1450XLD Sales Literature

[tschak909]

My primary storage device is a #FujiNet. It's not the fastest thing in the world, but it is proving to be extremely compatible and flexible. 

 

-Thom

[flashjazzcat]

11 minutes ago, Faicuai said:

...C'mon guys! I know you can do it!

Indeed. SIDE3 will allow simultaneous HDD, disk images and cart emulation... something I have been asking for the hardware to accomplish for some years, despite the fact I also own an Incognito 800 and a 1088XEL (whose HDDs do not block the cartridge port).

[Faicuai]

27 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said:

Indeed. SIDE3 will allow simultaneous HDD, disk images and cart emulation... something I have been asking for the hardware to accomplish for some years, despite the fact I also own an Incognito 800 and a 1088XEL (whose HDDs do not block the cartridge port).

 

NICE! (And there yet another forward-looking ornament...)

 

So let me guess: $75+$85 = U.S. $160 for old Side2 + Side 3 (and soon GBP, as it rapidly approaches parity), which means I could buy Incognito and with a bit of change an Ultimate/SD, and have all that (plus more) TODAY.... and without ever shedding a single internal component because the upgrades DON"T fit (!)

 

What about mounting a cart-image on my Ultimate-SD from an HD-based executable invoked from SDX's command prompt (like I do now)? What about booting the Magnificent ACE80 on the right-port, with its self-disappearing act (from the bus), while my Ultimate/SD cart is on the left-port, while booting Altirra Basic, or Basic-XL or any other legacy title via OSS DOS XL (for OSS carts) or simply Atari DOS 2.5? What about Monkey Wrench? What about booting Corvus from (front) ports 3 and 4?

 

The main point here is that there is a reason why Atari attempted to rectify (the best they could) with the 1400XL and 1450 XLD architecture and feature-set, though.... At least, you could plug your cart (on the left side), and plug an HD on the PBI port and, with the right SW, possibly eliminating most contentions (I would accept that, though...)

 

Let the nervous-laughing continue...

 

 

Edited March 20, 2020 by Faicuai

[flashjazzcat]

7 minutes ago, Faicuai said:

Let the nervous-laughing continue...

I'm laughing, but not nervously. As wonderful as the Incognito 800 (or 800i or whatever you like to call it) is, there are other 8-bit Ataris which people also like to use and upgrade. You're welcome to assert that the 800 is the best computer ever designed (or whatever point you are trying to make), but referring to peripherals as 'ornaments' seems to me quite unnecessary.

[bfollowell]

17 hours ago, bob1200xl said:

I was sifting through some Atari papers and I found this. Anybody seen this before? It looks like a page out of the marketing manual. There were a number of s/w and h/w pages for other products, also. (1010, 1020, 1030...)

 

Bob

 

 

 

While I don't recall ever seeing this particular brochure, there were other, flashier, colorful marketing materials available back in the day. I've attached links to four that I found on AtariMania. Back in my high school days, typing away on my old 800, I had all of these brochures and used to drool over them daily. I wish I still had them. I have no idea what happened to them, but I suspect I wore them out until there was little left but paper dust.

 

1450XLD Brochure

1400XL Brochure

XL Line Brochure 1983

XL Line Brochure 1984

 

[Faicuai]

1 hour ago, flashjazzcat said:

I'm laughing, but not nervously. As wonderful as the Incognito 800 (or 800i or whatever you like to call it) is, there are other 8-bit Ataris which people also like to use and upgrade. You're welcome to assert that the 800 is the best computer ever designed (or whatever point you are trying to make), but referring to peripherals as 'ornaments' seems to me quite unnecessary.

Main point is already on last post, already (clearly stated).

 

As much as we tend to treat these toys as primma-donnas, at the end of the day they are just HW bound to physical and economical realities (does not matter how much we cry about it).

 

And ornaments are just that.... ornaments, as I (myself) grew tired of collecting them (just as a LARGE group in this audience that shelves this stuff for years...) The truth is the truth, no matter how not-pretty it may be....

 

 

NOW, a spanking-shiny 1400 XL will be the exception.... :-)))

Edited March 20, 2020 by Faicuai

[flashjazzcat]

10 minutes ago, Faicuai said:

And ornaments are just that.... ornaments, as I (myself) grew tired of collecting them (just as a LARGE group in this audience that shelves this stuff for years...) The truth is the truth, no matter how not-pretty it may be...

I find it difficult to see multiple 8-bit computers and peripherals as ornaments when I pull them onto the desk and use them for development and testing on a regular basis, but if certain users do no more than acquire them, place them on a shelf and dust them from time to time, that's their business.

[+kheller2]

7 hours ago, SS said:

So, is this why the 1200XL's case was so huge to begin with?  Because it was directly based on the floor plan of the XLD integrated floppy disk drive design and not because it actually needed all of that extra architecture?  Or was the 1200XL actually designed in order to look like it was twice the machine of its intended marketing sister, the 600XL?  Because the latter is what I've always thought.  So which actually was the horse and which was the cart?

The 1200XL is SMALL compared to a 1450XLD.  The 1400XL was the same footprint.  The XLD was way longer.  See my post on the bottom plastics.

 

 

 

[leech]

"Full stroke design..." I just got the strangest boner.

 

In all seriousness,  this would have been THE machine at the time.

