Commit to memory

 

Product name: Falcon memory upgrade Manufacturer: Titan Designs Ltd. Contact: 0121 693 6669 RRP: £129.95 including VAT & P&P Requires: Atari or C-Lab Falcon Pros:    Let's you use more fonts or accessories - ideal for multitasking Cons:      Some computability issues Score: 85%

 

Xav explains why he finally took the plunge and added more memory to his Falcon...

The Atari community has always had a love-hate relationship with the PC world. On the one hand, we have lost thousands of users, and some of our best programmers, to the glorious colours, whizzy processors and large user base of the IBM compatibles. On the other hand, the growing popularity of the PC has seen the price of peripherals dropping rapidly as vendors continually try to undercut each other in a market which has too many players.

For Atari users this has meant cheap modems, printers, scanners, hard drives and CD-ROM players because most of them can also be used on Atari machines. With Windows 95 requiring at least 16Mb of memory to run comfortably the price of memory has also been dropping rapidly.

The memory on PCs commonly takes the form of Single In-line Memory Modules (SIMMs) which provides a simple and modular upgrade path using components which are broadly compatible across most platforms. 30 pin SIMMs can often be picked up cheaply as PC owners switch to 16Mb SIMMs and they are perfect for use in both STE and STFM machines using suitable upgrade boards.

Although the ST series cannot currently break through the 4Mb memory barrier, the Falcon can access up to 14.3Mb directly. Using one of the new breed of Falcon accelerator boards it's possible move beyond this limit, but being of modest means I opted for the the cheapest option. Atari typically decided not to use SIMM memory, instead opting for their own proprietary designed board. Naturally this problem was promptly circumvented with various third party manufacturers producing adapter boards to convert the non-standard Atari connector to accept standard SIMMs in various configurations.

Due to the Falcon hardware design, a Falcon can only be fitted with 1Mb, 4Mb or 14.3Mb of memory as standard. Frankly, a 1Mb Falcon is a waste of time, and anyone obtaining such a machine should upgrade their memory at the earliest opportunity. A 4Mb machine can run most software comfortably under a single-TOS environment unless you want to run heavyweight applications, such as direct to disk recording systems or graphics programs to edit large colour images. However if you find yourself running in less less colours, fonts or accessories than you would really like it's time to start saving for an upgrade.

So is there any point upgrading to 14Mb? For many users the straight answer will be no, but if you're running a multitasking operating system, such as MultiTOS, MagiC or Geneva, you'll find extra memory will allow you to work far more productively. If you are in this category and thinking of upgrading it's well worth following the price of memory as it fluctuates wildly from month to month and time your purchase accordingly.
A SIMM motherboard costs about £40, so it should be possible to upgrade to 14Mb for around £130. In practice, the PC world is awash with slightly different memory variations, each with its own peculiar foibles, so unless you know what exactly what you're buying I'd recommend you buy the board and SIMM together from an Atari supplier - but shop around - I purchased mine from Titan Designs at just under £150 but one company quoted me £299!

The upgrade, as supplied, had the SIMM already fitted, and simply required the removal of the old memory board and its replacement with the new one. The job is simplicity itself - which is good, because no instructions were supplied - consisting of nothing more than the removal of a few screws from the casing and shielding and the subsequent swapping of the boards. Testing the installation is just as easy - simply turn the machine on and let it perform its built-in memory test!

There are a handful of applications which don't like 14Mb Falcons but for the most part the problems will go away as the applications are upgraded. MultiTOS seems even more sluggish than usual, although I suspect this might have something to do with the number of applications I can now have running simultaneously! Overall, the pros far outweigh the cons and I have set my machine up with a user interface the envy of some of my Windows 95 owning friends. I'm able to run at a high resolution, using ScreenBlaster, with NVDI supplied scaleable fonts, and long filenames accessed through the Thing desktop and Freedom file selector.

All this may sound like a typical set-up but when you run these applications simultaneously, you'll reap the benefits. For example, I can now 'Drag&Drop' files between the desktop, file selector and running applications to a degree I have yet to see implemented on ANY other platform, and as more applications fully support the Drag&Drop protocol, I expect to be able to 'pick up' selections of text or images and simply drop them into the window of another application. Running MultiTOS to work on my Web pages, and I can now simultaneously run CAB, a text editor and a graphics program, no matter how large the page I am editing. In fact, try as I might, I have been unable to practically use more than half my memory, without contriving situations involving dozens of high colour images.

Needless to say, I am extremely pleased with the upgrade, and so long as the prices of SIMMs hasn't gone through the roof since I wrote this I recommend upgrading to anyone running out of memory or running a multitasking operating system.