There was a Cubase on Atari that already had native audio functionality. It was made for the Atari Falcon. I had never seen it until I found this video on YouTube.
Nothing too special but still… got this iconic black and white GUI.
5 Likes
Awesome!
These were the days of monochromatic monitors and the GUI was cutting edge back then.
The cowbell… 
1 Like
Surprised at how little the GUI has changed. And all on a 12” monitor.
I wrote an assembler program to switch the black and white for a “dark mode”.
And the cowbell is an integral part of my drum kits, if you don’t mind.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
@Johnny_Moneto thanks for the nostalgia
The 
are on me.
2 Likes
The SM124 black-and-white monitor you see in the video was regarded as hi-res at 640 × 400 pixels. That would focus the mind!
PS More cowbell …
I had (still have) a Falcon in my cellar. And I had a Hardware Addon at the DSP Port where you can connect SPDIF Signal. Thes Days I did some euro dance things with that equipment (Roland JD800 and Korg 01W/FD). you could also do recording tracks and use them as a loop. But I had that Atari with a color Monitor. For storage I used a 1 GB SCSII Hard drive which was connected in an external Case. So to speak “lightyears ahead”.
1 Like
My friend had the Falcon. I had to settle for Cubase 2.01 and Mega ST4 with swappable 20MB hard disks.
Don’t worry…
…no “cowbell-shaming” intended my friend. I know you love your cowbell very dearly @Googly_Smythe 
That high cowbellish sound indicated the 1st beat but it was all over the place behind and before the beat. That’s what made me laugh and the fact that it jumped out of the left speaker as a reminder that the band had timing issues. It was probably just there for the sake of orientation during mixing.
Go cowbell !
1 Like
I remember it well. The falcon was quite expensive and short lived.
That was my first Cubase version (well, the first one I bought…). I think I must have been around 16 or 17 and put all my savings and my first salaries into a Falcon 030, a Cubase license and a Doepfer MS 404 (already had a second hand Korg M1).
It was fabulous! While it was still very expensive, it was suddenly an affordable solution compared what else was on the market back then. Steinberg even managed to trick the Falcon into having 16 instead of 8 digital audio tracks.
I then later also got that S/PDIF interface and also an 8 output adapter (RCA plugs). I remember those devices were made by a company named SoundPool, they sold them under their own name but also rebranded by Steinberg. The great thing about the FDI was that you could also use it to back up your Falcon to a DAT tape (if you had a DAT recorder with S/PDIF).
I still have to listen to my unlabeled DAT tapes very carefully, because if it’s a backup instead of music, it will blow out your ears 
2 Likes
No web to browse, no social media, just music…
… those vintage ones and zeros gave everything such a warm digital sound back then.
1 Like
Fun times. I ran that on a Falcon 030 with the 16bit ST RAM maxed out (14mb?) and didn’t come to the PC realm and VSTi plugins until Cubase 7. Was able to run the MROS stuff under a Geneva Cooperative Multi-Tasking switcher….so XOR, Sample X, and more could run in the background and talk to instruments over SCSI (SMIDI?).
First MIDI controller was an old Yamaha KX 76, then a busted up Peavey DPM3/4. I gave like $75 for the DPM 3 in a pawn shop, only thing wrong with it was mount posts of the keybed had snapped off from a ‘drop’. I was able to fix the DPM3 with wonder putty from the hardware store, and got a DPM4 upgrade kit (expanded the polophony and mulit-timbral flexiblity a bit. Most of my virtual instrument sounds over MIDI from old Peavey rack modules (DPM SP units, and a V3 rack).
Eventually got a Roland Fantom XR packed with those SRX cards (at the time people were dumping that kind of stuff for peanuts and moving to VSTi plugins, one could grab stuff like an XR or MOTIF Rack for less than a new key for Kontakt or HALion).
That Yamaha KX felt great and had the quickest on/off action of any controller I’ve ever owned, but for some reason it ran at half the resolution of the MIDI standard for dynamics. I’d still have it and use it if it did the full velocity resolution of 0-127 in the MIDI standard way. I never could figure out how to get that thing do the full 7bit General MIDI range for velocity and aftertouch. Same for the old Yamaha continuous foot pedals….it’s like half the resolution for the early Yamaha stuff was just ‘gone’? I guess it’d have worked properly with a DX synth which I didn’t have (nor want, wasn’t looking for synthy sounds back then). Oh well…
My Falcon was modded with a CT2b that pushed the CPU and FPU to 55mhz, and made it possible for me to pop in 64mb of 32bit Fast RAM. The CT2b also made it easy to overclock the VIDEL chip and get much higher screen resolutions. Also Had the SMP24, FA8, SPDIF box, and also the CLab/Logic stuff with Log3, Unitor, and Export. The CT2b didn’t mess with the DSP chip, so the main advantage to having this for Cubase was the extra RAM, and the ability to run a good SVGA monitor and get a lot more screen Real Estate. Seems like I got it stable with Cubase Falcon at 1024x728x2, but opted for something like 800x600x2, as that was easier for me to see, didn’t push the VIDEL as hard, didn’t make the CRT monitor ‘scream out’ the same annoying frequencies, and seemed better in tune to the resolution and such of the mouse or trackball I was using at the time.
