Atari 800 questions

[tyranthraxus]

Hi, today I just scored a working 800 at a thrift store. I also own a 800xl.

I noticed that the power turns off when you lift the cover of the cartridge

bay. Is this suppose to happen? Or is something loose in my computer?

 

What is the use of the right cartridge slot? Was it something that

just was not taken advantge of?

 

Other than RAM/ROM is there anything else that can be installed in the

expansion bays?

 

John

[krisjohn]

Hi, today I just scored a working 800 at a thrift store. I also own a 800xl.

I noticed that the power turns off when you lift the cover of the cartridge

bay. Is this suppose to happen? Or is something loose in my computer?

It's a safety thing. I just read mention of it with regard to a piggy-back DOS cart. You have to override the door switch to use the piggy-back feature on an 800.

 

I almost know the answers to your other questions, but I've only today picked up my second 8-bit Atari system. The first was an XEGS with limited non-gaming function. Today I scored an 800XL with tape, disk and printer. I expect to be rummaging 'round the 8-bit Atari world for the next few weeks...

[oesii]

What is the use of the right cartridge slot? Was it something that

just was not taken advantge of?

 

John

 

 

There are legimate uses for that slot such as the Monkey Wrench software cart that was a right hand cart and then there are the shady uses for it....

 

I used to own a 800 about 22 years ago, and I had a piece of software to dump carts into disk files. You ran the program and then you could safely open up the cart slot and you stuck whichever cart you were interested in dumping into the right hand slot and it was magically copied onto a disk file. I remember it was a tricky little program and you had to insert that cart in like a split second for it to dump correctly, but it usually worked after one or two tries.

 

There as been discussions about the Monkey Wrench here on this board which you can search for if you are interested.

 

-O

[Maury Markowitz]

I noticed that the power turns off when you lift the cover of the cartridge bay. Is this suppose to happen? Or is something loose in my computer?

 

Yup, the 400 and 800 both did this, although I'm not at all sure why. They removed it from later machines.

 

Now for real fun. Attach two similar machines together with an SIO cable, then try to turn one off...

 

What is the use of the right cartridge slot? Was it something that

just was not taken advantge of?

 

The idea was that both of the slots were mapped into memory, so when you plugged in a cart it "became" some memory in the machine. They simply mapped the right slot into a different set of locations. The idea was that the 800 could thus have up to 16k in the carts instead of the normal 8.

 

However what really happened is that since the 400 outsold the 800 by a whole lot, almost no one used the right slot. That's because if you did, you were basically giving up on 80% of the market. It's classic case of an idea that's only obviously bad in retrospect.

 

The carts that were available were pretty neat though, some excellent additions to BASIC and a great ML monitor for instance.

 

Other than RAM/ROM is there anything else that can be installed in the expansion bays?

 

The problem with the slots in the 800 is that they weren't real slots, they were really just funny-shaped cartridges. Like the cartridge slots they were mapped into different chunks of memory. In order to use the slots for anything else you had to include software that talked to your card by poking and peeking the right area of memory. And if the user put it in a different slot it wouldn't work, because it was in another area of memory then.

 

I know there was an 80-column card for it, but it didn't include any RAM so you needed one of those larger than 16k upgrades first. Even then you had to cut a hole in the case to run the cable out. Very annoying. Compared to all the things they got right, I find the 800's weirdness somewhat mysterious.

 

Maury