griz

No kidding. He he. Most of us have eyes that are starting to get old no? That was the target. The $35 unit has an ethernet port and twice the ram IIRC. I think it would make for a great little server. Also an easy way to make a miniature mame cabinet.

How about a Pico-PSU? Then again, at that price you may as well just get a real Atari power supply. BTW ... what is the problem with using an Atari supply?

I'm curious. Old Atari games likely define one of the original origins of abandonware. Is the original copyright holder allowed to suddenly start selling the same binaries decades later on a new platform? Could this mean Adandonware doesn't really exist?

Atari VCS -> Vic 20 -> Atari A8 -> ST -> Amiga I loved 'em all. I remember trading a pellet gun for an Intellivision. Loved Cloudy Mountain (listening for Dragons) and Sea Battle. Did this hobby make any of you experienced traders at a young age like it did me? I was trading stuff all the time.

Thanks a bunch guys. I have subscribed and will edit my previous reply.

I believe Photochrome originally came out on an ST Format coverdisk if I'm not mistaken.

That sounds like a sweet 600xl Mimo! What would be your dream A8 setup = All of them. That's like asking what is your favorite ice cream? There are too many! I would love to have every A8 new in the box in a big hoard pile just for me. Anyone else have this dream?

They can quite easily be made into ST 512 colours but are currently set to RGB of 0-255, it wouldn't make a huge difference though from experience with only 16 colours in the entire pic. All you have to do is make sure the RGB value for each colour is a multiple of 16 etc and round it up/down, or multiples of 8 if you want to do an STE/Amiga version. I was in a bit of a rush though so just left the palette choices and tweaked manually Thanks for the reply oky.

Considering the 7800 is largely backwards compatible with the 2600, I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean why didn't Atari build a 5200 with 2600 compatibility built-in as opposed to having to use the 5200's 2600 adapter? Do I make sense?

Thanks for the nice pics. Merry Christmas. Are the 16 colors chosen from the Atari ST (512) colors? STE (4096) colors? Perhaps they are from a larger gamut (16M)?

I was born in 72. My younger brother and I received a VCS under the Christmas tree. We had the bundled "Combat" along with SWESB. Although the whole family enjoyed it at times, none so much as I. Being fascinated with the fact that you could use light and sound on a tv to create interactive worlds, I was hooked for life. My first real computer was a Vic 20, but I was always fascinated with the Atari 8 bits. Eventually I would get a newly released 65XE as my first A8. Today I prefer the XLs. I did jump into a 520ST a few years later, and enjoyed it a lot, but it just wasn't quite as charming as the 8 bits to me. I lived with that XE for something like an entire year before finally getting a storage device. A 1050 disk drive with Dos 3. The Atari Dealer also provided Dos 2.5. My first few disks games included Boulder Dash, Movie Maker and Koronis Rift. Ah the good old days.

Okay, they're ALL ugly!

Thanks for explaining. It actually is smaller than I thought. I imagine the amount of waste heat generated would depend on the source power supply voltage? In other words with a supply voltage similar to the output voltage of the regulator there wouldn't be much? How necessary is the fan? Have you considered a larger case that could act as a massive passive heatsink?

Great! Thanks for doing this. I've got 600XLs that I upgrade, and some that I leave stock. An external upgrade like this is a great way to upgrade a stock 600XL and then revert it later if desired. I am interested in a couple of these for sure. Is it possible to make it fit mostly inside the PBI slot area? I see the prototype is already quite small.

Man that thing is ugly. Does that mean it has to be 4 inches away from the computer? Why so short? Is the cpu fan/cooler there to cool down a big voltage regulator? Isn't that inefficient? What about the added noise? These things are $15 to $27 from Atari dealers. How much does it cost for this unit, plus the requirement of having another power supply? I've seen big PSUs on ebay for a Commodore 64 + 1541. Have you considered something like this? An A8 + 1050 for example. This costs less to ship than an official Atari power pack? Please take no offence, I'm only trying to understand and am being honest/frank.

Me too! Thanks for doing this Candle. Will it fit inside a 600XL? Will the 600XL require the 64K upgrade first?

A wallswitch is monochrome only, at least the ST can produce 8 shades of grey.

This is great, thanks Remo.

Wallswitch = 1 bit of memory. St lacks hardware scrolling. Then again, so does the wallswitch. However the wallswitch could function as a joystick's fire button at the speed of light if only the ST's slow joystick port could handle it.

VGA *is* hardware though no? VGA could easily be added to any PC. I believe the PC did as well as it did largely because it was easily expanded. Imagine if we could have popped an Amiga-killing graphics card into an ST with just a screw driver? Why the EGA bashing? It wasn't all that bad. Simcity and Flight Simulator was able to use the 640x350x16 graphics mode. This mode wasn't as common as 320x200x16 as it required your graphics card to be outfitted with extra memory. Still, even the 320x200x16 version of Monkey Island didn't look too out of place next to the ST version.

It seems you don't understand the basics of game programming. Double buffering has nothing to do with skipping frames. You can run 60Hz all day long on a double buffered system. You page flip during the vblank and you are done. Low overhead (literally a couple writes), improved visuals. The purpose is to avoid writing to the screen at the same moment it is being displayed, which would result in a tearing effect (turn off vsync on any modern video card for the same effect) That's IF you don't take too long in drawing the display or handling the game logic. Then frame skipping is the result. Let me guess ... it's because the 800 supports even MORE high speed joysticks!?

These aren't using the real colors of the respective systems. Just some very quick images I put together showing the difference between 8 and 16 shades of grey. The horizontal resolution, in this case, makes no difference. I do this with full-on tongue-in-cheek. I realise it's a very, very specific scenario ... but it's real nonetheless, in showing something the A8 can do that the original ST cannot. First image is the original, second A8 and last (and least) the ST. I'm a fan of both platforms BTW, as well as C64s and Vics. I'm one of those Atari & Commodore type. On the surface this is an Atari versus Atari battle, but we all know it's another Atari versus Commodore war. I for one enjoy these ridiculous battles.

Exactly. I've got a light sixer with heavy shielding but that doesn't make it a heavy sixer. My first Atari was a 4 switch wood-grain. I remember when the vader models came out and back then I felt they were 'cheap'. Today I appreciate them much more.

A great concept! I'd love to participate but I'm not anywhere near the Bay area. Best of luck to you. I'll be a customer when they're ready to go.