jonathan

hi, I'm an A8 user since 1987. Some time a while back, I saw on here about a strange Atari motherboard marked 6402A, which no one knows what it was for. http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/XL/xl_protos/6402a.jpg I'm just thinking, the original Amiga A1000 computer had what looked like a 5.25" drive bay on the front in the middle. In actual fact this computer have this bay as an unusual place behind a plastic cover as a memory for RAM. the 6402 has a front mounted bus which could be similar. Given that the Amiga was developed by Atari engineers could the 6402 be maybe not an actual 16 bit computer or Amiga, but some kind of A8 computer with a seperate keyboard in slim desktop case?

Hi, I am an A8 user since 1987 but using emulators as my real Atari is packed far away. Have been playing Star Raiders under Atari 800win which does a good job of this classic. Years ago, I attempted a project to convert a CX-80 trackball I got of ebay to convert to USB. After butchering three different mice to make the optical sensors work, I put the bits away and haven't tried since. I still want to play Star Raiders with a better controller, as wanting to improve my game with some acurate controls. One the CX-80 there was a switch to make it mimic a joystick if I remember correctly. Now, I know Star Raiders doesn't support a trackball officially, is there way of using a mouse, trackpad or touch pad with any A8 emuator? I know a thread a while back people wanted to patch or change Star Raiders, the game is perfect apart from supporting some better controls.

check this:- http://labs.mirror.me/googleplus/105380066987035431562 scroll down or control + F your way to Jim Tittsler, hes an ex-Atari engineer who worked on this unknown 1600XL. Not sure this uses x86 IBM clone parts or has Amiga chipset? Is Kurt actively involved with Atari Museum any more? might be good to contact this above guy. Also, somewhere I saw on Linkedin there was mention of another ex-Atari person who worked one of the prototype XLs.

Hi, Im a former A8 user, been following some of the fascinating threads here on building 1450s from blank circuit boards and old documentation, From what i have seen, the 1450XLDs has push button (not twist lever) 5.25" floppy drives, the other day I actually found the part number of the Epson drives used. When I was at college we had some Epson 286 PCs which had push button drives that looked exactly like this. Does the 1450's internal disk controller use 5.25 drives with normal 34 way edge connectors? it should be possible to get some of the drives new-old-stock in order to make a close to perfect replica of this machine. Although I remember the wiring inside my Atari 1050 looks different from a normal PC 5.25 drive. Also, Im also curious, can the ROM dumps of the modem and speech chips be used with any A8 emulator to see how these features worked?