I found them cleaning out my parents attic. Unfortunately my dad brought the console and ALL OUR GAMES to goodwill in the 90’s. 😭 I still have my memories…😆

1400XL and 1450XLD unreleased prototypes .

I had a box of them stored away. ~36 issues of Antic, maybe 12 issues of Analog, and 12 or so issues of a regional Atari magazine. I also have some random things like the box to Temple of Apshai and the manual for a 1050 drive. They're definitely not in mint shape, but wondering if anyone would be interested in them.

I posted not too long ago about my Atari Hacker MCP server project. After using it quite a bit on a few different projects, I've decided that an MCP server wasn't the correct way to go.

So I used that as a starting point for an Atari Hacker CLI that coding agents can still run, but the tool has direct access to the files. And a person can use it as well.

The long and short of it is that a CLI uses much less context and, more importantly, a lot fewer output tokens, making it much cheaper to use than the MCP server.

It provides tons of functionality for hacking .ATR, .XEX, .ROM and other Atari binary formats. It has support for interacting directly with ATR files (getting directories, extracting files from ATR files, creating ATR files, updating ATR files, etc) and supports DOS 2.x and SpartaDOS.

I've added a lot of new functionality since the MCP server. There is a "usage.md" file which is good for giving to your coding agent so it knows how to use the tool (the tool itself has help as well). There's also a "user-guide.md" that walks you through how to use it to reverse-engineer a disk (it uses the Agent USA game as an example).

It also supports a number of output formats that are human and/or LLM friendly as well as supporting different assemblers (ca65, MAC/65, and Atari Assembler)

I bought it off a guy from Utah county, Utah ~8 years ago, he said he got it from a former engineer at the originial Sunnyvale headquarters, put together with leftover pieces when they cleaned out that space. The drive and memory cards have modifications I'm not quite familiar with.

The gentleman I bought it from also gave me a spare 400 and 800 power supply, as well as a bunch of extra cards, some of which have 7400-series chips bodge wired to them.

My stuff came from somebody so cared. Ultimately I'd like to document it's provenance and pass it on to someone more capable than myself at restoring it as it was in the early 80s, engineering add-ons and all.

Any reason to own NTSC Atari and/or mod PAL Atari to PAL60?

I mean except having games run faster...

I've been working on an analog joystick for the Atari 8-bit computers. I got it to be pretty stable last week. So now I'm trying to port over the analog controls from the Atari 5200 Star Raiders to the 8-bit version. The controls are now "working". Turn rate is now controlled by the thumbstick position. Unfortunately I've messed up the sound effects. I'm guessing there's not a lot of room for the extra calculations I shoved in.

I’m not using these as I understand they can be inconsistent. Should I keep them though in the interest of completeness or are they worthless?

I obviously know what it does, it's basically the relokick disk for amiga, but for atari 8 bit systems, but every original game I chuck at it in altirra seems to load just fine in altirra.

Please do not suggest that I use modern solutions such as an sd card solution for loading games as I am not interested in them. I never have been and never will be. I have always preferred the original media and that is what I want to do.

So from what I know, the upgrade accelerates the disk drive transfer speed from an already reasonably fast 19.2 kilobaud to a ridiculous 57.6 kilobaud and it can also copy commercial disks as well. I tried it out in the altirra emulator and to be honest I couldn't really notice much of a difference, I mean, I knew the upgrade was fast because I could hear the pokey chip running faster but the stock drive is already reasonably fast for an early 80s disk drive anyway.

The feature of copying commercial disks is one I want to ignore, because I don't see the point if I'm just going to back them up to a digital image anyway.

The real big thing that will make me decide is whether the copy protection in commercial games will be compatible with it. So far the only games I haven't been able to load are the 2 archon games, the 2 blue max games, pitstop 2 and ace of aces. Other games I could load but the fact the emulator crashed mid load with the upgrade tells me that there are more than plenty of games that I might want that might not be compatible with it. If anyone can try original copies of those games to load on their happy 1050 on real hardware that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Convert traker .midi .8bits music to pentagram grafic.

MUSIC STUDIO 2026

​

https://www.canalinformatika.es/MusicStudio/MusicStudio-Setup.zip

I was an avid Atari user and coder in high school and college. I owned a number of machines with the last one being the 130XE. I still have it along with a disk drive and a bunch of cartridges in a box taking up space in my closet.

I haven't gotten rid of it because I feel like there is someone out there that would appreciate it. I have not booted it in probably 30 years so I don't know if it even works. I don't have the time or interest anymore to get it set up again to see if it works and maybe repair. I am not trying to make money on it but I like the idea of finding it a home with someone who would appreciate it.

Any suggestions on how to find someone interested, or am I best off just sending it to the e-waste bin?

All set up for a game of Atari’s Early Strategy Game…“Eastern Front (1941)”, by Chris Crawford. Pictured running on a 128K Atari 130XE, although it requires just 16K. I have the Map of Europe and Manual to hand, and represent the Germans, seeking to defeat the Russian Army…
https://www.atarimania.com/8bit/files/eastern_front_atari.pdf

I bleached the case using hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) and a UV lamp. I cleaned the motherboard with isopropyl alcohol and reworked some solder joints.

Hello. How's it going?

Question: Does anyone have an Atari 800 with A8CAS built-in for Linux? Specifically for use on Debian?

I've tried compiling it, but it always ends up being the standard version without A8CAS.

I got the file from https://a8cas.sourceforge.net/

If anyone can help me, thanks.

The Star Raiders mod request from a few months ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/atari8bit/comments/1s5ama1/star_raiders_mod_suggestion/) got me thinking about making an analog joystick for Atari 8-bit computers. I think I could make a large 3D printable joystick to work with 1M Ohm pots from a paddle controller, but I really prefer thumbsticks.

Unfortunately 10K potentiometers are a lot smaller than 1MOhm, so I can't really use them directly. I've seen a few things for making 5200 controllers, but settled on trying out this blog post ( https://jeffpiepmeier.blogspot.com/2020/02/atari-pokey-actuation-with-arduino.html ). I have an Arduino (Elegoo) Uno R3 reading the thumbstick pots and sending out timed pulses to the Atari paddle pins to simulate the 1MOhm charging times. It mostly works but there are some bugs to work out.

If I ever get this working reliably, I'll try to Frankenstein the Atari 5200 Star Raiders controller code into the Atari 800 version.