Atari 800 Computer Review

[@chriscorsello]

I have such fond memories of this machine, it was my first computer and it brought me years of joy. I remember when I got the 300 baud modem and it opened up a whole world to me. Such good times.This is one of the better reviews I've seen on KZbin, so many don't do it justice.

[@MrSEA-ok2ll]

I got hold of an Atari instead of a C64 back in the day. The Atari's had much larger color palettes and to me, were more fun. Also disk loading was super fast compared to friend's c64s. I have an SX64, which is cool, but literally every Atari 8 bit computer that was ever released...great video. To me, the Atari 8 bit was the little older brother to the Amiga...I treasure them both.

[@brillopad6901]

I never had one of these but did grow up during this era and am so glad I got to be around during this golden era. I had a lot of fun from around 77 to 97. That was a great 20 year run for everything during those years.

[@antonnym214]

When I saw Star Raiders on the 800, it blew me away. I think it was the first home video game I ever saw which looked like 3D graphics.

[@joedecuir3775]

Doug Neubauer, who designed the POKEY chip in it, then wrote Star Raiders. Marketing was blown away. as a result, the 400, originally planned as a game console, also had a membrane keyboard, to play Star Raiders.

[@scottlarson1548]

Star Raiders was the ultimate game at the time. I still play it with an emulator today.

[@Kable_TV]

Scott Larson I play it on my 2600 and want to get an 800 almost expliclty to play its much superior graphical star raiders the st version looks like it has too much going on for me the 800 version looks like something I could use in a scifi scene

[@asdfjklo234]

@@joedecuir3775 Thanks for dropping by and sharing your experiences.

[@vladalexeev8529]

The word "Atari" never meant "2600" in USSR, Chekhoslovakia and Poland, it was always Atari 65 xe/xl computers. The most played game in video-game-saloons were River Raid, Monty (a hack of Montezuma) and international karate

[@TheWardog1369]

Vlad Alexeev I hate to ask you, wasn't the Amiga also a pretty big deal in that part of the world? Computing in the 80s was nuts in the US; personally it only took off in the 90s with the standardization of IBM and Mac machines.

[@vladalexeev8529]

Warren S. No, we didn't have any Amigas here. Just atari, zx spectrum and lots of soviet microcomputers

[@RetroDawn]

@@vladalexeev8529 Which country are you from?

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

Small Polish software houses contributed so many great games. I grew up with an Atari 800 xl and these last 2 years I am discovering all the amazing programs that we were unfortunate enough not to have access to them back then.

[@RetroDawn]

@@nickolasgaspar9660 Yes. They're not my style of games, for the most part, as I don't like most platformy games. And at least most of them need to be run on PAL Ataris, I'm pretty sure. But they had a cool, thriving scene, and still do! What country are you from? I'm from US. Polish Atari games were imported to UK, Germany, and, I assume, to some other countries, like Czechoslovakia (were Raster was from).

[@themagicboy6548]

The atari also has a _fantastic_ keyboard (apart from the right shift). By far one of the best feeling keyboard that I have used

[@Nostalgianerd]

Great video. I don't know much about these 8 bit Ataris, but my interest is now spiked. I didn't realise they were so graphically capable.

[@ModernVintageGamer]

+Nostalgia Nerd ha, you and me both sir! i knew atari had capable 8 bit machines but not at this level. thank you for watching!

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

Some unique characteristics first found on the Atari 8bit line. First home computer with an SVIDEO connection. First home computer with the extensive use of co processors. First implementation of a "USB"- like serial connection. Joe Decuir, the guy who designed the SIO port was part of the team responsible for the USB port. Autoboot disk mode. No need for old and modern users to know "cryptic" commands in order to use the machine and run its games.

[@TheGuruMeditation]

Outstanding video all around. Congrats! I also love the commercial at the beginning. The Atari 800 was my first computer. My dad bought it for me in 1980. It cost $800 plus $600 for the disk drive. I also had a modem with acoustic coupler, tape drive, printer, and 48K RAM upgrade. I feel very lucky that my dad saved his money for a very long time to buy this wonderful system for me. Speaking of floppy drives, you should get the 810. The body style of the 1050 goes with the 800XL and the mismatch hurts my eyes ;-) Just kidding. Check out Fort Apocalypse, Star League Baseball, Star Raiders, Pharaoh's Curse, Ballblaster/Ballblazer, and Bruce Lee. Those are some of my all-time favorites. Also, my neighbors used to come over to my house and drool over Pac-Man because they were stuck playing the 2600 version while the 800 version was almost arcade quality! I subscribed to your channel and look forward to watching all your videos. Cheers! -- Bill

[@JohnnyReb1976]

1400 bucks adjusted for inflation would in today's money be a shitload

[@KtotheL]

I had star raiders lol my only cartridge game...

[@eugenetswong]

What was the right cartridge slot for?

[@eugenetswong]

+John Peel, thanks for explaining. That makes sense. It's too bad that the 800 didn't come with the features built in.

[@bjbell52]

The right hand slot was suppose to be for larger programs but was never used except for Monkey Wrench. They found a way to use bank selection to put more than 8K in a cartridge. My 800 had an alternate operation system that gave things like a disassembler and a debugger. I recently gave all my Atari "stuff" to one of my sons. He looked on Ebay and some of my cartridges, like the Mac 65 assembler, are going for big money.

[@Oldbmwr100rs]

The 400/800 were really built around designing games more than anything, so it's little wonder it had better sound and graphics over the C 64 which was built for a lower cost. The Atari machines were low priced for their day, but still quite expensive. The later update of the TIA to the GTIA really increased the graphics, it was good that the company stayed on top of it's designs. Better yet there was a lot of support for the series, both with increasing ram and also floppy drive modification. Atari also offered an expansion module that had a teletype output as well as industry standard connections to further make the machine stay usable instead of locking you into their brand. For 1980 that was pretty cool. One good friend got a lot of use out of his hacked and modded 800, even to the point of making a sort of SSD system for it which could hold 32K on it near instantly after loading with a drive, leaving the machine with a further 48K RAM to use.

[@bjbell52]

One slight correction. The original 800/400 came with a CTIA chip. This was later upgraded to the GTIA which gave some multi-colored text modes and a few more graphics modes.

[@Oldbmwr100rs]

It also gave a great deal of color shading with make 3d ish graphics possible from what I remember.

