kogden

That looks pretty awesome. Will this run on a 48K machine? Well done!

Have you played the 5200 version of Centipede that was backported to the 8-bit computers? It's night and day. It's almost as good as the Arcade. If you haven't ya gotta play it. I was shocked how different it was. There was a few good 2600 games I guess. The colorful 2600 games could easily be done on the 400/800 if people actually tried. Especially with DLI's etc. I also found the sound on 2600 games to be horribly annoying. I played 2600 games on occassion but I guess I was spoiled with my 5200, 130XE and eventually an ST and a Lynx when I was young. Some people are nostalgic for 2600 games but I've played stuff lately for the 400/800 that even have my kids impressed. It's super frustrating that all anyone remembers is the 2600 when you say "Atari" in public. The 2600 both made them and killed them.

Uhhh.... Wut? 5200 predates the NES and is based on the 400/800 chipset with some minor hardware differences. The ONLY problem I have with the 5200 is the stock controllers almost always fail eventually and if you buy one, you'll have to rebuild them. Star Raiders on the 5200 with analog flight control was fantastic. I never liked the 2600, even as a kid. Horrid annoying sound, the arcade ports like Joust were generally awful. I thought I wanted a 2600 until I actually played one again recently and that nostalgia faded VERY quickly. I do have an 800XL, 5200 and an ST set up that I play frequently. Unit sales doesn't mean it was impressive hardware by any means. The 2600 sucked IMHO. It was hard to develop for and the hardware constraints were insanely limited even for the late 70s. I wouldn't bother.

Oh wow.... I have a couple MicroVAX machines but nothing that needs 3-phase power or requires 4 people to move. Maybe various PDP11 UNIX groups like TUHS might have something. Someone on the NetBSD/vax mailing list might have a working drive. Hell with platters that big you can probably almost see the bits. A working PDP8 or PDP11 are on my bucket list though. I like blinkenlights.

I believe there are some other graphics apps with lightpen support that can be run from disk. Rambrandt or Blazing Paddles maybe?

On the original Atari 400/800 you are correct. The later XL/XE series had Atari BASIC onboard in ROM. You should be able to find a BASIC cart really cheap. RAM gets tight on a stock 400. If you plan on doing much you might consider upgrading to 48K if you haven't already. Especially if using DOS.

SIO2SD works well and emulates floppy drives up to 16MB in size. Since you have an XL, a PBI hard disk controller is an option. IDE controllers also work with CF cards with a simple adapter. I'm happy with IDEPlus and a dual CF adapter. Depends what you're doing I guess. If you just want to emulate floppies, like the bleep noises and play from and save to disk images stored on an SD card the SIO2SD or SDrive-Max are probably your best bet.

1.). Show me a PC at a comparable price point that performed better in 1985. An 8Mhz 68000 was more than a match for the 286. The only thing the ST lacked was a decent expansion bus or a math co. And the onboard video was certainly nicer than CGA in most respects. You weren't going to get a 286 with EGA, Adlib card and MIDI, HDD interface, multiple joystick ports and 1MB of RAM for $1,000. 2.) We had half a dozen ST's over the years. Dying RAM and heat issues were fairly common but not extreme. Having to reseat socketed chips and such wasn't uncommon either with our machines that ran nearly 24/7 like our BBS. The cheap build quality made RAM upgrades and repairs pretty spooky as well. My old ST's all have more modern power supplies and such now. Biggest issues I have now are failing monitor ports and trying to keep those CRTs running. 3.). I never said shedding the shells didn't work, just that on release the 800 overheated.

The ST was far cheaper than a comparable PC in 1985 and spanked it in every way that counted. I still have mine. They also overheated as badly as the 800. And the build quality left a lot to be desired. But they were awesome too.

I love lightpens. Wish it was easier to make them a bit more accurate. Light pens are the primary reason I keep using CRT monitors with my 8-bits.

I found trying to write ST images to floppies from a PC a little painful. What I ultimately ended up doing most since my ST has a SCSI HDD was transfer the images to the ST with a null modem cable and use utilities on ST side to write the MSA and ST images to floppy. Slow but reliable. On my 8bit I can use a $5 adapter to have my PC emulate a floppy drive and even had a real floppy drive in SIO chain. I wish they retained SIO bus for the ST as well. I need an UltraSatan and an Ethernet interface.

That's really neat. I just never really liked the AY much. I grew up with the ST as well. I always thought POKEY had more "character". Maybe I should try to build a quad POKEY cart for my ST. I'd love to see what kind of cool things could be done with a POKEY driven by a 68000.

