I bought an 800XL because the C64 looked just like my VIC-20 which I hated. Later I bought a used 800 and then a 130XE. But I never saw a 1200XL and none of my friends had one. I finally got a C64 when I switched to Amiga 500's and I didn't like it compared to the Atari 8-bit computers.

I HAD to have a 1200XL in 1983 and I got it. Looking back, I would have probably been better off picking up an 800 (old style) and a disk drive or a C64, disk drive and the works. But I have zero regrets. I learned a lot with my 1200XL. I still have it on display and plan to do all of the ultimate upgrades to it. It deserves no less for being my foundational home computer 40+ years ago. I probably owe my career in engineering to it.

The Atari 8bit came out in 1979 and the Commodore 64 3 years later. They both were very capable. Atari did suffer from some terrible ports of games, mainly due to Atari's lazy documentation and support for vendors, but also the marketing as well. But to be honest both machines in the right hands were very comparable. People always go on about the SID chip in the Commodore, which was awesome, but in the right hands the POKEY chip in the Atari could be made to sound remarkably similar.

In my book the Atari 800 was superior to the commodore except for multi colored sprites. Atari 800 also came out 11/1979 versus 08/1982.

The 680LC60 has not FPU but has MMU. The EC versions has no fpu neither mmu.

I have one of these and it is a freaking tank! Star Raiders must have been an incredible experience in 1980.

Atari, are you keeping up with the Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you! 😊

Back in the 80's these things were a major expense for households. Being a new consumer category, a lot of people didn't realise that if the machine didn't sell enough units, the shops would soon stop selling software & accessories.

1450XLD

Damn. $899 in 1983 equates to $2,849 in 2024. Insane!

The Apple ][ series was way more expensive than the C64 and the Atari 8-bit series, yet it was still successful.

I settled for an Atari 400 back in September of 1982 and eventually upgraded the memory, but really wanted an 800, however, it was out of reach financially. I recall the 1200XL showing up and I remember the negative reaction from myself and many others for a few reasons. First, was the dropping of 2 of the controller ports. Second, some cartridges from third parties would not PHYSICALLY fit in the cartridge port. Third, was dropping the RIGHT cartridge port. Although it was never used, the promise of it was being 'cancelled'. Fourth, and most importantly, so much software that was written for the 400/800 and broke the rules, (NOT Atari's fault) did not run. The 'translator disk', if I recall, was NOT available for quite a while, maybe even until the 1200XL was discontinued. Finally, the 1200XL did not have any of the slots that the 800 had for add on boards, such as an 80 column card. On the positive, the 1200XL keyboard was AMAZING, the video signal seemed to be better and of course, the styling was more up to date, but didn't match any of the existing peripherals. So, by the time the 800XL debuted, the software houses got their acts together and started making games or patching their games to work with the XL models. The 1200XL was shunned and nobody wanted it until much later when people realized what a diamond in the rough it actually was.

Atari PCBs always had beautiful layouts.

Atari always surprised with "interesting" design choices. In this case the angled joystick ports or the deep inside the case cartridge slot, presumeably to make normal sized original Atari cartridges not stick out of the case (like the 800XL). Would have been nice, if you had shown the difference between the 1200XL and 600/800XL silver function keys, as the 1200XL seems to have a lot more of them.

Atari's original goal was to go upmarket like the Apple II, selling mostly expensive configurations. The 1200XL was actually the base model of the expanded line. They didn't anticipate the C64 which launched a price war instead.

Ah, very cool! Nice to see a lesser known model in all its glory! And nice inclusion of Ultima III in all its garish Atari colors 😅

Nice.. thanks for the wrap up. Got some 800 and 600xl's in Australia but not many 1200's. Thanks for sharing a bit of the history and games. Good work. :)

The computer I lusted after was the 1450XLD, basically a 1200XL with a built-in speech synthesizer, 300-baud modem, and double-sided double-density disk drive. The look of it was awesome! I couldn't dream of affording one, but I wanted it so bad! Atari demo'd the 1400XL (same thing without the disk drive) at one or two trade shows. I read an article talking about what it was like using one, but Atari cancelled them. That was such a downer. :(

Yes price killed the early Atari 8-bit systems, but it did have a faster CPU and better palette over the C64.

Atari thought they were competing with the Apple II, unfortunately they unknowingly lost the higher end war and were relegated to compete with the Commodore and Spectrums. The 1200xl should have had expansion bus slots to compete with Apple, instead it had nothing.