[@rbrtck]

+Oldbmwr100rs Regarding the Atari 800 vs the C64, first let me say that from the beginning I had always wanted the Atari as a kid, even after the C64 came out (the 800XL), but by the time my family could afford to buy me a computer, I ended up with the C64 instead because that's what most of my friends and schoolmates (the ones who owned a computer at all) owned at the time. I also saw what it could do, and felt that while it was different it was pretty comparable. I learned to program both (and programming is what I've been doing for a living since then), and would say that yes, they're pretty comparable, alright, with different advantages and disadvantages. While the Atari has a cooler, purpose-designed chipset architecture in some ways, there aren't many tricks it can do that the C64 couldn't with raster interrupts and such. What the C64 has over it is superior sprites, which depending on the type of game is a major advantage, and far easier, more accessible ways to get more colors on the screen at once (all 16 with some restrictions). Both were good at things like hardware-supported smooth scrolling. Now, the Atari of course has a far superior color palette, but is far more restrictive in terms of the number of colors that can be displayed at once--in the vertical direction this was no problem, but horizontally it was an issue, and most game designers and programmers would not and did not take the extreme measures that would have been necessary to partially overcome this (doing so would have taken the player-missile graphics away from the action anyway, forcing reliance of soft-sprites). In theory, the Atari seems more powerful, but in practice each computer could do some things better than the other, and the games often enough reflected this. I might even argue that the C64 was graphically more practical and capable for the majority of the types of games out there. This is not to reflect poorly on the Atari 8-bits at all, as I own several examples of both of these computer series and others in addition, and I appreciate them all. And like I said the Atari is definitely a cooler, better design in some ways. But in hindsight the C64 just had this combination of features that allowed it to "punch above its weight class" as seen time and again with the best games created for it. Now as for the sound chips, putting subjective personal preferences aside, the C64's SID is more like a music synthesizer (specifically subtractive analog synthesis with digital controls and waveform generators) than the POKEY, which was originally designed and used as an arcade sound generator (and sounds very much like what it is). Some adore the SID's characteristic sound while others may find it grating (depends on how it's programmed, though), but I don't think there is any question that it is more powerful. I've heard some impressive Atari demos in which famous SID game tunes are reproduced, sounding almost exactly the same, but those require significant work from the CPU, and the whole point of custom chips is taking a load off the CPU. Even the Apple II's rudimentary built-in clicker could make almost any sound if that's all the CPU had to take care of. Only on the C64 in that era will you find games that have both CPU-intensive graphics and synthesized sound and music, and many (most?) people actually prefer the SID version of certain music in certain games over the Amiga versions of the same.

[@xrayangiodoc]

The Atari 800 was my first computer. I purchased mine along with the Atari 810 disc drive for $500 each. The drive was single density, single sided and stored a whopping 80k!. We would, "Notch" the 5.25" single sided floppies so we could use the uncertified back side for storage. I used my Atari for word processing with AtariWriter. Actually sent out letters for a job search in 1984 outputting to an Epson 80FX dot matrix printer through the Atari 850 interface which provided standard parallel and serial ports. Kept track of finances with The Home Accountant package. I went online with it using a standard 1200 baud modem and connected to Compuserve and America Online. Yes, I also played games. Star Raiders was my favorite. My grandkids still enjoy using it.

[@mrnickbig1]

These were great computers, and bomb proof. There are NOS XEGS computers for sale on EBay, now. Basically an upgraded 800, with more memory and speed. It still uses the 400/800 CXL carts, as well as the upgraded RX carts, and the same floppy drives and peripherals.

[@moow950]

The Atari 800 was ahead of its time. All this in the late 70s!! Wow.

[@ridiculous_gaming]

Similar to the original Amiga 1000, the Atari computer was created by Jay Miner and was ahead of its competitors, but it's high price limited sales. By the time the machines price became affordable the C64 was dominating the 8 bit market and the 16 bit Atari ST was released in 1985, which made this machine no longer necessary.

[@joedecuir3775]

I would like to talk to this guy sometime. I have an article for him. Joe Decuir, apprentice to Jay Miner on Atari 2600, Atari 800 and Amiga 1000.

[@ModernVintageGamer]

Hi Joe - I'm humbled you watched my video !! If you need to contact me email me at [e-mail]

[@TomisaburoRMizugawa]

Interview soon? :-)

[@joedecuir3775]

email: [e-mail]. the next 7 weeks are very busy, but in principle I would be interviewed. I am on the ANTIC Podcast, #44.

[@joedecuir3775]

my translators don't handle German, which is stupid. 100 years ago German was the essential technical language. I did work on the Amiga; at some point this fall it will be posted.

[@mindphaserxy]

Joe Decuir I loved all your interviews in FBTB:Amiga Years, Easy to Learn, Hard to Master and The Commodore Wars. I know everyone loves to romanticize the coin-ops and grand arcade systems but the Atari home machines were always more prominent in my younger days. I love how the Stella name came about and that created a domino effect of naming all the chips afters female names =D

[@abdallansairat7453]

I had Atari 800XL from 1986-89 i had a lot of programs and games from Pac-Man to Zorro ,,,boulder dash,,hyper blast ,the EIdolon,, Hacker ,Raid over Moscow,moon patrol,The goonies also Bruce Lee ,etc was wonderful time

[@Mosfet510]

Great review of an awesome machine and nice job on the cleaning part too! I still have mine and one day Id like to play on it again. Last time was early 2000's so a recap and good once over is needed before I turn it on. Countless fun childhood memories playing on it and friends of mine loved it. There was something so nice about turning a system on back then and it just worked.

[@heidirichter]

A fantastic video about what is sadly an often forgotten computer. Top work mate! I had an Atari 400, and that was the first machine I really programmed on - despite the horrid membrane keyboard and lack of any way of saving, it was still a far more capable machine for a beginner than the Commodore vic 20 we also had. Also, the ANTIC chip was neat in that it could have a display list written for it, which meant it could mix graphic and text modes, or different graphics modes on the screen - much like its successor, the Amiga. This could be very handy for having a text display for score and lives, and a graphic display for the game play area. One game that shows this very well is "Star Raiders", which is a fantastic game I strongly suggest you spend a good amount of time trying out. One thing I think you could have expanded upon a little, is just how much the SIO has in common with modern USB - it really is pretty much the father of USB the more you look into it, as it shares so much in it's concept and design - even if the connectors don't look anything like USB. Such a shame this machine line wasn't really given the attention it deserved from Atari, who didn't seem to think it was worth their time...

[@ModernVintageGamer]

+Troy Wilkins hi Troy. great points. and i appreciate the feedback. Yeah the SIO i guess is the predecessor to USB, which is amazing since it came out in 1979 ! thanks for watching

[@heidirichter]

+Modern Vintage Gamer No worries, thank you for the great content, I only recently found your channel, but I'm glad I did! I've since been reading more about these machines, and the more I read, the more it's obvious just how groundbreaking they were and how much what we take for granted now first came to be with these machines.

[@heidirichter]

+Modern Vintage Gamer Oh and seriously, if you don't have a copy of Star Raiders for this machine, I strongly suggest you get it - I still play it under emulation, it's still a great game and helped sell many units back in the day based on the fantastic graphics.

