Steve Mynott

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

https://1200baud.wordpress.com/2017/03/04/build-your-own-9600-baud-c64-wifi-modem-for-20/

I guess that wasn't very many shades of green

In Atari800 and Altirra emulators it's possible to take a snapshot of system state (half way through a game or whatever). Is there any software which runs on actual hardware (maybe U1Meg?) which allows those snapshots to be restored and re snapshoted in a way that the state can be migrated back to emulation?

The Bit3 manual says some Atari, OSS and LJK Products work. I could get OS/A+ 1.2 to work in 80 columns (but not later versions). I used the attached utility (typed in and assembled from the manual) to switch to 80 column mode. No spreadsheets worked. I couldn't even get Edit 6502 (8K and 16K carts) to work which should work. A LISP from 1981 did work! ON3.XEX

Hmm I'm not sure SynCalc has bit3 support. I know there are different versions but would assume its in the early ones (if present) and https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue57/review_syn_series.html suggests not. "The only feature one might wish for is 80-column capability with the Bit-3 and Austin-Franklin 80-column boards. According to Synapse, there will be new versions of the programs that will work with Atari's 80-column board in the 1090XL expansion box, when or if the box is released." It doesn't seem to work with VisiCalc 1.74a either. Although I could be missing config steps with both packages (Letter Perfect wasn't that obvious). It's a pity since a 80 column spreadsheet would be cool (I think the source for the Antic one and SpeedCalc is available).

Well I finally managed to get readable 80 cols in LJK Letter Perfect (at least under emulation). With LP V6 (lower case menu) I had to hold down ESC while it was booting to get to a config screen where you can see Bit3 selection there (this part I could only get to work under Altirra with slow standard disk options rather than turbo disk). Then with the disk image in the config state it worked fine under Atari800 emulator with the Bit3 (I don't think Altirra supports Bit3?) The screen looked nice and clear and the 80 columns is quite fast and useable (much better than the Omnimon 80 software version with 3bit wide chars). My impression, from emulation at least, is that Bit3 is a lot better than XEP80. Is there a list of productivity software which supports Bit3? It's just a pity I can't get this working on real hardware (unless VBXE can emulate Bit3?)

I'd still like to see the Edit 6502 manual if anyone has it

While playing around with emulation I used an 800XL ROM but not the inbuilt BASIC ROM. Much to my surprise I saw a colourful "Atari" (better than MEMO PAD!). Is this the same logo displayed by the 1200XL? Is there anyway of displaying this on a real Atari? I suppose a U1MB image could be used without BASIC? (Correction to above I may have selected a 1200 ROM by mistake?)

There are at least two versions of Oregon Trail on DOS. The original is pretty much the same as the well known A2 version. The "Deluxe" is just like the Mac version only in colour.