Yeah seriously. I would be more interested in seeing these devices repaired, modified and still used rather than hitting the trash heap. I always wanted one of these. I have the ACSI version for my ST but never owned a proper HDD interface for my 8-bits. I would have loved a SupraDrive or MIO back in the day. Glad we have devices like IDEPlus now. I just hate to see stuff fade into history due to intellectual property issues that seem kinda pointless. PBI stuff is cool, I'd like to get to play with more of it.

I'd love to see this for the 8-bit as well. I've been playing the ST version off and on. The Atari 8-bit could certainly do better than the C64. The BBC Master seems like an interesting machine but I've never seen one in the US. If I was going to get a mutant British machine it would probably be an Archimedes or RISCpc.

I don't know, my IDEPlus is pretty damn awesome. And since I like hacking around with hardware, PBI makes for some interesting possibilities.

I have a massive amount of Current Notes magazine. It may be the full run or close to it. Most are in great shape. I haven't seen scanned copies. I don't have a good way of efficiently scanning them. Is there a good way to do so without destroying the originals? If any are missing somewhere I might have them.

I've had good luck with an 850, iPocket232 (similar to Lantronix but very compact and usually cheap), and ICE-T. Have even used it for file transfers from my UNIX boxes, including an old DEC VAXstation running Ultrix lol

I have a couple AtariFest flyers/program booklets. I went to several as a kid. My parents were vendors, they sold a rechargable NiCAD battery pack, charger and carrying case for the STacy. They were heavily in the ST and I had a 130XE and a Lynx growing up. Seeing the STe and Lynx for the first time at AtariFest was pretty magical for an 8yr old. I have some Atari promo materials for the ST, STacy, TT, etc that we picked up there as well. I'll see what I can find in the closet.

It's an irrelevant platform with no commercial future. Who cares about being a weird stock machine purist? Modifying the machine was insanely common even in the 80s. Why break compatibility when there's no performance advantage or good reason? I can see not putting extra effort into directly supporting an upgrade like VBXE or something, but to take extra effort to break it is just a retarded waste of time. The GTIA music is kinda neat though. I haven't seen that done yet.

Sounds like we need a playable version of Dragon's Lair and Space Ace for IDE-equipped machines now. Probably fairly easy to pull off.

Cheap asses like 99.9% of the home computer market in the US? Hell by the time Eastern Europe was buying these machines in number we were moving on to the ST, Amiga and Mac. I know of almost no one that had Y/C monitors in the 80s but plenty of people using Amdek composite monitors. Artifacting is the ONLY way to get color in hi-rez modes effectively and certainly beats not having color at all. While I use S-video for most things, I do keep composite hooked up for games that used artifacting as well. And there are quite a few. Starfleet I and Retrofire! are another couple examples. Apple II games made extensive use of artifacting as well. And that machine was far from cheap. While I'd love to have a Sophia or VBXE board to plug my machine into a modern display, I'd hate to lose the ability to play games that use artifacting properly. So I'll probably just go the UAV route.

Not exactly a classic upgrade but I have a RAM320XL external RAM upgrade that can be slapped on the PBI on an 800XL. It doesn't have passthrough though. I haven't used it much lately after I bought a IDEPlus PBI IDE controller that is quite possibly the coolest HDD controller ever released for these machines. If either one of these devices had PBI passthrough or someone made a PBI backplane it would be beyond awesome. There were some really cool 3rd party devices made but Atari never did anything noteworthy with the expansion bus which is a shame.

Any way to get this running with a happy drive? SIO2SD works, so does SIO2PC.... 1050 Happy drive doesn't work, even in unhappy mode.

I'm a US NTSC user. PAL had higher resolution but a lower frame rate. PAL machines had a slightly slower clock rate but could do more between frames than the NTSC machine. IIRC palette is slightly different as well. Unfortunately all the REALLY cool demos were written in Europe and most won't run properly on our machines. Most games run fine. Artifacting was used to generate a couple colors in hirez mode but those colors aren't visible when using svideo, only composite. So with video upgrades you generally don't get these colors, just gaps between pixels in games that relied on artifacting. I was wondering if Sophia or any video upgrade really emulated artifacting to produce the color on RGB or DVI displays?

PDF is like a mutant version of PostScript. It would be so beyond slow to build an interpreter that would be usable on a 6502. Plus the fact that many people scanning books and magazines do it as an image and embed it in a PDF instead of OCRing the text. Trying running CPEGview and looking at a JPG on your 8bit. A PDF interpreter would make that look fast. Best bet is just to strip the text from PDF, convert to ATASCII and send it on the the 8bit. There's plenty of Linux CLI tools that could help there.