[@bjbell52]

One could add that a programmer can set up a display list interrupt and change some hardware settings on the fly. You could take a sprite and split it into pieces making more sprites. You could also change to color of the sprite, change the horizontal position, and change its width. One very good feature was the ability to redefine the character set. You could also change that with display list interrupts. You could also turn on horizontal and/or vertical scrolling and point to a different memory location for the graphics.

[@urzu117]

well the reason USB resembles SIO so much is because the guy who designed SIO went on to work on the first USB standards

[@techraan2160]

The Atari 800 was a better computer than the Commodore 64 in several categories, but one in particular. Disk drive speed. The Atari 810 drive was big and bulky, but the read write speeds were so much faster than the external drive that Commodore was using. My friends that had the C64 would put a disk in and we could go upstairs, make a sandwich and eat it before the disk would fully load. I am not exaggerating.

[@Bridyjump]

Man, your channel is such a find for me. I had my first computer only in 1998. I've never had any experience with these old computers from the 80's. But I'm such a sucker for old technology. I will continue wathing all your videos waiting for new ones.

[@104d_3rr0r_vince]

AAAhhh father of the Amiga! Great machine indeed. I have two 800XL with an sd card adapter.

[@TheGuruMeditation]

+Vincent GR WHO'S OUR DADDY VINCENT GR???????? Ha ha! We know who he is. Nice seeing you here. -- Bill

[@musclesmouse]

This was a $999 computer back in the day. You need to play Defender, Star Raiders, MULE, and all the other arcade ports

[@SimbaSeven.]

The only thing I have left from my old Atari 800XL setup was the Atari 1050 Disk Drive. I now have a newer 130XE, two XF551's, two 1050's (one being my original), and a 1010. I Happy modded both 1050's and they're running great with new electrolytic capacitors. I still have the 800XL, but it needs some TLC before I fire it back up.

[@thegood9]

the original memory cards were housed in plastic "boxes" that clipped in, they weren't the bare bones memory cards shown in the pic. I owned both the 400 and the 800, then the ST's and the XL series. Loved them all. GREAT systems for the time.

[@gamedoutgamer]

Great video! That 800 looks fantastic. Congratulations. Yes there are many games that look better on the A8's. Also many that look better on C64. It more depends on the quality of conversion or which machine on which it was native.

[@hangonsnoop]

For its time, the Atari 800 was an amazing gaming platform.

[@Lardzor]

The Atari 800 was my first computer. There's a lot of old software that was, for it's time, pretty damn good. I wouldn't bother with it now. Computers have advanced so much that I can't really go back. Besides, I've already been there and done that. I'd say there's hidden gold in those old games. Kind of like there are great old movies. They don't have the production value of movies of today, but they still knew how to tell a story.

[@MrSEA-ok2ll]

Love my 8 bit Atari machines...Jay Miner was a humble guy, but a genius regarding hardware designs.

[@stephenelliott7071]

I was so jealous of my mate who owned this computer, while I owned a ZX Spectrum back in the day. The impressive keyboard, cartridge slots and disc drives - as well as hardware sprites and impressive sound. Bristles was one of my faves on that system.

[@waveglyde746]

Pokey was ok for its time ..but the SID - it's a 3 voice synth with an analogy active filter ..far more advanced than Pokey Sid can also playback samples and is much sought after today.

[@joedecuir3775]

If you liked SID, you would love the Amiga sound circuits.

[@bjbell52]

SID had 3 16-bit channels. POKEY had either 1) 2 16-bit channels 2) 1 16-bit channel and 2 8-bit channels (for sound effects) or 3) 4 8-bit channels. So saying a bit more is far closer to the truth. How many years after POKEY came out did SID come out?

[@gamedoutgamer]

All true but SID is a synthesizer while Pokey is more for games effects. Take Blue Max for example.. The sound effects are much better on A8. SID can sound muffled and basey, while Pokey can sound metallic or tinny sometimes. SID has far more control of the waveform for excellent music effects. Pokey can do explosions and is super fast for changing states and TBH Pokey is much more reliable since SID runs so hot. Each are great chips, designed for a different purpose IMO. I believe the A8 designers said the 6502 is not fast enough to drive Pokey to it's full potential. For example the arcade game Tempest uses Pokey to much greater effect.

[@waveglyde746]

@@joedecuir3775 Yes--I do!

[@waveglyde746]

@@gamedoutgamer Yes its interesting how popular these chips are, and Pokey seems to be completely unavailable? I didn't realise that SID ran so hot though.

[@moronicmisfit]

love this video, I know I'm late for commenting, but I just had to, my love for this ol' 8 bit line runs deep. As a teen, I bought an Atari 400, later upgraded the keyboard to a real one, the ram to 48k , bought the Action cart, a C like language, and programmed my first game ever, Midas Maze, sold it , and was happy as a clam, ( are clams really happy? who knows) Anyways... , I always wanted an 800, and someday i plan on getting one, I have a 600 XL, 48k, and still have my old 400 and an Amiga 500 , but still want one of these bad boys, I mean just look at the Atari 800, it screams play me! the Atari 800 is impressive looking and sturdy as hell, way down in the comments , as a reply, I tell a tale of how as a teen, I ducked into a computer store back in late 1983 or 1984? to get away from a bad storm coming my way, on display in said store were two apple II's , two commodore 64's , two Atari 800's and two Atari 400's, (they must of liked things in pairs?), anyways, lightning hit the power lines, everything went dark, and after about 5 minutes the power came back on, the Apples were dead, the Commodores also resembled door nails and smelled of burning circuits, the 4 Atari's just blinked back on, the one 400 still running Star Raiders, so since it was raining out , I played me a game, made pilot class 3. That to me says alot about the quality of these machines, sure they weighed a ton, but they could take a lickin and keep on ticking? playin? running? and look good while doing so. so again, thanks for the video, brought back tons of memories... have you played Atari today? cause if not, do so now!!

[@Falador321]

I like how all the memory and gfx and cpu chips are on modular boards. I own a c64 and it's a bitch to fix something because it's all just soldered on one flat board

[@pqrstzxerty1296]

You try doing a 100 a day at the Commodore factory like I used to do.

