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atari 7800 or 600xl?


Osbo

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You have two different families of Atari systems there.

 

The Atari 7800 will play Atari 2600 and 7800 games.

 

The Atari 600XL will play Atari 400/800/XL and some Atari XE games (not the 64K ones). It will not play Atari 2600 games.

 

Tempest

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The 600XL and 800XL are from the 8-bit computer line. If you're going to get an 8-bit, go for the 800XL. It's easy to find, nicely constructed, and compatible with most 8-bit stuff. Which is better? Well, there are far more games for the 8-bit than 7800, and if you include disk and tape titles, there's an even larger library of games.

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quote
If your going for 8-Bit Computers get a Commodore 64!!!! :P

 

Oh, them's fighting words! It's been quite a long time since I've argued the pros and cons of these two systems. Since I had a rather large collection of Atari 8-bit hardware and software, I'm rather biased on the 8-bit side of things. However, I do acknowledge that the C64 had some pretty decent capabilities and the SID sound chip was definitely superior than what could be coaxed out of the Atari 8-bit.

 

However, the Atari 8-bits had a much better operating system, the floppy drives were much faster (very fast with ICD or Happy mods), there were tons of great development tools available (Basic XE, MAC/65, Action!, etc.), awesome DOS environments (SpartaDOS/SpartaDOS X), better hardware expansion capabilities (parallel expansion bus on back of XL/XE for awesome peripherals such as the ICD MIO board), much better BBS software (Carina II was incredible), 800XLs were easy to hack up to 256K, and there were tons of great games you couldn't get on the C64 (such as Star Raiders).

 

I'm sure there are more reasons, but these are things I remember off the top of my head.

 

Getting back to the original topic, yes, the 800XL is a much better choice over the 600XL. The primary reason is the 600XL only has 16K of memory and the 800XL 64K. The 16K will really limit what you can do with the system, especially if you ever start running disk-based software.

 

..Al

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