I went from the Atari 400 to the Atari 130XE. I was a bit miffed about losing two joystick ports (MULE is everything). The keyboard was so much better. I had the Indus Disk Drive[1] and I swear I opened that cover way too often because of how smooth it rose.

I still think MULE is the perfect game. Seven Cities of Gold can never be done again, but it did provide some serious amusement ("See, I can trade only, hey back off, why is that drum playing, I'm one of you, oh crud, well its on now.")

1) https://archive.org/details/run-magazine-20/page/n25/mode/2u...

Many of those early EA games were so... well done, inventive, and really captured your imagination.

MULE, 7 Cities, Archon, Pinball Construction Set, Skyfox, Adventure Construction Set, Music Construction Set, Racing Destruction Set, Heart Of Africa and Bards Tale were all... relatively mind-blowing (although my mind was only... 12-13 at the time!).

They seemed to be capable of both pushing the computer past its limits and expanding the idea of what was possible in game (or just... with the 'construction sets'... what was possible).

Also the Lucasfilm games such as Rescue on Fractalus or Koronis Rift. And Mercenary by Novagen.

indeed the list goes on. i was trying to just list some EA games, but Epyx ('summer games'!!!), Infocom, Lucasfilm and others all produced some groundbreaking work for their time.

I went from the Atari 800 to the 130XE - also had the Indus Disk Drive! That thing was a tank, especially with all the disk-switching that went on in those days.

One of the things I remember most about the Atari 8 bit family was the superior graphics and sound as compared to the early generation of dos-based PCs that came years later. The haunting melody from the splash screen of 7 Cities of Gold was classic. And it still blows me away to see what the Atari 8-bit was capable of with games like Alternate Reality: The City!

Jay Miner's team doing their own chips (Antic, Pokey, C/GTIA) instead of assembling a machine off the shelf. It was a truly fun machine to program. It was amazing what could be done on the Atari machines that couldn't be done on the Apple ][.

I have a love of both. Atari was a chip playground. And the SIO system was very forward looking for the time. Look at FujiNet for an example. Old software working across the Internet!

The Apple was a tank, fast workstation. (Assuming one boosted the 1Mhz CPU.) I had 4Mhz at one point then.

My //e can run at 16Mhz. Crazy fast. Makes it useful today.

Atari machines can get a high Mhz upgrade, and if one wants to do it, a 6809!

I'm not sure it's fair to describe the membrane thing on the 400 as a keyboard. I typed in everything in the Basic manual, and thinking about it now makes my hands ache.

Yes. I got a real keyboard for mine back in the day.

Today I have one. It has one purpose: run "Star Raiders."

I love that game. And the 400 looks seriously cool. Never fails to get some attention running that game.

Then people experience the feel of that cool looking keyboard... oh well. It is fine for the game.

The musical intro to M.U.L.E. was GREAT. I worked at a computer store at the time and I just had it running all day.

I had the Atari 400 then 800. After losing days of work to unreliable cassette storage, getting a disk drive (the Trak) was momentous. Being able to NAME files was a bonus on merely being able to read and write them reliably.

I still have the whole system, and my Commodore 1702. That thing needs to be re-capped.

The M.U.L.E. music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EubKmtFBXY

The XEGS was my first computer. My parents bought it for me when I was 11. I later got a floppy disk drive and a 300 baud modem. It honestly felt magical to me. Rescue on Fractalus was one of my favorite games. The light gun was not as good as the NES one, but I still had fun with Bug Hunt. I really enjoyed the Infocom text games, though I think the feelies were the best part of those. Later I discovered Ultima IV and played the heck out of that. I had my first experiences in programming with it. I would read the manual for fun and typing in programs from Antic. I eventually started asking my parents for an Atari ST but ended up with a second hand IBM AT.

1988 issue of Antic: https://archive.org/details/1988-06-anticmagazine

I have a Atari Inc 800XL (1983) and an 800 (1979) downstairs that still work great. And an Atari Corp 130XE (1985?) with dead DRAM that doesn't, despite being newer and in much better visual condition. Apparently a very common failure. The XEs were a "rock bottom pricing" innovation from the Tramiels, after creating Atari Corp from some of the ashes of Atari Inc. Cheaper components and my impression is they are not of the same quality.