[@rbrtck]

Regarding the Atari 800 vs the C64, first let me say that from the beginning I had always wanted the Atari as a kid, even after the C64 came out (the 800XL), but by the time my family could afford to buy me a computer, I ended up with the C64 instead because that's what most of my friends and schoolmates (the ones who owned a computer at all) owned at the time. I also saw what it could do, and felt that while it was different it was pretty comparable. I learned to program both (and programming is what I've been doing for a living since then), and would say that yes, they're pretty comparable, alright, with different advantages and disadvantages. While the Atari has a cooler, purpose-designed chipset architecture in some ways, there aren't many tricks it can do that the C64 couldn't with raster interrupts and such. What the C64 has over it is superior sprites, which depending on the type of game is a major advantage, and far easier, more accessible ways to get more colors on the screen at once (all 16 with some restrictions). Both were good at things like hardware-supported smooth scrolling. Now, the Atari of course has a far superior color palette, but is far more restrictive in terms of the number of colors that can be displayed at once--in the vertical direction this was no problem, but horizontally it was an issue, and most game designers and programmers would not and did not take the extreme measures that would have been necessary to partially overcome this (doing so would have taken the player-missile graphics away from the action anyway, forcing reliance on soft-sprites). In theory, the Atari seems more powerful, but in practice each computer could do some things better than the other, and the games often enough reflected this. I might even argue that the C64 was graphically more practical and capable for the majority of the types of games out there. This is not to reflect poorly on the Atari 8-bits at all, as I own several examples of both of these computer series and others in addition, and I appreciate them all. And like I said the Atari is definitely a cooler, better design in some ways. But in hindsight the C64 just had this combination of features that allowed it to "punch above its weight class" as seen time and again with the best games created for it. Now as for the sound chips, putting subjective personal preferences aside, the C64's SID is more like a music synthesizer (specifically subtractive analog synthesis with digital controls and waveform generators) than the POKEY, which was originally designed and used as an arcade sound generator (and sounds very much like what it is). Some adore the SID's characteristic sound while others may find it grating (depends on how it's programmed, though), but I don't think there is any question that it is more powerful. I've heard some impressive Atari demos in which famous SID game tunes are reproduced, sounding almost exactly the same, but those require significant work from the CPU, and the subject here is taking a load off the CPU. Even the Apple II's rudimentary built-in clicker could make almost any sound if that's all the CPU had to take care of. Only on the C64 in that era will you find games that have both CPU-intensive graphics and synthesized sound and music, and many (most?) people actually prefer the SID version of certain music in certain games over the Amiga versions of the same.

[@gamedoutgamer]

Yes true... Well said! IMO what allowed the C64 to win the market was it's cheap price and high availability combined with being very capable. Agreed that the SID chip often sounds better for music, including the Commando example played at 3:06. It depends on the composer and the port. I still prefer Spy vs Spy 1 on A8 by a wide mile. Same for other games. The issue with SID is that many games got lazy and the effects sounded like a musical keyboard instead of real game effects. Blue Max's A8 explosions/effects are a good example but there are many more where it felt like the C64 programmer was lazy. The C64 build quality suffered greatly and it had some other failings (slow disk drive). But it was more than good enough for the task of winning the first generation home computer market. Good points about the A8 being more difficult to exploit its full capabilities. True. There are many other subtle but important differences. A8 has a full 10K OS while C64 has a 2k kernel. A8 can boot disks. A8 can play full motion video while C64 can't due to it's limited address range of the VIC-II video area while Antic is not. A8 has many more cartridges and their build quality is top tier. A8 has more models. But I think one of the biggest differences is that A8 hardware is much more reliable especially here in the 2020's. A8's don't feel like they are on a timer down to failure. C64 still has much bigger software library but slowly here we are getting a good number of C64 games ported like The Great Escape and Stunt Car Racer. Have you been following the new A8 releases? There have been some great titles coming out! The new Time Pilot is great; Monty on the Run; Prince of Persia is in development but there is a playable portion/demo of the game; and Windows 10 (maybe not).

[@przemekkobel4874]

I always heard that the 800 model had an excellent 'clicking' keyboard. I've seen several types of keyboards on XL and XE computers, and there was one decent variant that had springs combined with conducting rubber elements. Never had a chance to try the 800 though. Also, I see that you actually know what you are talking about (very few people ever mention 16-bit POKEY modes, and they can produce very interesting effects with high frequency sounds, and if I'm not mistaken, you could even go to ultrasound range). Good old days...

[@ngiants2230]

Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for this video. I had the baby brother to the Atari 800 (Atari 400) and I loved that machine. I had some of the games you showed such as gyrus and Ms. Pac man. I absolutely loved playing them. I remember as a kid having Pac man for the Atari 400 and having tournaments with my mom and dad to see who could get the highest score! We went through so many joysticks because we would get so excited playing this game that we would eventually break the controller causing us to buy new ones. But we had a blast. Some of the best memories I had with my dad and mom. I miss that machine and wish I could have one again.. maybe someday I'll find one. Thanks for bringing back those memories.

[@jimsteele9261]

I still have my 800 tucked away in the storage unit. :-) Great machine.

[@Adamchevy]

Great Video! It really is an amazing computer. Even in today’s world it’s a lot fun to own and operate. I think an 810 Happy Drive would be a perfect compliment to your setup. I still use my 400 48k to program with. Thanks again for this video!

[@ecernosoft3096]

Later models included 48K of RAM, and then with GTIA! (256 colors, the special GTIA modes, etc)

[@DoRC]

This was my first computer. I wish I still had it.

[@bjbell52]

They do have a couple of really good Atari emulators. Just GOOGLE for it.

[@KtotheL]

This was my first computer. It came with 16k. I was lucky (spoiled) and had 32k (which helped for games). I also had the cassette player... It was a pos. My favorite game was miner 2049. You have no idea how badly I wanted the 300 baud modem... BUT it cost $500. (A lot of money even now... (Imagine in 1979.) Instead I had a mini bike the Honda 50. I got a LOT of fun out of both. Games cost me $35-50. My friend had the Timex Sinclair which cost $99.. his father was rich (worked at the airport as a flight traffic controller) he had the trs-80, apple 1, and 1 other computer but I cannot remember now what it was... My gfs dad had the commodore 64/128 and some others. Spilled a Pepsi on it's keyboard and that ended the 800"s life. I love Atari and always will. The BEST thing they ever made ? A game called marble madness ! (Trackballs) it was in the arcade and cost 25 cents to play... You could play it head to head ! I preferred red (player 2) even way back then... (AMD fanboy even before they existed ? Maybe but naw I'm a blood.) Thanks for the video. Ps. It took up to 1 hour to load a game on cassette and IF there was a single error you might as well throw the game in the trash.

[@bjbell52]

Ah, the good ol' days when I use to sit and wait for 1/2 for a Scott Adams adventure to load from cassette, only to have the final beep go bad and would have to start all over again.

[@Xanduur]

My FIRST computer!!!! Such memories!!!

[@MegaManNeo]

Honestly, I have not seen one bit of Atari800 footage until just now that I watched your video. As someone who grew up with the C+4, C64 and 286 as far as computers go, I must say I'm really impressed by what this thing can pull off!! Sure the Commodore64 will always have a place in my heart but nevertheless, this computer sure was at the peak of its time.

[@bjbell52]

After using an Atari 400/800 for years, I tried a C64. I thought the text mode looked washed out. I've seen many examples of games on the C64 that look very good. It would be cool to compare the capability of each machine to one another.

