Hello! Rebooting my Atari 800 nostalgia

[billyc]

Around this time of year I always get a wave of Atari nostalgia, and for some reason this time it's stronger than ever. I was your typical nerdy 12 year old with a new Atari 800 and tape drive the day after Xmas back in 1982, attached everything to an ancient 11" black/white Motorola TV (with a handle!) -- and for the next five years it was basically the center of my life until I went away to college. By that point I was too embarrassed to bring it along, because Atari 8-bits were considered pretty outdated by 1988. Also my parents wouldn't let it leave the house since I had written my Dad's dental office payroll system on it and he needed to pay his employees ?

 

I think my journey will sound familiar to a lot of people here: I started with Star Raiders, Wizards of Wor, and a bunch of Zork and Adventure International text adventures -- games I solved together with my sisters and the other Atari-owning kids in the neighborhood. We typed in a lot of games from Antic. Then I started programming in BASIC, reading Compute magazine voraciously and writing my own terrible games with bad PM graphics, and eventually getting an 810 drive and learning machine language -- even writing my own full 6502 disassembler and submitting some games to magazines. Beyond that payroll software, my Atari ended up enabling a bunch of weird family projects, like authoring a book my dad wrote and creating the Turkish Embassy's women's club phone directory. Not to mention countless school projects of course.

 

The arrival of a dirt-cheap 300 baud MPP joystick-port modem cracked the larger world wide open. I was no longer just a kid trapped in the suburbs and found my first online friends, found lots of pirated software, and came out online to those friends before I did to any of my real-life friends (ok maybe that part of my story is less common, lol)

 

Suffice it to say, that Atari was so much more than a game machine; it launched me into an adult life fully comfortable with software development and I've been coding ever since. Of course tech has marched on, and a long line of Macintoshes, PCs, Linux and Windows desktops and laptops have been on my desk since. But nothing can ever match the computer you get on your 12th birthday.

 

My original 800 died in 1986 for unknown reasons but by then a replacement 800XL was so cheap at W.Bell & Co. that just replacing it was easier than finding a local repair location -- anyone here know what a blank "green screen" on an original 800 would have meant?

 

So in the 201x era, I dug up that 800XL and it still turned on, although the 810 and box of disks all seem to have gotten lost along the way. I did the Super-Video 2.0 upgrade so I could connect it via S-Video to my new flat TV, and WOW the picture was amazing. Then I added a USB chip with a bit more soldering so I could fake it into thinking my laptop was an attached disk drive (was this sio2usb? I can't remember). Good times.

 

And then in 2017 I moved to Berlin. Different power plugs & different video, so I left everything in a box back in the U.S. Now I'm wondering if it's easy to find replacement hardware here in Germany so I can start a new collection. Ideally I'd love to replicate what I had before, but as you know the 8-bits are all basically the same and I'm not too picky anymore. I kinda want to see what all these new expansions and Turbos and DOSes etc are all about. I never heard of Turbo-Basic or Action, and man if I had had access to those languages when I was 15... sigh.

 

Where do I start?

 

First post here. Hi everyone! ?

Billy

 

Edited December 20, 2020 by billyc

[Dmitry]

Hey Billy, doing the same here, rebooting my Atari habit from time to time.  I think a lot of folks started with the bedroom programming in the 80's and then turned it into a career.  After college I didn't own a computer for about 5 years, I thought that was still an option back then!   Although I ended up going into IT I spent many years doing database administration.   Back when the iPhone was getting big, I heard the siren call to return to programming.

 

Which I still do today, except now in the area of data science/healthcare analytics.

 

Well welcome.  I'm only recently starting this latest round of nostalgia myself!  Personally I wanted to just be productive on day one, and I spent some time thinking about what would do that for me.   I was keenly interested in Action as well.  I just don't feel like there are enough Action examples, and I'd worry if I ran into a bug, that I'd run into a road block.

 

But in the end, I chose C/Assembler.  It's actually more of a newish choice, I guess, but whenever I run into an issue I can just switch to assembler, which is probably the best supported development option of all on the Atari.

 

[billyc]

3 hours ago, Dmitry said:

But in the end, I chose C/Assembler.  It's actually more of a newish choice, I guess, but whenever I run into an issue I can just switch to assembler, which is probably the best supported development option of all on the Atari.

 

 

Very nice! I guess I'm interested in Action because it was around back then (even if I didn't know about it) and it seems so well-suited to the 6502-based system with its dpoke/dpeek, great syntax for variables as pointers to Atari hardware registers, and so on. Seems much more palatable than raw assembler at this point! What are you using for C development? I didn't think that was possible.

 

But what I really need first is some hardware here in Germany! :-)

[Roydea6]

3 minutes ago, billyc said:

But what I really need first is some hardware here in Germany! :-)

Join the ABBUC Atari users group and or log into there website very similar to AtariAge forums.  And ask or post your needs & desires 

[Mclaneinc]

Hi there Billy, always great to see a person returning to the Atari campus, you should not have too much trouble getting an 800XL in Germany, there's tons of EU members on here and a great bunch they are too.

 

ABBUC is a good choice as mentioned, worth every penny of the membership.

 

Really hope you get all the bits you want and rediscover that wonderful enjoyment the old Atari (as well as many old machines) offer.

 

Paul..

[Jochen]

Hi Billy,

you live in Berlin, the Abbuc has its own Regionalgruppe in Berlin ?

 

http://www.abbuc.de/~atarixle/AIB/

 

Jochen

[+Spancho]

Welcome Billy,

 

in case you want to know more about ABBUC just have a look at this link: http://www.abbuc.de/abbuc/impressum

 

spancho

[billyc]

1 hour ago, Spancho said:

Welcome Billy,

 

in case you want to know more about ABBUC just have a look at this link: http://www.abbuc.de/abbuc/impressum

 

spancho

Yup I filled out their registration form just yesterday, and have not heard anything back yet, but I'm sure I will

 

 

 

[mimo]

1 minute ago, billyc said:

Yup I filled out their registration form just yesterday, and have not heard anything back yet, but I'm sure I will

 

 

 

Joining/registration/ actually loging in can be a bit messy maybe @skr can help?

And welcome back to the Atari world, hope you get set up soon