[HN Gopher] The Atari 800XL
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The Atari 800XL
Author : jdkee
Score : 45 points
Date : 2022-05-21 04:40 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (goto10.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (goto10.substack.com)
| criddell wrote:
| The Atari 800XL is the machine I wanted, the TI-99/4A is the
| machine I got.
|
| My brother and I spent a pretty good chunk of one summer writing
| games on the TI. I'm very thankful to my Mom for indulging 11
| year old me and getting me started on this path.
| billygoat wrote:
| This blog reminds me of -me- back in the day. I cut my teeth on
| programming bad Atari BASIC games, but eventually I learned 6502
| assembly and wrote my own disassembler, modem routines, etc...
| heady days!
|
| And funny timing, this weekend I (finally) plugged in and got
| working an old 800XL I bought on eBay about a year ago -- but
| after purchasing the machine, it gathered dust while I got
| distracted with so many other things. :-)
|
| This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks and a folder with dot-
| matrix printouts cataloging the files on each disk. Previous
| owner had the machine for decades and was very meticulous. It
| also came with a 1050 disk drive which makes scary wheezing
| noises when the disk spins, lol. I don't think I'll use the disk
| drive much since everything interesting is downloadable nowadays
| in seconds in ATR image format; I also picked up a SIO port to
| serial adapter, so I can link the Atari to my laptop. It's pretty
| amazing, the Atari sees my laptop as a disk drive using RespeQt
| [1] on the laptop. It is -so- much faster/easier than actually
| dealing with the disks like back in the day.
|
| And if you thought disks were slow... this machine also came with
| a cassette drive (!!) but it needs some lube or something, the
| rotors don't spin at the right speed. I kinda want to show some
| of my students the slow speed at which we used to be tortured:
| ten minutes to load a single game, and that only if you were
| lucky enough for it to load successfully on the first try...
|
| The most interesting aspect of this experiment is the speed at
| which technology operates now: I had forgotten just how slow
| everything was. A simpler time.
|
| [1] RespeQT - https://github.com/RespeQt/RespeQt
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks and a folder with
| dot-matrix printouts cataloging the files on each disk.
|
| Please consider taking full dumps of these disks and uploading
| them to the Internet Archive software collection. Floppy disk
| data are extremely fragile, and the Internet Archive is one of
| very few institutions that can take advantage of existing
| copyright exemptions for libraries to properly store such
| content for the foreseeable future.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Please explain how to do that? It seems easier said than
| done!
| pronoiac wrote:
| I'd suggest the Greaseweazle, which lets you use a PC and
| PC drive.
|
| https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle
|
| I haven't tested this, it's on my to do list.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| You need an SIO2SD or SIO2USB device. It plugs into the SIO
| port on the Atari and reads/writes to an SD card. You can
| then save disk images from the disk drive to the SD card.
| Transfer the SD card to a modern computer and upload the
| image files to the internet archive.
|
| There's lot of info on the web about this, even YouTube
| videos if you prefer that. But here's one random
| discussion:
|
| https://atariage.com/forums/topic/306652-copying-files-
| from-...
|
| Google terms like "Atari copy disk image to SIO2SD" and
| similar.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks
|
| It sounds like these are homemade collections of software, not
| off-the-shelf store-bought stuff.
|
| If I'm right, then this is the real gem of your collection, not
| the hardware. That hardware is much easier to come by than
| homemade, personal collections of disks. In fact, such
| collections are exceedingly rare and very expensive if you can
| find them at all. Sellers will often break a collection and
| sell one disk at a time for crazy prices like $10-20 each,
| without even knowing if the disk works.
|
| I sincerely regret selling my collection about 15 years ago. I
| don't regret selling the hardware.
| LocalH wrote:
| This. Please image those disks. You may find you have
| something that has not been backed up to the Internet until
| now. Pretty sure I had at least one C64 demo that I have yet
| to be able to find online in over 20 years of looking.
| cyco130 wrote:
| I'm the original author of AspeQt (of which RespeQt is a fork:
| the maintainer after me turned out to be hard to get along
| with, so the guys in the AtariAge community forked it). Great
| to see it still brings joy to people after all these years.
| cable2600 wrote:
| It was a good computer, a friend had one and I had a Commodore
| 64. The 64 had better sound and sprites, but the Atari had better
| color and animation.
| ddingus wrote:
| I liked the SIO system. Device independent I/O was nicely done.
|
| K: Keyboard C: Cassette (slooooow) Dn: Disk drive P: Printer
|
| Today, we have a device called FujiNET. It is basically a
| serial to Internet bridge.
|
| N: For Network
|
| And most programs just work across the Internet despite being
| 30 years old. Once the N: handler was done, Atari computers
| basically are networked.
|
| Programming with the Internet works like serial does, and there
| have been a couple multi player games written in BASIC that
| perform nicely.
|
| I plan on getting one for my 800XL one day in the near future.
|
| The FujiNET is being made to worn with other machines too. They
| all vary in how this kind of thing can be made to happen. The
| Atari will end up a benchmark, or reference.
|
| SIO today is seen as a very early USB type implementation that
| offered capability for up to 30 devices to coexist on the
| serial bus.
|
| Pretty damn spiffy, and I feel it is one of the better
| features. Each 8 bitter has at least one stand out thing. On
| the Atari, this is one stand out often underappreciated.
|
| The Apple had slots and an assembler monitor.
|
| C64 had great sound, sprites, nice user port.
| buescher wrote:
| The designer of the SIO worked on the USB.
| ddingus wrote:
| Thanks for confirming that. I think I read about those
| things happening somewhere, and just wasn't really sure at
| the time I wrote my comment
| jdswain wrote:
| And Atari DOS was written by the same people that wrote DOS
| for the Apple ][. Shepardson Microsystems. The book 'The
| Atari BASIC Source Book, written by some ot the same people
| is still an interesting read today.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This was my first computer, it was great. I did really miss
| having the ability to have multiple text colours on the same
| screen. It couldn't do that, though there was a trick where you
| could combine rows of multiple display modes by fiddling with the
| "display list interrupt".
|
| PS This writeup is not great, very basic.
| thom wrote:
| I always just thought of this as a games machine because of the
| cartridges so I never really learned to program it. But I loved
| things like Submarine Commander and I still think of the version
| of Centipede on these machines as canonical. Good times.
| iex_xei wrote:
| This was my first computer. I learned BASIC and did some
| "drawing" in the graphics mode. A few years ago I tested and it
| was running. Time passes.
| issa wrote:
| Apparently I have conflated the memories of a lot of the
| computers I had back then. I will NEVER forget those metal
| buttons running down the right side, but I could have sworn the
| 800XL looked different inside.
| gbourne wrote:
| Fond memories and the tape drive I had to play games that we're
| on the cartridge.
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