[@rbrtck]

+bjbell52 I'm not sure what you mean about the text mode looking washed out. It is true that the default text and background colors for the BASIC editor weren't the best combination for contrast, but you can change the text color to whatever you like. I always hit Ctrl-2 to get white text on the blue background instead. As for the color palette in general, what you'll see in videos in many cases and hear people comment on is how muted and unsaturated the entire palette is on the C64, but this was only true of the PAL version. For some reason the C64 was converted to PAL in such a way that its color palette indeed looks very muted or faded. NTSC C64s, however, have a reasonably saturated, colorful palette. Now, as for how the C64 compares to the Atari 8-bit in terms of graphics capabilities, in a nutshell they each have different advantages and disadvantages over the other. The Atari philosophically has a better designed, more optimized graphics subsystem overall, and even has a supporting coprocessor (ANTIC). It is also implemented such that the CPU can run at 1.79 MHz, which is about 79% faster than the C64's otherwise nearly identical CPU. ANTIC can be programmed with "display lists" that tell it, on a line-by-line basis, how you want the display to be generated, doing things like changing modes and colors on the fly. Obviously this is really powerful and just plain cool. Additionally, the Atari has "player-missile" (also called "sprite") graphics that overlay the rest of the screen and take a huge load off the CPU when they can be used in place of actually changing the contents of the screen. In comparison, the C64's graphics subsystem is simpler and cruder in some ways. There is no coprocessor and there aren't even any truly simple modes that allow the CPU to run faster. The VIC-II graphics chip virtually always takes up half (actually a little bit more) of the memory cycles, which forces the CPU to run at 1 MHz (or actually slightly less, effectively). But what the C64 gains over the Atari is easily being able to place 16 colors on the screen at once; there are some limitations to this, but for example getting 16 colors on every horizontal scanline is no problem, whereas it is impossible to do on the Atari. And while having the CPU always running more slowly is bad, when the Atari tries to match what the C64 can display in terms of color, its graphic subsystem steals a lot of memory access cycles from the CPU anyway, slowing it down considerably; the Atari's CPU still always runs faster, but not nearly by 79% in most cases, and not by much in games that try to maximize graphics quality. At most, the Atari's graphics modes can display four colors on each scanline (or five with limitations), unless its player-missile graphics are used to supplement the display, but then you lose those for other purposes. Meanwhile the C64 can display 16 colors all over the screen at once, including horizontally, so even though those are the only colors it has while the Atari has a 128-color palette, C64 screens typically looked more colorful, and it could do this while maintaining its full sprite capabilities. Speaking of sprites, the C64 has eight sprites of 24x21 pixels that can have multiple colors if desired (at the cost of horizontal resolution). The Atari's four players are only 8 pixels wide, and while they span the screen vertically, this is not as useful as having wider sprites; in addition, they can only have a single color each. The Atari also has four missiles, which are like players that are only 2 pixels wide; the four can be used as-is or combined into a fifth player that is 8 pixels wide. Clearly the C64 has the advantage in sprites, and for some types of games this makes quite a noticeable difference in favor of the C64. Another thing I should mention is that while the C64 lacks the Atari's graphics coprocessor, it can effectively implement its own display lists with its CPU and raster interrupts--everything from changing modes and colors, and even multiplexing sprites to put more of them on the screen at once than the normal eight. This aspect may not be designed as nicely as on the Atari, but it gets the job done and the user can't tell the difference either way. And both computers, like the Amiga, have hardware support for smooth scrolling, which is why games that scroll generally look so much better on these computers than others at the time. The Atari still has some advantages over the C64, but the C64 has its own advantages. Which is better, assuming competent game design and programming, depends on the peculiars of each type of game.

[@rbrtck]

+bjbell52 Now as for the sound chips, putting subjective personal preferences aside, the C64's SID is more like a music synthesizer (specifically subtractive analog synthesis with digital controls and waveform generators) than the POKEY, which was originally designed and used as an arcade sound generator (and sounds very much like what it is). Some adore the SID's characteristic sound while others may find it grating (depends on how it's programmed, though), but I don't think there is any question that it is more powerful. I've heard some impressive Atari demos in which famous SID game tunes are reproduced, sounding almost exactly the same, but those require significant work from the CPU, and the whole point of custom chips is taking a load off the CPU. Even the Apple II's rudimentary built-in clicker could make almost any sound if that's all the CPU had to take care of. Only on the C64 in that era will you find games that have both CPU-intensive graphics and fully synthesized sound and music, and many (most?) people actually prefer the SID version of certain music in certain games over the Amiga versions of the same.

[@bjbell52]

@@rbrtck The Atari has 4 players (sprites) that span the screen vertically but using display list interrupts one can cut a sprite into pieces, change their horizontal position, change its color, change its priority (to be in front or in back of other players or play field) and change its width (players had three different widths). They also have built in collision detection. It is also possible to combine two players into one 3-colored player. If you a program needed to calculate something, you could turn off the graphics co-processor giving the 6502 the entire 1.79 cycles. As for graphic modes, Atari has two 16-color modes allowing for 16 colors on one scan line. Of course, it can also mix graphics modes and give each scan line its own memory address (handy for scrolling). It has 5 text modes, at least 2 of them the characters are multi-colored. The character set is re-definable and character sets can be changed during a display interrupt. Yes, the C64 had a few advantages graphically over the Atari but overall the Atari was more powerful. After all, it was originally designed to replace the 2600 as Atari's game console.

[@rbrtck]