But I was an Atari ST user back in the 80s, so the case design has some nostalgia value to me.

I was an Atari ST 1200 user too. In college, I told no one. I felt like I was cheating with the word processor. The other students would talk about paying someone $1.00 a page for typing, and I said nothing.

I told my college girlfriend she could use it whenever she wanted, but she just didn't like the poor Atari. I remember trying to get her interested in the drawing program, but still nothing.

I still have a nice memory of me demonstrating the abilities of the drawing program though. I was fooling around and drew male and female anatomy on the screen. She said, “You’re getting me horny. Turn that box off!” I was astonished on a few levels. I never heard her say anything remotely sexual, and I like it. I remember breaking up with her after we graduated, and I never found anyone even close to her on a lot of levels. I mistakenly thought the grass was greener.

I had this irrational fear one teacher might question the dot matrix print, but no one questioned anything.

My girlfriend at the time thought I was crazy for spending so much money on a computer.

I hated writing papers, but the computer saved me a lot of hassles.

I wish now I explored other aspects of computing back then, but in all honestly, I felt like sitting in front of a screen for anything other than writing, or making money, was waste of my 20’s.

I even got to the point where I didn’t like computers. I still have a love hate relationship with a lot of tech.

I remember looking at the case, and the monitor a few years after graduation, and tossing it all away. At the time, I wished they didn’t use that beige for the case/monitor though.

Now—-I wish I kept it. That word processor was everything I needed to write.

"What you have to realize," said one Atari engineer (I think it was Shiraz Shivji), "Is that DRAMs are really analog components."

IIRC the ST was running DRAMs a few tens of nanoseconds (ten to fifteen percent) faster than they were rated. Not sure exactly why, but I think the ST was running cheap parts faster than they were supposed to go, and it largely got away with it.

Wonder if they played the same games with the refreshed 6502-based systems.

They did that so that they could run the Shifter from the memory on the off-cycle of the CPU, right? I mean, it's crazy because it worked and all my STs I have downstairs have never failed, and I don't recall ever having issues with memory chips on them, and I don't recall them ever being unreliable.

As for the XE, from reading the forums it sounds like they just used a bad batch of 4164 DRAMs, something to do with them being American made and not Japanese. I seem to remember this was the era of crazy fluctations in memory prices.

Oh yeah, in 1986 Reagan administration introduced tariffs for 64K DRAMs from Japan. I remember having a bunch of trouble tracking the chips down so I could upgrade a 128K Macintosh to a 512K "Fat Mac" (which was easy to do, if you had one of the oddball new Torx bits -- also hard to find -- and a soldering iron stalwart enough to defeat the massive and heatsink-like ground plane on the Mac motherboard).

512K for about $240, IIRC. My first major purchase at Fry's, which had recently bifurcated a supermarket into a "chips" side (with dip) and a "chips" side (with sockets).

My first Atari was a 130XE. I now have 800XL's and a couple more XE's, but my favorite case design is still the XE. It just always seemed like a futuristic case to me, while the XL beige case kinda felt more like the previous era. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

My Atari (no affiliation, but a happy customer since the 90's) still has a ton of (brand new, old stock) parts and (in some cases) brand new computers, and they're stored in beautiful northern California, so they don't get any UV damage. They're also absolute knowledge sinks for Atari's (both 8-bit and ST):

http://www.myatari.com/

Same here, I had an XL and I did find the XE much better looking. Computers were a future thing, a futuristic design was a much better fit than the brown/beige that harked back at the wooden panels of the first-gen home computers.

Web site seems a little outdated. The home page proudly includes "Snow day 12/7/2009!"

Almost everything I click displays this message:

  Last change 08/03/2018
  Temporarily not available due to Maintanence.

  Sorry we we have had several of our Windows XP Systems
 crash that we use to update our prices list so have not
 been able to update price and stock levels on many items.
  I am trying hard to correct this but just do not have
 the time right now.

Isn't that part of the charm? ;) You can call them or email them for details (http://www.myatari.com/atariord.htm), or check out their Ebay store:

http://www.ebaystores.com/Atari-Sales-and-Service/Atari-8-Bi...