It was pretty cool, but for audio I honestly preferred hooking up one of those BOSS stand alone porta-studio hard drive recorder things with the preamps, mixer, and all built in. Of course these weren’t around yet when the Falcon first came out, and it was at least 10 years later (or more) that the porta-studio things were affordable options. The BOSS porta-studio could sync up tightly with the Falcon (MMC and MTC), but also the old 8mhz/4mb Atari STacy 4 and audio tracking was simplified a good deal (at least for my needs and workflow preferences). I’ve kept that thing around for doing quick and dirty live recordings. It’s still pretty useful!
After I got a nice PC and moved on to Cubase 7, the stuff went neglected in the type of storage that kills old electronics if it stays there for long. The worst thing about that old stuff was it had batteries and stuff on the PCBs that if you didn’t check and change them pretty often they’d leak and eat up traces and stuff on the boards!
So, I eventually sold most of it to a retro equipment enthusiast with the space, work-bench, and climate controlled storage to take good care of it, and maybe even use it. I think he drove off with the KX, DPM stuff, Falcon CT2b, two STacy 4, and a Mega 4, and old Amiga with Bars and Pipes, and boxes loads of software and kit (All the Steinberg and Clab/EMagic interfaces).
It’s still somewhere in the world and most of it still works I think?
Some things I miss about it for sure! What I don’t miss is all the space required, and needing a good hour to boot everything up. Cables everywhere! Needed lots of smart patch bays and special clocks (still have some of those just in case). Electricity was cheap back then, but I bet these days running all that stuff would be ‘noticeable’ on the power bill for sure. It still required a few of those HEAVY CRT monitors that made high pitched wirring sounds no matter what!
1 Like
Yeah if there’s one thing I don’t miss about those times it’s the cables. So. Many. Cables. And I had to solder most of them myself to save money.
CT2b is the CENTurbo 2, right? I vaguely remember having toyed around with accelerators back then, but I don’t fully recall which ones exactly I had (and got working). But I certainly remember the Centek stuff, I think there was also something called Nemesis from another company and something called Afterburner 040 (with a 68040)
Those were fun tinkering times… pretty much the antithesis of todays “everything soldered on SoC Apple Silicon”
That’s correct. The CT2b came with a special 68030 on board tested to handle the 55mhz speeds, a socket for an FPU, and two SIM slots for 64pin Fast RAM. Centek later did 68060 boards as well.
The CT2b required a good bit of hacking about on the original Falcon motherboard. Had to pull different gals and cut traces. While it had all the clocks and chips it needed on the board, you had to run several wires all over the Falcon and solder them to the proper points.
Subsequent models, I think were plug and play. Other than the Atari recommended patches for SCSI and Audio that every Falcon owner should do, I don’t think they needed any hacking. Didn’t have to snip out any traces or pull any GAL chips.
Wizztronics did prototypes for an Afterburner 68040 based board, though I don’t know if they ever ordered a batch and shipped those to customers? A small handful of people might have gotten their hands on that one (probably prototypes at that).
All of those took advantage of the 32bit burst mode memory of 68030/40/60 chips. Atari’s OS saw that as ‘TT RAM’.
There were several stand alone DIY VIDEL overclocking kits (Blowup?). Somebody did some kind of PCI SVGA graphics card interface called Panther.
Somebody finally did some true ethernet interfaces (and these days several exist for people that still own those machines…also lots of modern options for storage to SSD media and the like). I had the etherNEC kit, and a Dynaport SCSI<>etherNET device (made for Macs, somebody did an Atari driver for it…STing and MiNT Net versions).
Over in Europe a few companies were doing TT like Atari clones. Medusa had a motherboard decked out more like PC (ISA/VESA slots and such), and I think they might have even made a few that used the 68060. Those didn’t have a DSP like the Falcon though.
C-Lab got their hands on a batch of Falcons to rebadge. They did all the audio and SCSI patches, built in better connectors and such for AUDIO, and I think at least one model may have gotten a new desktop style case. For the most part they were otherwise stock Falcons (same chips/speeds/etc). By then I think Steinberg had stopped making stuff like CAC clocks, FA8 interfaces and the like, but Soundpool did clones of the stuff (at least functionally, and compatible with CAF and the others) for a short time.
I did the switch from my Atari STE directly to PC on windows 95. I had an audiomedia III PCI card and ran Cubase audio. It took a couple of more years before i was happy with a PC the same as I was with the Atari syncing to tape. They certainly were interesting times. Back then I could also write sysex which I used with the Cubase mixer where you could build up controls for your synths.
1 Like
Yeah the Medusa and Hades came from Switzerland, I’m Swiss so I remember those quite well. IIRC they were marketed more towards the DTP crowd, e.g. Calamus users.
1 Like