+bjbell52 As I was playing _Ms. Pac-Man_ on the Atari 8-bit (A8 for short) and C64 for the first time in a while, I noticed the differences in the multicolor text modes between these venerable computers, so I thought I'd give a somewhat detailed overview of both to show some of the different choices their designers made. For visual reference, here is a combined image of screenshots taken from the Altirra A8 emulator (on the left) and the VICE C64 emulator (on the right), both in NTSC mode: i.imgur.com/zHQnNSd.png Note that I added images of all of the fruit (and a pretzel) players/sprites beneath each screenshot for comparison--both arcade ports do not display the bottom row of fruit. This image also serves as a reference for the differences between the A8 players and C64 sprites that I described previously. I have to say that the C64's sprite capabilities certainly make a positive difference in this case, and there are many more like it. That said, the A8 is more impressive with some other types of games, so one computer is not necessarily superior overall, they're just different. Now let's talk about their multicolor text modes. The A8 is apparently using graphics mode 12 here, which is the most similar mode to the C64's multicolor text mode, which it likewise uses in its port of this game; both modes can use redefined characters in RAM, and they do so here. Not counting the players, of course, the A8's screen has 5 colors: black for the background, 2 colors for the maze walls, another color shared between the dots and power pellets, and white for both the score and the software sprite that shadows each ghost player to make their eyes white. Each pixel is defined by 2 bits encoding 4 values, but the reason 5 colors can be used is that the A8 character sets only have 128 definitions, taking 7 bits, so each 8-bit character code has an extra bit that selects between two color registers for one of the 2-bit patterns; this means that only 4 colors can be used in each 4x8 pixel character cell, but they are chosen from 5 color registers for each cell. That's a pretty cool way to gain an additional color (25% more colors available for each scanline), although the trade-off is that there are only 128 character definitions instead of 256. For comparison, the C64's multicolor text mode is basically similar, using 2 bits to encode 4 values for each pixel, but instead of using 4 color registers for each cell (chosen from 5 total in the case of the A8), it uses 3 color registers plus color memory, which consists of 1000 4-bit nybbles--one for each character cell. This means that in addition to the 3 globally shared colors, each 4x8 pixel cell can individually choose a 4th color of its own. If we look at the reference image, ironically the C64 port of this game only uses 4 colors in the gameplay area on this particular level, although beneath it are colorful and fairly faithful renderings of all of the fruit sprites at once; I added the actual sprite images below them for comparison. The A8 port only ever displays the current fruit (probably using a multiplexed player) because it just doesn't have enough color registers (or players) to display all of them in a horizontal row like this, but the C64 does a good job of it thanks to color memory (which is stored in its own separate static RAM chip). I suppose the A8 port could switch to graphics mode 10, which offers 9 color registers, for this area, but then the total horizontal resolution would be only 80 pixels, which is rather chunky. Meanwhile, the C64 can do this--and does--at a horizontal resolution of 160 pixels. There is, however, one trade-off--the 3 color registers used on the C64 are each 4 bits so they can select from the entire palette, but in the case of this specific mode (and no other), the fourth bit of each color memory cell selects between multicolor (if the bit is 1) and 2-color high-resolution (horizontal resolution of 320 pixels) mode (if the bit is 0), leaving only 3 bits to select from the first 8 colors only. So basically this trades off the use of half of the colors for one of the 4 pixel values for the ability to freely mix high-resolution characters with multicolor characters, as this game does, which is clearly visible in the reference image. By doing it this way instead of the way the A8 selects between 2 registers for 1 of the 4 pixel values, the C64 gets to use all 8 bits of each character index to select from 256 character definitions instead of the 128 of the A8. Which is the better trade-off depends on how many character definitions a game needs.

[@mas3ymd]

I remember using this computer in elementary school, and to this day I had absolutely no idea you could play games like that on it. Quite impressive for a computer that came out in 1980.

[@bjbell52]

actually, in 1979

[@jrherita]

Jay Miner FTW -- Atari 2600 --> Atari 800 --> Amiga 1000 --> Ranger chipset.. :). The Atari 8bit SIO was probably the most ahead of it's time feature on the platform since it provided 12V power to accessories, and accessories had to be 'smart' and provide their own boot code (like USB devices identify themselves). This along puts the A8 ahead of competitors imo..

[@ecernosoft3096]

Also, the POKEY has 2 tone mode, AND 5 unique waveforms!

[@CoolDudeClem]

This was way ahead of it's time.

[@dirkjewitt5037]

I used to play Commando a long time ago when I was young, on a C64. Dad wouldn't go for the Atari PC's for some reason. But I did have a 2600.

[@richy69ify]

The memory modules originally came in brown cases in keeping with the overall design and making them fool proof to upgrade. I think the bare memory cards were usually salvaged from 400s.

[@charlesjenkins1225]

I had one for about 28 years. Loved it. I was so over built. The cart slots were cast metal parts!!! Did anyone else do that??? The only reason I no longer have it is because it was ruined from water/mold/mice damage. If it had only been put on a shelf rather than the floor of a basement I would be racking up millions on Defender tonight :)

[@10MARC]

Wow. I have to agree that easily rivals the C64. Back in the early eighties I remember considering the Atari 800, but went with the C64 because I was already used to my Vic 20. Now I want one!

[@brianwild4640]

I had this it was the beast. Was a breeze to program. The interrupt system was awesome. You could change color pallet on every fly back of the crt. And have 8 or 16 colors every line and it was fast

[@DaystromDataConcepts]

I still own my Atari 800XL with 1050 fitted with a "US Doubler" chip & loads of software. In my humble opinionb the 8-bit AtaRI'S were superior to all other machines of that era despite the popularity of the C64/Spectrum

[@joedecuir3775]

the original Atari 800 was designed before the FCC changed the RFI rules in 1979. That is why it contains a mm-thick Faraday cage inside. IMO, Atari was slow to do the cost reduction that resulted in the 600XL and 800XL.

[@nednettapp]

After seeing this video I'd have to agree. Obviously failed at marketing though.

[@one3thirteen31]

i remember the good ole days when i put the tip of my manhood in the cartridge slot and slam the cover closed. oh the memories.

[@blengi]

Would be interesting if someone were to hybridize the 800,c64 and spectrum architectures, such that one could mix the functionality on a per cycle basis of all the different antic modes vic modes sid and pokey, and allow mixing of processor z80,6502/10 instruction sets, to see what games could theoretically have been made back in the day if Jay Miner, sir Clive(RIP) and Jack Tramiel decided to have a love child lol...

[@ToddsNerdCave]

Another fabulous video buddy! The Atari 8 Bit machines have a wealth of aftermarket upgrades for them. From Stereo Pokey mods, flashcarts, disk drive emulators, ram expansions, hard drive add-ons, video cards add-ons(!) and the list goes on. If you like to tinker, they beat the C64 scene hands down in that respect.

[@ModernVintageGamer]

+Todd's Nerd Cave yeah man i have a Side 2 compact flash cart on order, was hoping it would be here for the video but its about a month away unfortunately.

[@ToddsNerdCave]

+Modern Vintage Gamer I could loan you my SIDE 2 if you want to check it out before yours arrives.

[@dcangrlish8802]

You can get all those things, with the exception of the XE video board, for the C64. You'll need to expand the list a bit.

[@unconbentional2044]

Great video! I have an Atari XEGS, which I understand is basically a repackaged 800. I really enjoy collecting cartridge games for my XE. Maybe you could do a buying guide/instructional video for playing games off of floppy's?

[@muzboz]

I never even saw an Atari 800 in the flesh. I've only ever played the Atari 2600, which was obviously awesome, but also pretty lame. :) I'm now looking into the history of the Amiga, which inevitably spun me into a whole web around the Atari and Commodore computers as well! I've gotta say, the Atari 800 looks pretty amazing, and I love the design of the machine itself, and Dropzone is a game I've never seen before and it looks awesome! Love the animation, colors and sounds. Nice one!

[@beforth]

I liked a lot the modular design... it makes it very hackable and useful even today... imagine putting a module with an SD card interface.