Jack Tramiel's ruthless drive to vertical integration and constant pressure to lower prices gave Atari a really hard time.

I had both a c64 and an upgraded 400 with 48K and a strike keyboard. I always preferred the Atari. Better graphics, similar sound capabilities, and far more powerful BASIC. The disk drive was more expensive, and the printers were not as capable.

The price war was between the TI 99/4A and the C64. The 1200XL got caught in the cross-fire. It didn't help that the 1200XL's updated OS was incompatible with the 400/800. This incompatbility was carried into the 800XL, but Atari had had the time to develop a loadable compatible OS for the XL series computers that allowed incompatible 400/800 software to work on the newer computers. They were very well built computers which are more likely to be found in working condition than the C64. The C64 gives Adrian Black and other retro channels many opportunities to do repairs.

I was a big Atari guy back in the day with an original 800 but it wouldn't have mattered what Atari had released back then they were crippled by the parent company Warner Communication that wanted to be the sole producer of software for their computers and would actively sue companies that tried making games for their products. Even after they lost in court to Activision they wouldn't help outside companies wanting to make games and utilities for the 800 series. so a lot of companies made them for the C64 instead. It always infuriated me trying to find software for the 800-series when plenty was available for the C64.

The C64 is much more powerful than the Atari 800 in terms of sprites. However, the Atari 8-bit has much better scrolling support. The C64 provides the bare minimum to perform hardware scrolling, but enough to do it (even though it's much more of a pain than on Atari).

That sound test brought back the memories of my 800XL computer. My brother bought it and I bought a 130XE computer. I used the ACTION! cartridge to make games. One game I recreated was Star Castle, it was one of the first vector graphic screen games in arcades. I knew that a vector screen game would not get translated into 8-bit computer, so I made one. The screen is still raster graphics, but the game play was like the arcade version. I also recreated an Asteroids game, so I could change the graphics (I got tired of looking at the same rocks) or game play to suite. Sold all of my 8-bit stuff to get into the 16-bit world with the STE computer.

This is weird. I was just thinking about getting a 1200XL the other day.

no the red headed step child is the 1400 xld!

That board is sexy.. The machine "out fo reach" for us back in the day..

would love to see a detailed video on how to set up the sd card for the ACSI2STM I downloaded the Petaris.hd file but stuck now also how to convert floppy images to hd for st.

You should have shown your insertion process - why worry about what someone else thinks?

I still own and use almost every day, my Atari Falcon. I also have and still use my TT030. They are however, both upgraded from stock. The TT not so much. It is cosmetically nice, I have sprayed it black, and changed the P@ower and the HD LEDs to Blue, and the rear 60mm fans are now also blue ( Almost useless ). The keyboard is currently a stock one, however, I was using a QWERTYX Adapter and a Serial Keyboard and mouse, that were both black, however when I moved home a few years ago, I ended up throwing them away like a moron. The TT also has a SCSI Zulu and this lets me use Disk Images as real Hard Disks on an SD CARD - Nice little addition. My Falcon however is a true beast. As the video states, it WAS a 16Mhz 68030 Processor, but now it has the CT63 add on and that is also giving it a 120Mhz 68060 and that is way way quicker. It also has the CT-PCI Adapter and it uses an ATI 7800 PCI card and so it now also runs at bigger r4esolutions such as 1024x768 ( ridiculously huge for an Atari ). It is also fully ( Well, fairly ) internet capable, with the NETWORK Card and USB. The FloppyDrive is now B: and A: is dealt with by a Floppy Emulator that uses Floppy iomages. It too has a SCSI ZULU however, it also has its main 32GB MSATA Hard drive, a 250MB ZIP, a 230MB Iomega and a DVDRW. The upgrades have unfortunately foced me to leave the top of the case off as it simply no longer fits inside ( Its also powered by a 250w ATX PSU ) . I use that Atari, almost daily and I use CuBase Audio ( very old music software - But I like it for what it is - I can, but dont use any PCs other than a Laptop for actually recording the end music ). I also use Papyrus for documents, and Texel for Spreadsheet work. Its Operating system is MINT ( Soft of a linux add-on for the built in TOS and GEM ) and I use the Jinnee Desktop. I suppose if you were to compare it with a PC, it sort of works similar to Linux running Cinnamon.. Albeit a 30+ year old PC LOL In terms of speed, Its no slower than my main PC ( Ryzen 9 ) at basic desktop work like Word Processing and Spread Sheets, but obviously it struggles with full screen Videos a little bit and of course 3D Graphics and serious stuf like gaming are millions of times quicker on a PC, but I love it. When the Falcon came onto the scene, it could have given a PC one hell of a hammering with some things... Definitely the 386, but the 486 was just around the corner, and the clock speeds were getting into serious territory and so the Falcon was simply doomed from the start. The TT has a 32Mhz 68030 CPU and was far superior to the ST, but again, they bundled it as a Linux Machine with System V and that was simply something that was its downfall. the TT does have 2 banks of memory, and thats STRAM and TTRAM. My Falcon also has this. STRAM can be accessed directly by the DMA Chip, but TTRAM cannot. This also means that the STRAM can be used to play music with the STE compatible DMA Chip, but not the TTRAM. Shame because the TTRAM was capable of being huge, while the STRAM is limited to 16MB and most Atari STRAM only being a meagre 4MB without hardware add ons. Again, something that Atari was guilty of, was not allowing for easier upgrading, not just forcing backward compatibility with almost everything... Definitely holding on to the past too much, and therefore suppressing innovation. Sorry, I am waffling now. But yeah, I love my Ataris If I am wrong on anything then please let me know and correct me and I will edit the post.