> The 2 piece cases greatly reduced the cost of the product, though their design was rather drab and unappealing compared to the more stylish, yet more expensive XL case designs. The keyboards were another shortcoming of the design. They were mushy and lacked solid tactile rebound to them and this was a major complaint for many users.

Don't really agree with this. I had an 800XL and I thought the grey XE series was much more stylish and modern in design. The brown/beige was very old-fashioned. In fact I think the ST series was one of the best looking computers of its time. Definitely much better than the Amiga 500 (which I did own)

The keyboards had better feedback on the 800XL but the keys were much heavier there. The XE was more like a modern keyboard.

Serious question to those who still have a functioning retro computer: what do you do with it?

My dad still has our old Atari 800 in the closet somewhere and I sometimes wonder if it still works. But I just can't imagine using it for more than few minutes nostalgia hit.

I enjoy playing around it with it for the programming challenge of targeting such a constrained platform (a 4MHz Z80 with 64KB of RAM for my system). It's simple enough that you can hold the whole system in your head when you're working on it. Basically the same things I do with embedded platforms like Arduinos, except my old Z80 system can host its own Turbo Pascal compiler.

I need to get a good Z80 card for my Apple. It is crazy how much there is out there for that CPU.

You can play Star Raiders and M.U.L.E. - the latter with four human players, which is best.

Yeah! And Warlords for the Atari 800 (or "Castle Crisis," which is a homebrew / arcade-perfect port of the arcade version of Warlords) with some friends and real paddle controllers is a lot of fun.

If you know something about wiring you can get photocells and wire them to the paddle ports (pin 9 and 5) then move by how much light gets to the photocell. I put two in a piece of wood so I could use my hand to allow or restrict light reaching the photocell. Also fun to write a basic program to take the value and use it for the sound command. Makes some weird noise.

That seems fun. I have a kid who might love to play with one or two hooked up to the sound registers.

Edit: I know what I am going to do. My granddaughter is 5.

I am going to write a little basic program that reads these cells wired to a couple paddle ports. I have one set I can take apart for this bit of fun. We have two hands, which makes for a perfect pairing.

https://www.atariarchives.org/ecp/chapter_5.php

Press a key, and something happens on screen. Maybe the color changes with the sound, or it says, "Hello Kiddo", whatever.

And the registers, math, change.

A couple hours on this should lead to interesting time watching her interact with it all.

Thanks for the inspiration. Should be fun. Now all I have to do is get a program into that Atari. Might finally be time to get one of those SD card devices for my Atari, or a FujiNet. Something.

Young kids love that game. I have a good version for the VCS. Medieval Mayhem.

It never fails. Mine and friends will play that one for some time. It is simple, immediate on a low latency display and all interactive.

Total classic!

4 player M.U.L.E. is special.

Those computers did offer up 8 paddles! I am not sure any title ever made use of them.

Have an Atari 130XE, a C64, and two Apple IIs in my office still. Play my favorite old games, hack 6502 code, trace into ROM routines, mess with the latest accessories. (network adapters, solid state storage, accelerators, etc)... sometimes I even beat a game I couldn’t quite beat before. I rarely get time to actually do all this stuff, but when I do...

Same, minus as many machines, but yeah. Special recharge the soul time.

If you have a C64 there is new software to try every day: http://csdb.dk

And some days, they release new good games for it (these came in the last 6 months):

https://sarahjaneavory.itch.io/zeta-wing

https://carletonhandley.itch.io/runn-n-gunn

I run @oldtechadverts on Twitter so I see my fair share of folks talking about their passion for the Atari computers (as well as other retro computers).

The majority of them seems to really enjoy playing the games, repairing them, enhancing them, writing new games for them. The fact that these computers are old does not matter to them, the retro crowd enjoy these computers just because.

I have a few. One, a Color Computer 3. Has a 6809 CPU. I know a friend who has kids. Perfect, it will find a new home for my lack of time. Maybe his kids get the spark same as we did.

My daily retro driver is an Apple //e Platinum with some good cards in it. Serial, CFFA 3000 disk emulator so I can use USB drives, and a FastChip 16Mz 65816 CPU.

I use it to write. Nice keyboard, and this may seem odd, but when I write on it, different words come out. It takes me to a place I find hard to be in otherwise. I can move my work back onto a modern machine with a USB stick.