[@michalmarek77]

Atari 8-bit in '79 (and even later) was like stuff from some futuristic S-F movie. Such a great, outstanding machines! State of the Art in its full glory. Those computers (as XL and XE series) were very, very popular in Poland until 1995! 16 years after its release! Still, they're quite popular here - check this site: www.atarionline.pl Thanks to them we were able to witnessed the best computer ever created - The Amiga. Amiga is natural follow up to technology first introduced in those wonderfull machines.

[@justinholmes5614]

Was the Amiga popular in Poland as well ?

[@michalmarek77]

Oh man. Amiga was THE DREAM of everyone. But was far too expensive before 1990 (A500, i don't even think about higher models). Amiga was incredibly popular between 1991 and 1996. Was the computer to get and number 1 game machine for everyone. I can say, that whoever was (back then) into computers and could afford Amiga - had an Amiga. In Poland consoles as NES, Mega Drive, SNES etc (until PlayStation) were unknown and most of Amigas were used as an console - just to play games. Amiga was loved for that and still is remembered today. You may check a Polish Amiga Portal - www.ppa.pl , which is quite popular (for its niche) even today.

[@joedecuir3775]

two points: I just bought an Amiga 500 MIST, from Poland. I would like to assemble an "Atari 800 MIST", first a design and then maybe Kickstarter funded production. changes: build in SD diskette emulation, and USB with drivers for disks, HID, networking, etc.

[@RetroDawn]

​@@joedecuir3775 MIST is very cool. It was created for the ST originally, hence the name, and the Amiga via the minimig core was an early, or even original target. Have you seen the EclaireXL, which is an FPGA board that was specially designed to run a core that implements an enhanced Atari 800? Latest boards are just being shipped: atariage.com/forums/topic/258454-eclaire-xl-pcb-aka-atari-on-fpga-project/?do=findComment&comment=4309122 Thanks for co-creating the three most important systems of my life!

[@joedecuir3775]

@@RetroDawn I have an Eclaire 3.0. My students have been working on an FPGA replica of the Atari 2600, too. direct: jdecuir at IEEE dot org

[@TheRetroShed]

Such a thing of beauty. We’ve got the 800XL but I’d love one of these. Great vid!

[@xnonsuchx]

My parents bought us 3 siblings an Atari 800 for Xmas 1979 (US$1080 in the Sears Wishbook)...w/ a 410 data cassette 'drive.' There's even some AMS (Atari Music System) POKEY music files I made in some online archive sites. We had a 130XE too (still in my parents' basement), but I don't remember if we got it as a group Xmas gift or if it was just for my older brother's birthday and he was told he had to share it w/ his younger bros.

[@dbridger620]

The 800 is a cool machine obviously ahead of it's time, but I love my First gen Commodore 64 from 1982 which I still have. Had to replace the SID chip several years ago.

[@Code1D10T]

I'll be picking up one of these babies tomorrow. I can't wait!

[@dr3w399]

there amazing i got one for $ 5 thought it should of been more

[@Code1D10T]

Turns out the one that I picked up shows a black screen. I've troubleshooted both RAM and OS cartridges. I do get color-coded errors, such as a green screen, when I take out all ram cartridges, and a yellow screen when I yank out the OS cartridge. I'm going to open the entire thing up and reseat some ICs. I also ordered a revision E OS card, and GTIA and CPU board. This has definitely turned into a project, but I will get it to work!

[@dr3w399]

thats sad : (

[@Code1D10T]

Have a quick update: I swapped out the board that has the cpu and gtia and I finally got the 800 to work. Only problem now is that while typing in either Memo pad or Basic, the speaker will start to sound more and more garbled, then it will slow down, then finally freeze. I have to power cycle it to start over since pressing the system restart button just gives me a black screen. Funny enough, Basketball will work without a problem since it's a diag mode cartridge. When I try pacman I just get a garbled screen with bits of the game showing up here and there.

[@lennytrick821]

I have one of these sitting next to me right now. It was my dad's when he was a kid, and it has full 48kB RAM capacity, OS cartridge, 2 controllers, power supply, a basic language cartridge, and a pac-man cartridge. Only need an a/v setup for it and it should work (fingers crossed).

[@isocubesoftware2713]

I am amazed at the Atari 800 - wow! I want one..but I have never seen one, in my neck of the woods. Thanks for the video, it was great!

[@bjbell52]

If you want to play around with an Atari 800, there is an emulator out there that runs almost every program a real Atari 800 could run. I wrote a volleyball game that was published in 1981 and it runs under the emulator.

[@timjroughton9931]

You forgot to mention the thing weighs metric ton ! :)

[@pcuser1541]

at 0:22, the shooter still move when the joystick is stopped.

[@GORF_EMPIRE]

I will take an 8 bit Atari over a C64 any day. I have both, both are great but the A8 is just superior in every way.... I will even say in sound. Yes the SID gives you ASDR and that is cool, but with the A8 's almost double clock speed, that can be overcome. Now... the Amiga is definitely superior in many ways to the ST.... But I went with the ST because it's a great machine and as a musician the built in MIDI ports was a no-brainer, not withstanding the extra features the Amiga gives you. The obvious factor here..... Jay Miner and Joe Decuir. Great designers period!

[@richard1113]

Very nice Atari hardware! You did a really good job of cleaning up as these look brand new!

[@thealaskan1635]

I bought the ATARI 800 for 2 reasons. #1 is STAR RAIDERS!!! #2 it was the most powerful home computer. It blew away the Apple 2.I looked at the Commodore 64 and decided it was just a little better than the VIC 20 which wasn't much. It couldn't compete power-wise with the 800.The main reason for its success was the price.

[@argonwheatbelly637]

If you ever used a Commodore PET, you could get something decent out of it. If you used the Amiga, then you could really do some serious work.

[@33ordie]

Atari did bold moves with the Atari 2600, the 400 and the 800, but then they cut corners in the R&D and so things didn't move as much as they could of. The 1979 technology stalled up to the last Atari 8-bit, and the 2600 never really had a true successor (7800 wasn't released on time and flopped). The 16/32bit era of computers was good, with the ST line, yet, became a stalling point over the years (they could have done like Apple and enhance their machine overall like the Mac). Still enjoyed the ST lineup, and sometimes a little 2600 and A8 action. As for the Jaguar (...) the ultimate fail. They could have spent some time and release that Falcon040 computer, that would of been great!

[@Benny_Shill]

I wish I had one of those. Atari should release a mini version.

[@marcsm2008]

The old POKEY vs SID war still creates debates to this day. I prefer the SID overall, but there ate sone games that DO sound better on the POKEY, like Alternate Reality.

