pjedavison

Have now written an article to go along with the vid, which can be found here: https://moegamer.net/2024/03/29/the400-mini-a-great-entry-point-to-exploring-a-range-of-underappreciated-computers/

That reviewer is me, btw. Later in the video, I do a comparison of the "Instrumentarium" demo, which people seem to think is a good workout for the virtual POKEY chip. Sounds pretty much identical on The400 Mini and Altirra.

That music sounds the same in Altirra to me. I think it's just like that.

Perfect. If you figure out what key on a USB keyboard is mapped to the Atari/Inverse Video key that would be super-helpful, as I couldn't find it on mine!

I went with 336 as the width as that's what Altirra uses by default (scaled up to your display) and that looks "right" to me. Any wider and you risk introducing "garbage" that wouldn't have normally been visible on an old TV or monitor. Feel free to tweak according to your own preferences though! Sure, here's the full .cfg I used for Bosconian. The only stuff I changed manually was the above. I don't know if additional settings beyond what is included here are possible, but it's a starting point for people to investigate. emulator_machine = "130xe-pal"; emulator_artefact = 0; emulator_force_pal = false; input_analogue_rate = 100; input_analogue_curve = "linear"; input_analogue_autocentre = "off"; display_start_line = 0; display_height = 240; display_width = 336; controller_0_a = "joy_a"; controller_0_b = "start"; controller_0_x = "option"; controller_0_y = "select"; controller_0_up = "joy_up"; controller_0_down = "joy_down"; controller_0_left = "joy_left"; controller_0_right = "joy_right"; controller_0_sl = "space"; controller_0_sr = "joy_a"; controller_0_menu = "option"; controller_1_a = "joy_a"; controller_1_b = "start"; controller_1_x = "option"; controller_1_y = "select"; controller_1_up = "joy_up"; controller_1_down = "joy_down"; controller_1_left = "joy_left"; controller_1_right = "joy_right"; controller_1_sl = "space"; controller_1_sr = "joy_a"; controller_1_menu = "option"; controller_2_a = "joy_a"; controller_2_b = "start"; controller_2_x = "option"; controller_2_y = "select"; controller_2_up = "joy_up"; controller_2_down = "joy_down"; controller_2_left = "joy_left"; controller_2_right = "joy_right"; controller_2_sl = "space"; controller_2_sr = "joy_a"; controller_2_menu = "option"; controller_3_a = "joy_a"; controller_3_b = "start"; controller_3_x = "option"; controller_3_y = "select"; controller_3_up = "joy_up"; controller_3_down = "joy_down"; controller_3_left = "joy_left"; controller_3_right = "joy_right"; controller_3_sl = "space"; controller_3_sr = "joy_a"; controller_3_menu = "option";

I saw that editing the per-game options on The400 Mini created a .cfg file on the USB stick to go along with the disk image/executable, so I wondered if it would be possible to tweak the settings beyond what the menu offered. It is! To get the "correct" proportions for a real Atari screen with the full overscan border, edit these lines to read the following in the relevant game's .cfg file: display_start_line = 0; display_height = 240; display_width = 336; Tested this on Bosconian, and it works perfectly. No reason why it wouldn't work on other stuff too. Then save the file where it is on the USB stick, pop the stick back into The400 Mini and run the game. DO NOT open the Game Settings menu, as this will overwrite this manual change, which also means you will probably want to set up your control mappings before you do this little trick. A side-effect of doing this also appears to be that the "suspend" functionality no longer works for the game in question, which means you can't use save states. But for arcade-style stuff or demos that you don't need to save in, this is an interim solution for until Retro Games ups the maximum limits on the cropping settings in a firmware update.

I dunno, my wrists were pretty strong when I was 12. ... I did a lot of piano practice.

It doesn't format the USB stick -- at least it didn't for me. All it should do is create the THE400_BASIC.ATR image if that doesn't exist; everything else you put on the stick should stay where it is. That's what happened for me anyway. Perhaps it has issues if the stick is not in the format it's expecting (FAT32 with a Master Boot Record)?

Just to clarify, no-one is blaming you here As I said in my previous post, more often than not this situation arises because licensors are happy to say "sure, you can use our game" but not actually have a suitable archived copy which can be, y'know, used. And that inevitably leads to the licensee having to track down their own copy, which often leads to its own issues. As you say, there's plenty of additional due diligence which could (and should) have been done here, but that entirely falls on Retro Games and not you. I doubt there's a single person here who doesn't appreciate all the hard work you and the other Atarimania contributors have done over the years! So apologies if you took any of the discussion above as a slight. It's absolutely not your fault. I will say one thing: tracking down working disk images/executable files of Atari software that hasn't been defaced by crackers is a hell of a lot easier than in the C64 scene...!

I've also done a similar vid addressing some questions that popped up in this thread:

If you're talking about games you're loading from USB, default mappings are right ring button for Select, Menu for Option and top ring button for Start. You can also access them via the on-screen keyboard (press Menu and Home together) or remap them from the Game Settings page. Some of the carousel games use alternative mappings. Push up on the joystick from the carousel to see that game's specific mappings. To turn it off, press Menu from the carousel screen, go to Advanced Options and the shutdown option should be there. You can probably also hold down the power button until it turns off, but the shutdown function from the menu will likely be kinder to the machine.

