Compatiblity between 800, the XL and the XE models

[Adam Huemer]

well, the topic says it all, how much were the Atari 8 Bit models 800, XL and XE compatible between each other?

[Shawn Jefferson]

Well, AFAIK the main compatibility problem arose when Atari changed the Operating System for the XL line. Software that did not use the jump vectors, but rather jumped directly to the OS routines would not work on the XL OS. The Translator disk (or FIX-XL and friends) would turn off the ROM in the XL/XE, turn on the RAM and load the 800 OS from disk into memory making your XL/XE an 800 with only two joystick ports.

 

The 130XE model had 128k of ram, where the extra 64k could be banked in at $4000-7FFF in 16k chunks. Software written to use this extended memory will not work on the other models (unless a RAM expansion is peformed on them, and then only the XL/XE models will work generally.) Software that puts code/data "under" the OS ROM area of the XL/XE line will not work on the 800 since the 800 did not have RAM under the ROM. Disk versions of SpartaDOS operate this way, as does TurboBasic XL.

 

The 600XL, 800XL, 130XE (European 65XEs) all had the PBI/ECI bus which would allow the attachment of bus peripherals such as the MIO, BlackBox, Ram upgrades and other stuff. The 400/800/1200XL/XEGS does not have this connector.

 

Did I forget anything?

 

Short answer: a large majority of titles will work on all 8-bit models.

[Adam Huemer]

thanks for reply