I also game on it, currently enjoying Nox Archaist a couple hours here and there. That is a new release, 5 years in the making, and it is exemplary. Old school, runs on an Apple, but done with more modern ideas.

And it sometimes ends up being a terminal for various projects.

By "daily driver", I mean setup, ready to use. I do use it a few times per month.

My Model 100 is a portable curio. Sometimes when I am way out in the sticks, it is fun to play with. I may find it a home too. I have not used it in a long while. Took notes on it last time I did.

And my Atari 800XL and 400 see some gaming along with an original 6 switch VCS. (2600) These come out for old school game time once or twice per year.

I have young ones coming up and I plan on showing them the ropes old school. Probably the Apple to start. Lots of education and Oregon Trail.

My favorite thing to do is small, fun programming and or electronics. The Apple is great for both. It is awful nice to be able to write a little code with almost no worries. And if one wants, putting a circuit on a card is not hard.

Oh, and from time to time, I do use the Apple as a spiffy calculator. It can kind of just sit there holding values, bits of code, whatever. I have always used one this way since I was a kid. Sort of how people will use their powerful hand calculators.

My workbench has a pro grade CRT I got for a song, and the Apple all setup and ready to go. Both are off to the side, right there. Flip a switch and it is there, ready same as it always has been.

The CRT is special. Looks great and takes me back to fun places.

It all reminds me how far we have come, if nothing else. It is nice to have it handy. And sometimes, when I am blocked somehow, a romp on that machine seems to always shake me loose. Worth it just for that.

I have the same attention span thing with them, but generally, I spend more time fixing it up then I do using it. Replacing capacitors, cleaning it up, adding a USB stick floppy emulator, etc. Then, put it up on eBay and buy another with the proceeds, rinse, repeat.

I have a half dozen retro computers.

I write programs, trying to understand the hardware of the machine. I play games I remember. I play games I’ve never seen before. I try the “killer apps” like VisiCalc. I connect it to a BBS. But mostly I just collect.

Are there still any BBS’es around that are ONLY accessible via modem/phone line?

If there were, how would you find it? :D

But seriously, they’re all running Telnet so you can put a WiFi modem on your C64 and “dial” an IP address and port 23.

The Timex Sinclair was my first computer. Getting an Atari 8-bit a couple years later seemed like (and was) a massive upgrade. Every time I hear kids complain about load times I think about spending an hour trying to load a text game from a cassette drive only to have it freeze up and being forced to start over.

We had an Atari 400 and then an 800 along with the Atari 410 program recorder that used ordinary audio cassettes to store and load data.

I learned BASIC on that along with hours of Star Raider, Miner 2049er, Jumpman, and arcade classics like Pac-Man, Centipede, and Missile Command.

I had an Atari system growing up (until we lent it to someone and it never worked again), and I'd never been able to recall what it was.

According to this site it was an XEGS, and to my mind that is the best console ever :D

I had an 800XL that I got for cheap at the end of the 8-bit era. It was an amazing machine. A few years later, my then girlfriend's mum's boyfriend got a new computer, a 65XE. I was shocked when I realised it was basically the 800XL with very little difference. But, hey, I lent them a lot of games. The 65XE was marketed as "new" at the time in the UK, which was quite disingenuous really. A bit like the Commodore 16. Both were a bit past their prime.

In the early 1980s you could buy a 5mb hard disk that connected to the Atari 800 and other models through 2 (4?) of the joystick ports. It was pretty clever, and 5mb was a huge amount of space at a time when a floppy disk held 80k, and loading files from cassette tape could take 10-20 minutes. It was also incredibly expensive.

I recently ordered a SIO2SD device from a polish guy who designs peripherals for Atari 8 bit and such. It's not vintage but emulates Atari disks (ATR files) on an SD card. So you can download ATR files on a PC and then boot or load on the Atari. Can recommend.

I discovered this site just a few days ago while searching something for my still functioning 65XE after 30+ years (my first computer). I wonder if after a couple of decades current computers will still be functioning :-)

Unfortunately Curt Vendel (the original owner of the site) just passed away fairly recently:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-09-08-gaming-his...

R.I.P.

Ugh, that’s sad news.

I had one of those growing up! I loved it. My favorite game: Realms of Impossibility.