TOS 2.06 bombs when there is no drive connected. The workaround is to set TRK00 to log 0 and then it goes to empty desktop. It would be great to do some patch for the 2.06 TOS.

The moment you connected your mouse and ad with an explosion in the beginning popped up and I had an OMG thought but only for a brief moment. Packaging is extremely important, nothing worse then finding parts bouncing around in the enclosure. I have been lucky but I did receive a delivery where FedEx had to add tape to the box because the box was falling apart due to not being properly sealed up and in part a rough transit but everything was bubble wrapped with lots of padding but the box a horror show.

Need to fix my kbd too but am too pressed for cash atm, recapped my ST, put in a pc floppy drive and modded it to fit properly, expanded the RAM to 4MB and fixed everything up, then stupid me accidentally let the back of the kbd touch the metal shield so there was a spark and now a part of they keys are dead... no burnt traces so assuming the controller ic got busted :(

Really different and interesting faults this time 😁👍😎. Do you know if there is a source of 3d printing sources for the mouse buttons? My original one is missing the left one.

Heck yeah new 8-bit computing sub 🙌

I also restore vintage machines as a hobby, but as a kid I had a CoCo2, I had never seen or even knew anybody that had an Atari ST. I recently got a 1040STF. Built a SideCart for it, got a video cable set up into my upscaler and I got the machine itself working (minus the floppy, the heads are trashed). So not sure what I will do with it once I get it fixed...probably play Ultima.

Hey brother.. got mine i the mail from UK... ;-) not so bad. Up and running. Do you know if there was a way to pull the 5+V from the ST itself somewhere? There has to be a supply to tap from somewhere (using a Diode) Tanx

What did you plug the RCA plugs into to connect it to a modern TV? I want to hook up my 800 and play Star Raiders etc...thank you

LOVE that RUN Magazine C64 programmer's poster on the wall. I have the same one!

I remember in the magazines, there was a thing that turned the joystick ports on the front of the 800 into a printer interface. Four 9-pin D-Sub connectors going to ribbon cables. I don't remember if it was a project for the reader or a review of a commercial product.

Another run of these boards has been announced and will be available in the near future. Forum post here: exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=89&t=6655&start=40 When they are available to be ordered they will be found here in the store under the "motherboard" section: www.exxosforum.co.uk/atari/store2/

I think there's an ATARI Jaguar infomercial on KZbin .

Love your videos. Is the STE DMA a real problem? I've read that early STE's were shipped with the wrong DMA's that make using a HDD impossible? Have you seen that some people replace the PSU with a modern Mean Well PSU, do you have any thoughts on this?

The design is Mega cool. Looks like a building these gaps and elements, loos like you could take those components apart.

i typed in one recently called machine clock and it wont work however - for the Dragon 64 thanks............... and i need some help for it thanks............

hello do u know much about dragon 32 or 64 or bbc micro machines at all?? i need to know because i type in programs from listings from magazines and books thanks........