FifthPlayer

You can't find it within yourself to look past the wonky controller and swap it out for something else? Kinda sounds like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Check out the book "The Story of Commodore: A Company on the Edge" by Brian Bagnall. It covers the history of Commodore's 8-bit period from the PET through the C128, and has a lot of Tramiel biographical info. He's currently at work on a prequel covering the years 1954-1975, which presumably would have even more biographical stuff. (There are two other books in the series, one covering the history of the Amiga and the last covering Commodore's final years).

?? The 5200 uses an analog joystick, so just about everything in the system's catalog requires it.

Excellent news! Just being able to boot the major language carts with DOS around means there's quite a lot of coding that can be done with The400 as-is. I was concerned about the OSS language carts because they use their own unique form of bank-switching, and it wasn't a certainty that The400's emulator would support it.

Excellent news. That should do well for the non-banked language carts like Assembler/Editor, Altirra BASIC, and Pilot. Could you try one of the OSS language carts like BASIC XE, Action! or MAC/65 to see if it supports booting them along with a disk image?

Yes, and it should also be pointed out this is one the good things that has come out of Atari's acquisition of AtariAge. I'm surprised Atari didn't negotiate to rename the game "Warlords" since they own the rights to it.

I wasn't aware the ROM was available, but thank you for bringing up this excellent point about licensing revenue for the developer.

Castle Crisis is a game sold here on Atari Age ($30), so its inclusion on The400 is some real value.

Thanks for the clarification. I watched the GenXGrownup review, and there he showed you could save BASIC programs, but that there was no way to access them outside of the machine. It sounded as if The400 makes a private disk image that you can't access from a PC. The review also didn't cover if you could boot from a language cart like ASM/Editor and also have Atari DOS available, like it does for the built-in BASIC. I'd love to see some more experiments like this, once more units get in people's hands. The ability to have a programming environment on or near-par to original hardware, but with a) smaller desk footprint, b) modern connections for power and HDMI video, and c) modern, high-quality keyboards would make The400 a compelling alternative for hobby hacking directly on the device.

It does not. The FAST keyword precalculates the branch points, so it does not have to search for the destination of a branch the way Atari Basic does.

I'd like to see improvements to the BASIC support, so that you can mount an ATR of your own for saving program files, as well as use other language carts like Assembler/Editor, Altirra BASiC, or the OSS language carts. Ability to boot into a DOS besides Atari DOS would be great as well.

Have to say the beige USB and video cables are a nice touch.

I don't want to be misunderstood - I think it's great that AtariAge casts such a wide net. I remember advocating for the creation of the Commodore 8-bit and Amiga groups, even though dedicated communities exist for them on the Internet, because AtariAge is big enough to support discussion forums around other retro platforms, but from a slightly different fan perspective. And I completely agree about the utility of subforums - the The400 forum makes a ton of sense.

This Atari-centric Board has forums for Commodore 64, Intellivision, Apple II, and plenty of other non-Atari systems. So a forum for an emulated Atari 400 sounds OK to me.

My definition of "Classic Mac" is everything before OS X, but yes, System 7.5-9.x exactly describes what I was thinking of. Anyway, MagiC OS, being a slavish copy of the Mac GUI, doesn't appear to break any new ground in its use of proportional vs. monospace type, regardless of what other merits it may have.