[@lorensims4846]

The Commodore monitor was always the very best monitor for the Atari Home Computer. I had one for mine. Sure beats the TV adapter. Atari never made a monitor, we had to wait for Commodore. The GTIA was preceded by the CTIA in early machines. You can tell you have a later model my the GTIA, the expansion slots fully loaded with bare RAM boards and that Really Nice keyboard. The first ones were a bit loose and rattly. After the success of the 2600 game machine, they started working on a successor but then decided to put a keyboard on it and commission a BASIC that would fit in an 8K game cartridge. Microsoft BASIC wouldn't quite fit so Atari BASIC doesn't have the string arrays, nor the length limit of 256 characters. Atari BASIC strings are simple arrays (as in C, but with a length in the zero location as in Pascal instead of being zero-terminated) that could be 'dimensioned' to a length of 32K or available memory, whichever came first. Added to the BASIC commands to get the address of a string and the command to begin executing a binary routine at a specified address, we easily added assembly language subroutines we could load up into strings to speed up calculations. All numbers in Atari BASIC are floating-point (enter 2.35E3 as a line number - it works!) which was a problem. No integer math and there was a bug in the floating-point routines that seriously slowed down floating-point calculations. I bought my first computer in '82. I chose the Atari specifically for its superior graphics (and Apple ][s tended to look like hobby kits with ribbon cables hanging out everywhere).

[@natehollingsworth1927]

This is the atari 800. I has the best keyboard, ever

[@artvandelay509]

It's a great keyboard for sure, though the layout does have an annoying flaw. For some reason they decided to stick an "Atari" key where the right shift key should be, making typing somewhat frustrating until you get used to it. They did correct this problem on the XL series however.

[@mgabrysSF]

I'd put the 1200XL on top. Best layout, best response. The XLs and XEs that followed were 'ok' but never seemed to match it. Since I used it in college for word processing before I got my first Macintosh, it was a godsend.

[@john2001plus]

The games seem to be the better examples. The Atari 8 bit computer had 4 (or is it 8?) player missile graphics. Each one was a sprite as tall as the screen but 8 bits wide and single color. You can control the horizontal position, but to move the sprite vertically you had to move the data inside the sprite. (One reason to have sprites is to not have to move data.) This takes more CPU effort, but could be used to simulate more than 4 sprites. It is essentially the same graphics as the 2600, but with more memory.

[@judgewest2000]

Even in the 70's dad's were seen as dummies

[@Ray2Jerry]

And they all apparently looked like Kevin Arnold's dad on 'Wonder Years'...

[@dukenudibranch6414]

My sister's and I loved Miner 2049er.

[@danielson9579]

I love the way you make systems sound like they are a serious piece of kit :-)

[@southoftheline6066]

POKEY has great drums and a dirty sound for heavy and aggressive music, as well as being an I/O chip as well (very efficient) but SID is great for less "in your face" tunes and for more clean synths, but they both are amazing in their own right. Graphics wise Commodore only has better sprites, otherwise Atari takes the cake. They have (essentially) the same processor however, and mind you the C64 competed with the 800XL, which was competitive in the RAM department. I personally have never laid hands or eyes on a real C64 (I hope to), but I had the luck of using a 800XL and the luck (and frustration) of using an original Atari 400. In fact, my very first program was in Atari BASIC, and I hope to eventually learn all I can about it so I can have a slight head start when I graduate high school (Put simply, I have a bias.)

[@lactobacillusprime]

The reason "left cartridges" exist! ;)

[@aybars_dr]

I bought one in 1983 and still using it with pleasure.

[@CaminoAir]

Is this the best styling of a 8-bit home computer?! It looks cool and seriously well constructed.

[@griffo83X]

very impressive system for its time, great vid mate i enjoyed that :)

[@Shot97]

Great computer, would have loved to have one then or now. But that sound is not better than the SID :P. haha. It is a very good and unique sound chip though. Nice video.

[@ModernVintageGamer]

+Shot97 not sure which part of the US you are in but in the midwest i see Atari stuff popup occasionally on Craiglist. usually ST stuff or 8 bit computer gear.

[@mgabrysSF]

The copyright on the screen flashes 1981 ... literally a second later MVG captions it 1980. Forehead slap.

[@marekl8805]

Great machine. Never owned one. I started out with Atari 65XE.

[@quatz1981]

Not really a fan of the 2600 but i love Atari's 8 bit computer line.

[@argonwheatbelly637]

First, an Altair, then an Atari, a TRS-80, and eventually Apple and Amiga. In between, work on mainframes with punch cards; later, teletype and terminals.

[@tahustvedt]

I love my 800XL.

[@Left-Earth]

I had one just like it as a kid, hooked up to a black and white TV next to my bed. 📺🕹️ It had great games: Choplifter, Donkey Kong, Ms Pacman, Jungle Hunt, Space Invaders...

[@robintst]

Which audio chip sounds better? Um... I like them both.

[@matsaw]

I had the Atari 400, I'm not sure of the spec's but it seemed like the only difference was the keyboard. I loved the games though, I had pac man, missile command, defender, and a few more but mostly played the ones listed, loved it!

[@IanSlothieRolfe]

I had a 400 too. It had only 1 cart slot (no loss really as there was only ever 1 "right cartridge" made afaik) and its 16k memory couldnt be expanded without extensive surgery. The keyboard got a lot of negative comments but I got used to it and it was plenty good enough for programming - which was what I used it for (aside from Star Raiders!). The rest of the hardware was much the same as the 800.

[@brostenen]

Yeah... That dad, really have some space invaders guilty pleasure. 😁

[@RalphZ80]

Great review! The Atari 800 was way ahead of its time and yes, the POKEY chip does hold its own. :) Never had one or even knew one at its prime, but I have a lot of respect for it. Cheers!

[@joedecuir3775]

good news: this month I shook the hand of Doug Neubauer. He designed POKEY, and then wrote Star Raiders.

[@RalphZ80]

+Joe Decuir My deepest respect for both yours and Doug's work on the Atari hardware. I wish I'd also been there to shake your hands!

[@joedecuir3775]

send me your email address. first, I would send you an article I wrote about it recently. second, you might want to read a draft of the book that I am working on about the same systems. [e-mail]

[@andrewjreed3]

My first computer, the 810 drive outlasted the 1050..

[@M1Anut]

810 had 'The Chip' but the 1050 had 'Happy Enhancement'

[@InterCity134]

What no 810 drive?

[@PTsR]

Fact: Atari 800 is world's first GAMING computer

[@monjarojas]

The first 400 and 800 had a CTIA not a GTIA, just so you know. ;)

[@bjbell52]

BUT...........................If you had an older Atari you could get a GTIA chip from Atari and simply replace it,....

[@33ordie]

A lot of 800's are GTIA from manufacture, in fact, there are more 800s with GTIA than CTIA.

[@Bluzlbee]

the future of yesterday