OldAtarian

For SIO port expansion there is the Quintopus from CSS, and the EASI/O Spider from More Than Games. Bill I called CSS a few months ago and spoke to Bob (what a guy!) and he told me that he'd recently dumped a load of A8 stuff to another seller to clear the warehouse. He was going to look to see if he had any Quintopus boards left, but I never heard back from him Can you really still order from CSS? I thought that info was kept up for historical purposes like the Atari ST pages over at ICD.

Don't you mean MOS Technologies? C= commissioned it from them You mean the MOS Technologies that Commodore OWNED 100% of SINCE 1976 and officially known as Commodore Semiconductor Group? Yeah, them.

Bah! Misjudged what I was looking at. Nevermind.

here in the seattle area, there have been some real nutters posting to craigslist, $500 for a atari 2600 and 8 carts. no boxes for anything... Let me guess ummm....Combat, Pac Man, Asteroids, Defender, Space Invaders, Adventure, Haunted House and Yar's Revenge. ( You can also substitute Air Sea Battle, Outlaw, Maze Craze, Dodge Em, Othello or Slot Racers for any of the previous games and it comes out the same.) Oh, I forgot Canyon Bomber, Breakout, E.T. and Demons to Diamonds. Those seem to also be among the popular junk carts people sell with systems these days.

And the POKEY is sooooo superior. *pukes* Depending on the AY Chip version and what type of music is used. If it comes to bass sounds, POKEY loses anyways. But the programmable waveforms seem to be endless with POKEY . Only SID can do better, when comparing common soundchips of the early 80s. SID... *pukes* The SID chip rules. You have to applaud Commodore once in a while when they do good. It can't all be venom and vitriol.

Ummm...aren't the monitors different frequencies? Something about one running at 50hz and the other running at 60hz, I seem to remember.

The last one I saw on ebay was 5 years ago and that went for $850-ish back then. I can easily see $1500 now.

According to press coverage of the time: "Atari Chairman Jack Tramiel and his family now hold 42 percent of Atari stock". "Atari shareholders will own 60 percent of the merged company". Yes, Atari Interactive (not to be confused with the division of Hasbro under the same name, nor the current Atari Interactive which are three separate entities that happen to have wound up with the same names). You can read more about it at the entry on Wikipedia I created for them. This wasn't AtariSoft, Atari Interactive was a new division started in late '95 and announced in early '96 to move Jaguar era titles to the PC. It lasted about a month after the formal announcement before being disbanded for the merger talks. I believe they only got Tempest 2000 and one other title out the door. Interplay wound up picking up the Tempest 2000 DOS publishing rights, so you have two variations on packaging. Look at this version for the Nuon

If you want to run floppies, or floppy images 1MB is probably fine. If you want to use HD patched software (I'm assuming he has an interest since he mentions WHDload) you probably want more than 1MB. Having more memory also allows you to softload different TOS versions. I've run TOS 3.06 from floppy on my 1040STFM and it runs fine.

Advice on buying ST? Don't. Get an STe instead. Given you have an Amiga, Atari 8-bit, etc. you may not be missing much with just an ST. Why an STe? Not much was written to support the features of the STe so why not just get an ST? Even a 520 will run almost everything out there. I used a 520 ST (separate floppy drive) and then a 1040STFM right up until the Falcon030 was released. I never bothered with an STe until a few months ago.

Maybe it thinks you're trying to hack the source code. There were a lot of programs that refused to run if you had a custom OS installed like the Omnimon or things like that. That's one of the reasons you needed the Translator for some early software. Part of the protection was to check certain memory locations and if the expected values weren't found there the protection assumed you were a pirate with an Omnimon and refused to load into memory.

I think it's better to use cartridge versions of programming languages to prevent accidental erasing of the language itself in case of buggy programs. ROM software is like having a protected OS installed that prevents user applications from over-writing the OS but even better since viruses/spyware can still ruin OSes whereas not if they are in ROM. Perhaps, you should forward this to Microsoft. That's what those little stickers that go over the notches are for.

I think the nearest you'll get to an NTSC one is Supergirl :- http://www.starringthecomputer.com/feature.php?f=396 There was a small run of the first units made for North America but it was recalled and they were all converted to UK units when they didn't sell. Somebody out there somewhere has one or knows someone who has one. It's just a matter of networking the right vintage computer sites to find that person. Shipping from the UK is astronomical and I would only resort to that as a last resort.

There's some memory locations that are used differently and some subroutines in the OS that are different but not much else really. I used to have a bunch of floppies long ago with 5200 games on them that I ran on my 800. Apparently, it wasn't all that hard for someone with even a rudimentary knowledge of programming on the Atari to make the necessary changes to get the games to run on the 800.

If I can't plug my 2600 carts into it, why do I need it? Until someone releases a fully 2600 compatible system with a cart slot the 2600 remains dead. And $220? I can get both a real 2600 and a real C64 for less than that and be able to use all the peripherals and use a wider range of software for both systems. Not a very good value for the money to me.

Pete Rose Atari commercial

Asteroids and Star Raiders, too.

Embedding disabled.

True enough, it may not stop the questions, but if it even helps one person get a better understanding of how to spot Heavy Sixer material, than it was all worth it. But...now we have more competition for heavy's when they come up for sale if more people know how to spot them. But you are forgetting about people looking for these at yard sales just to put them up on Ebay. Believe it or not there are just as many if not more people looking to find stuff to sell, than to buy. So in the end it all equals out. Yeah but all those people will be buying them with the intent of charging a fortune for them and prices will go up. We'll start seeing heavy consoles with no games or controllers starting at $250. Once a few people start doing that, everyone else who has one will start doing it, too. The days of $20-$50 heavy's will come to an end quick.

True enough, it may not stop the questions, but if it even helps one person get a better understanding of how to spot Heavy Sixer material, than it was all worth it. But...now we have more competition for heavy's when they come up for sale if more people know how to spot them.

And the BBC Micro probably has the best implementation of basic of any 8 bit home computer in the world. I wish I could find one in the US.

Holmes has MS BASIC II, .atr and ROM It never was very popular. It has string arrays, but the syntax is different than Atari BASIC, and so, without documentation would be hard to use. If you are programming and don't like Atari BASIC, probably BASIC XL, BASIC XE, and TurboBASIC would be better. All three are compatible, pretty much, with Atari BASIC. The advantage of MS Basic, though, is that it was pretty universal across platforms. If you were a multi platform developer you wanted MS Basic and not any of the Atari Basic variants because it would be easier to port since most of the popular computers had a version of MS Basic. It was a little trickier translating your Atari Basic programs to Apple or IBM.

What kind of list of cancelled/unreleased games doesn't have Duke Nukem Forever on it? Add to that list Shenmue II for the North American Dreamcast (I had to buy the UK version and a bootloader to play it) and also Half Life for the Dreamcast and the list starts to fill out a little better. There were so many games that looked awesome in reviews that should have been on that list. I give the list a fail.

I always felt the DC controller was too narrow. The one controller I really liked was the original fat XBOX controller but it got canned because apparently I was the only one who did like it.

I'm not sure what the dip switches do exactly. I've played around with them a little but still can't tell what they're for. OMG you just erased whatever was on it!!! j/k