Great news! Hope that saves people some hassle and returns Re: other controllers, TheGamepad (including the one with TheA500 Mini) and TheJoystick (including the one that comes with TheC64) should both work fine. The full .pdf manual for The400 mini has a table showing what buttons on alternative controllers map to those found on TheCXStick. https://bit.ly/THE400-Mini-Manual-1_0_0 (page 31)

in case anyone doesn't see my edit above: Scratch that, it seems like it is the disk image -- those graphic glitches show up in Altirra also. So Atarimania has some duff images of the game, and that's likely where they were sourced from, at a guess. As someone who's involved in this sort of thing for the day job, I can speak from experience that a lot of licensors are more than happy to license out the rights to their games despite the fact they, themselves, have absolutely no archive of the software in question themselves. That leaves projects like this with no option but to source their own images from the Internet -- and that, of course, leads to mistakes like this where seemingly working images (i.e. they boot!) have issues. Should have probably been caught by QA though.

Just adding my experience to the overall survey: have had no problems with my pack-in stick.

The MULE issue appears like it might be an emulation bug rather than a wrong disk image. Just tried the Atarimania .ATRs of both the Ariolasoft UK and Electronic Arts versions and both exhibit the same graphical glitches. The Homesoft "Multi-Joy" .XEX version crashes. And the other .XEX I have only appears to support 2 players regardless of system. EDIT: The version on Fandal's website seems to work perfectly. https://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=4190 So if you want to play MULE, use that one for now. EDIT the second: Scratch that, it is the disk image -- those graphic glitches show up in Altirra also. So Atarimania has some duff images of the game, and that's likely where they were sourced from, at a guess. As someone who's involved in this sort of thing for the day job, I can speak from experience that a lot of licensors are more than happy to license out the rights to their games despite the fact they, themselves, have absolutely no archive of the software in question themselves. That leaves projects like this with no option but to source their own images from the Internet -- and that, of course, leads to mistakes like this. Should have probably been caught by QA though.

I wonder if this is an instance where the fast loading system (which The400 Mini has turned on by default, and can't be disabled at present) is causing the load to fail. I know TheC64 Mini/Maxi (and VICE, by extension) has issues with fastloading some disk images, which is why the "True Drive Emulation" setting is there. I would like to see the equivalent added to The400 Mini, if only to hear the delicious IO sounds

Here's my quick tour of THE400 Mini, including some examples of things I've seen people asking about here (such as running programming languages from cart with a disk image inserted, the Instrumentarium demo etc.) This isn't intended to be completely comprehensive as I'll be doing a longer series of deep-dives into both the included games and some other recommendations, but hopefully this provides some useful information to those who haven't yet picked one up. Enjoy!

Tried Action! Wrote my first ever Action! program. (The "Hello World" example from the manual, natch.) Discovered on-screen keyboard has no "Ctrl" key. Plugged in USB keyboard. Pressed Ctrl-Shift-W to "Write". Saved as "BUMS". Rebooted and loaded DOS disk. "BUMS" was safely on the disk. I'd say that's a go. This almost certainly goes without saying, but you will want to use a USB keyboard to do anything vaguely clever/non-gaming with this thing.

That's correct, you just set up an .m3u playlist, but you have to do that beforehand on a PC. You can mount up to three on the device itself, which is nice. I'm not super familiar with any of them but I'll have a look. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work, but I'll attempt it and report back.

This is one thing I was a little concerned about prior to launch, seeing all the built-in games with no border. For USB loaded games, you can increase the screen width and height by a bit as well as tweaking the vertical offset, but not quite enough to make the full overscan border visible. Whether or not this is an issue varies a bit by game; more recent homebrews tend to be a bit more adventurous in this regard (the status bar in Bosconian is chopped off at both the top and bottom even at max width/height, for example) but older stuff that keeps itself to the usual "playfield" generally works fine. This should in theory be an easy enough fix in a firmware update, they just need to up the limits on the crop settings.

Further to this, for anyone curious, you can indeed mount both a cartridge and a disk image (actually, up to three disk images) simultaneously, allowing you to use cartridge-based software and save to disk. I have tried it with AtariWriter so far and it worked fine. Not tried SpartaDOS X as yet. Only downside is that you need to have prepared the (blank/DOS formatted) disk images in advance, as the only means of creating a disk image on the device itself is the auto-created "boot into BASIC with DOS disk image" it creates in the root of your USB stick if one doesn't already exist with the expected filename. Just look on it as the modern equivalent of having to have enough physical disks to save all your stuff or something.

You ideally want to a bit of a border all the way around the basic "blue screen" display, as the A8 is capable of changing the colour of (and, with some clever programming, displaying stuff in) the overscan border. I don't know the exact proportions/pixel values offhand, but on most TVs it was a fairly large margin at the top and bottom and pretty thin ones either side.

Yeah, mine was showing as Saturday until about 2 in the morning, at which point it said it's actually coming between 2.30 and 4.30 today. A pleasant surprise!

That looks amazing!

Mine still says Saturday