Steve Mynott

Some of the disk based versions of LP do work with the Bit3 emulation in the Atari800 emulator. You have to hold a key down on boot to select 80 cols (maybe Esc I forget). I think the other LJK products are supposed to work in 80 cols but I never got them working.

The Atari engineer who worked on the 1600 (cross between 8bits and PC) has posted some new pictures on Twitter. The keyboard seems to say "Toshiba" and look similar to the T200 one.

Thanks it was of course the Alpha-Load menu! Now I downloaded several ATRs of the menu maker and I can't get any of them to work. Have I forgotten something or are many of the images broken>

Back in the day I used a multiboot with a rippling Fuji logo at the top and I can't find it on any atr sites. Can anyone remember whether this was the Rob C one or was that just the plain multiboot? Is it available anywhere? Did anyone ever meet RobC? I think someone told me he worked as a chef but don't know if this is true or not?

While basically agreeing with Rybags I can see that Deluxe Invaders is very good. It's true to the original spirit and isn't too much of an upgrade. Apple Invaders looks very close to the original although it suffers from the usual "bit corruption" issue due to being an Apple port.

What's the best port of Space Invaders which most closely resembles the archive original? I was never keen on the original with the strange green rocket shape on the left. Is there a homebrew version?

I'm amazed it lasted until 1998! Amiga Format lasted until 2000 so the 8 bit mag did very well.

Yes it's just running Vice. I find the FPGA based ZX Spectrum Next a much more interesting system. It's got the spirit of the original system but extended with better graphics and it's just about to ship on Kickstarter (and has been for some time!) There is a software emulator at https://dailly.blogspot.com/. The Mega65 sounds interesting too since it's based on the never released C65. The easiest way of doing something similar on A8 would be to ship Altirra/Wine/Linux preconfig'ed on something amd64 based with a small form factor.

I notice the Amsterdam Compiler Kit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Compiler_Kit has a 6502 backend. Has anyone tried it as a cross compiler on A8?

Good point about the FREDDIE MMU. I suppose it also basically means a 20% speed boost since ANTIC is no longer stealing cycles from the 6502 (?)

I just tried Fast BASIC 4 FP and it looks like its the winner correct to 8 decimal places rather than 7!

Minor feature request. It would useful if typing "help" entered the help system. D'uh ignore that I missed %H

Jay's chipset dates to 1979 (and was probably 2/3 years ahead of it's time then!) and they probably manufactured until 1992. Over this time period did Atari really never have any plans to upgrade it given the rate of technological change? I'm aware of AMY as a POKEY upgrade and GTIA as a CTIA upgrade and FREDDIE but did they never think of upgrading ANTIC and pushing things further? I suppose they had lost Jay's Lorraine team to Amiga but it seems strange that not even any design documents or abortive projects existed (AFAIK) and they were able to go outside Atari for the 7800's MARIA. Thankfully the community completed the job with VBXE!

Can anyone remember when the 800XL/1050 bundles got really cheap in the UK? I've vague memories Dixon's were selling them at £129 around 1985-6? I tried looking in some old scans of UK computer mags but its all ST about then.

One of the best Atari 8-bit video talks I've ever seen! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlVpu_QSHyw