ClausB

I'm Claus Buchholz, author of the 1985 BYTE article about a homebrew 256K RAM upgrade for the 800XL. I'm delighted to see you hardy souls still interested in that great old Atari computer. My question for you is: what things did people do with all that extra RAM? I gave out a RAMDisk program, but never really heard much about other applications. We didn't have email and internet back then, just the USPO and some BBSs. Thanks.

Forgive the late reply - I just discovered this forum. I'm Claus Buchholz, author of ACE80, and I'm delighted to see there is still some interest in the grand old Atari computers. Thanks to those of you who posted kind words about ACE80. If you care, here's a history: I first wrote the 80-column software as a dumb terminal for my homebuilt 300 baud modem so I could do my college programming from my house several miles from campus. My friend liked it and talked me into adapting it to work with the ATR-8000 CP/M machine. He marketed that as DT80. Then we worked on a version that replaced the E: device in the Atari OS and went in a right cartridge, called ACE80. It was fast because it scrolled the screen by modifying the ANTIC display list, not by moving the entire 8K bitmap. For the XL computers, we put it into a disappearing ROM left cartridge and called it (imaginatively) ACE80-XL. I also helped modify one of the popular word processors of the day (I don't remember its name) to work with ACE80. It was not all that successful, but it was fun.