7 hours ago, SS said:

So, is this why the 1200XL's case was so huge to begin with?  Because it was directly based on the floor plan of the XLD integrated floppy disk drive design and not because it actually needed all of that extra architecture?  Or was the 1200XL actually designed in order to look like it was twice the machine of its intended marketing sister, the 600XL?  Because the latter is what I've always thought.  So which actually was the horse and which was the cart?

I always kind of wondered why the 1200xl wasn't the 128kb machine, the 800xl the 64kb one and the 600xl was 32kb.  At that point they probably should not have bothered with a 16kb one.

[+kheller2]

5 minutes ago, leech said:

"Full stroke design..." I just got the strangest boner.

 

In all seriousness,  this would have been THE machine at the time.

I always kind of wondered why the 1200xl wasn't the 128kb machine, the 800xl the 64kb one and the 600xl was 32kb.  At that point they probably should not have bothered with a 16kb one.

 

The 1000 was to be 16K the 1000X to be 64k.

Much stuff happened, and you got a 1200... then 1200XL Released in numbers starting 1/83.

Then almost 10-12 months later you got the 600XL and 800XL.

Don't confuse this with the NY 600XL.

 

 

[Caterpiggle]

4 hours ago, bfollowell said:

 

While I don't recall ever seeing this particular brochure, there were other, flashier, colorful marketing materials available back in the day. I've attached links to four that I found on AtariMania. Back in my high school days, typing away on my old 800, I had all of these brochures and used to drool over them daily. I wish I still had them. I have no idea what happened to them, but I suspect I wore them out until there was little left but paper dust.

 

1450XLD Brochure

1400XL Brochure

XL Line Brochure 1983

XL Line Brochure 1984

 

That Brochure , 1983 that made me sad ... it suppose to be released on October, 1983 ! But Atari Company scrapped it away ...due of different CEO when he came in ! When I was a kid, I remember it very clearly in my mind when I read this first time in that catalogue , 1983. Yes, I do have that catalogue .. really nice designs in that catalogue.  Can you tell me what is that kind of monitor that used on 1450XLD. There are screen , it looks like VisiCalc program ?

[Justin Payne]

7 hours ago, tschak909 said:

My primary storage device is a #FujiNet. It's not the fastest thing in the world, but it is proving to be extremely compatible and flexible. 

 

-Thom

Yeah, but you're working on resolving that, right. ?

[tschak909]

Well, I've demonstrated it running at 125Kbps, which is pokey divisor 0... In theory, it could go faster with a synchronous clock, but we'd need to write whole new SIO routines to do that.

 

-Thom

[Justin Payne]

2 minutes ago, tschak909 said:

Well, I've demonstrated it running at 125Kbps, which is pokey divisor 0... In theory, it could go faster with a synchronous clock, but we'd need to write whole new SIO routines to do that.

 

-Thom

So, in comparison to other storage devices (original, enhanced, and alternative (aka: New devices such as FujiNet), how does it stack up as far as the throughput compared to other storage devices (keeping in mind your devices does a heck of a lot more).

[tschak909]

Parallel bus driven devices will always be faster, due to a much more direct interface. At most, RWTEST will top out at 10KB/s reading, with Mathy's high speed SIO code.

 

-Thom

[flashjazzcat]

A PBI implementation in the future will be useful if we are to transfer data between PCs and Ataris at reasonable speed. I can currently flash a 512KB ROM on an U1MB using SIO2PC at acceptable speed (127Kb/s), but for any kind of back-up or massive data transfer, this isn't much use. The 6502 CPU can handle 70-80KB/s with the screen on (short of a device using DMA, at which point things become muddy for purists). I've always thought it would be rather nice to have a 'PBI2PC' device.

 

Offloading all the complex network protocols onto the adapter firmware was definitely the right way to go, though.

[Justin Payne]

A quick and dirty effort to colorize.

[ijor]

On 3/20/2020 at 2:56 AM, Nezgar said:

The most intriguing thing to me about a 1450XLD's "Double Sided-Dual Density" disk drive was that it was going to be interfaced via PBI, and would read the second side as D2:. The hardware would actually have to read and write the 2nd side tracks BACKWARDS to maintain "flippy" compatibility with the 810 and 1050... This would have required whole track buffering I think.

 

I don't think the 1450XLD had, even remotely, the capability to read a flippy disk backwards (without flipping). That would require very expensive hardware at the time, and would have been very slow.

 

Quote

The integral disk drive is capable of operating in
two "size" modes. For the sake of clarity within
this document, these modes will be referred to as
"large" and "small" mode. The "large" mode addres-
ses the disk as a single logical entity, with two
physical sides. The "small" mode addresses the disk
as two logical entities, one per physical side of
the disk.

 

I think this "small" mode wasn't mean to be compatible with 810 flippies. Just that you could split the sides logically and the computer would see them as two separate drives. But that back side would not be flippy and you wouldn't be able to read it on an 810 drive.

[+Nezgar]

2 hours ago, ijor said:

I don't think the 1450XLD had, even remotely, the capability to read a flippy disk backwards (without flipping). That would require very expensive hardware at the time, and would have been very slow.

Yeah, thinking about it more, I have to fully agree with you. The hardware just didn't exist (and still doesn't aside from flux imagers) to read a disk backwards like that.