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Atari 8 Bit Computers FAQ

seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com

83 pointsindigodaddy46 comments

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Link dead, this seems to work:

http://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com/media/pdf/book/Atar...

Document itself contains another mirror:

http://www.atari800xl.eu/faq/atari-8bit-faq-us-letter-format...

The entire parent folder is a serious treasure trove of good programming books:

http://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com/media/pdf/book/

I spent probably $100 between C Programming and Elements of Programming w/ Kernighan. Had I only known they were in good shape here. ;) (I kid, I'm actually a bit of a bibliophile so I prefer the hard copies anyway...)

But seriously. It's worth browsing!

Thanks for the link. I actually have an original copy of "Machine Language for Beginners".

I think I actually typed in the whole machine language code for the monitor.

Interesting this is popping up. I had an Atari 800 and loved it. Not sure, though, why it's currently front page. Loved my C64 as well.

Anyone else that was hooked on the "Miner Twenty Four Niner"[1] game that was popular on Atari 400/800? My non-techie wife even loved it.

Also loved "Full Metal Planet" on the Amiga platform.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miner_2049er

Still have the cartridge, Miner 2049er was something of an obsession for me after Star Raiders and the Atari 8-bit Donkey Kong cartridge. 4 player M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold were amazing.

Actually, playing Seven Cities of Gold on a reservation generated some amusement.

Loved Miner 2049'er. The sequel Bounty Bob Strikes Back was also great!

Never heard of that. This is why I love HN. I'm likely to now Google around for how to grab this and run in an emulator. Appreciate the share.

Let us know if you find one. I still have a couple hundred floppy disks with all these games somewhere, and often consider pulling out the whole system. But then I realize I have nothing to connect it to.

You can get it straight from the original developer: http://www.bigfivesoftware.com/Emulator/emulator.htm

MULE, Archon, Miner 2049er, Boulderdash, and one of the Ultimas [Ultima IV I think] were my favorite computer games in my childhood.

There was a semi-realistic semi-3D RPG-style game that I really wanted to get into but never could. This thread caused me to research it, only to find out that it was Alternate Reality that another sub-thread is extolling. I think I was too young and impatient perhaps, but I got so frustrated at dying and having my bank investments go bust so often.

Archon, oh Archon. Friendships were almost lost from Archon.

M.U.L.E. was great fun!

For some reason this also reminded me of another game (not a 4-person one) that also had at the beginning some sort of trading/bartering component, but then you were outside in some sort of vehicle (airship?) searching for components. I can't remember the title or enough details to track it down though. (I remember riding up and down in a lift in the beginning though.)

The Atari 800 was a fantastic machine. Miner 2049'r was a great game. The Atari 800 was way ahead of its time in terms of graphics and sound. Check out the stuff Philip Price did with Alternate Reality in 1985. Also have to give a shoutout to the Atari 130XE.

I had an Atari 800 XL(?) and I loved Miner 2049er. My favorite game, by far, though was Behind the Jaggi Lines (so?) where you had to save downed pilots on an alien planet.

That game was awesome! The procedural terrain rendering. Got re-released as Rescue on Fractalus!

Another game that blew me away as Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set.

I had the 800XL and was obsessed with Super Breakout, Boulderdash, and most of all Landscape (later released as Stealth).

OMG I played SO MUCH Landscape...

Atari 800XL was my first computer, I have to say it changed my life. Built in BASIC interpreter was what got me into programming.

Wow, I haven't thought about "Miner Twenty Forty Niner" for a long time!

I can still remember my father bringing home an Atari 400 - the first computer I ever used. Tape drive, and typing in programs from computer mags.

It’s a true shame Jay Miner died in 1994. I really think someone would have gone one past Amiga on the journey from the Atari 8-bit.

Learned to program on a Atari 400, and very glad their was an easy to get, affordable, non-technical parent friendly option for those at the lower end of the income scale.

Oh, but the crap keyboard on the 400. I got a good deal on an 800, so wasn't subjected to it. Good for you for powering through it though.

Edit: Lol on the downvote. It was a membrane keyboard that actually fought touch type and encouraged hunt-and-peck. It truly sucked...a friend had one so I'm commenting from real world experience. Consider that "open source" at the time meant retyping code from long passages in a printed magazine. A time when the competition had at least decent keyboards. (C64/Coco/99-4a/Apple ii/etc).

Yep. It's like writing code on a microwave oven keypad.

With that, "yes, you pressed it" beep.

When I was a kid, I thought the 400 was the coolest looking computer of them all because of the membrane keyboard. They truly sucked to type on though.

I wrote my first game (in assembly language) on an Atari 400, because it was all I could afford on my college student budget. It was a fun machine to program.

You could get into a zone on the keyboard where you just tapped lightly and could achieve a decent typing speed, but it was never truly comfortable.

It was pretty amazing to program in assembly and work with the Antic, etc. chips. I got to compare it to the Apple IIe and the Atari 8-bits were really much better because of the added capability of those custom chips.

Brian Bagnall's books on Commodore argues that one of the reasons the VIC-20 and later the C-64 got proper keyboards was a combination of a costly mistake Commodore did on that front with one of their PET models that got slammed for the poor keyboard, combined with Tramiel seeing it as a way of making the VIC-20 look like a more expensive computer next to the Atari 400.

Makes sense, in retrospect. My C64 keyboard was awesome. I took touch typing in high school on old school typewriters, and the C64 keyboard seemed natural and fast to me.

I had gotten a steal of a deal on it... basically another high school kid bought one and didn't understand it, so I got a fire sale price on it.

My friends had inferior things like Timex Z81's or similar, so I was soaring past them just on touch type ability.

And my middle school had a relationship with DEC, so we had decent VAX/VMS 11/780 backends with VT-200 terminals.

Truly most of any of my success was, "right place at the right time", versus any real mental advantage on my part. I'm truly grateful for advantageous timing. It helped me more than any skill of my own.

We had a zx. Mini membrane keyboard without a space bar (space key to the lower right). The Apple //e keyboard was a relief (as was not having to use tapes)

We were living large with the 16kb memory expansion though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000

Could have sworn that Commodore started out making typewriters, so they should know how to do keyboards (and the value of them).

It was calculators, not typewriters, but your point stands for the same reasons.

> The company that would become Commodore Business Machines, Inc. was founded in 1954[3] in Toronto as the _Commodore Portable Typewriter Company_ by Polish immigrant and Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_International

I don't think 1950's manual/mechanic typewriters were particularly good sources for electronic keyboard designs, and I'm pretty sure the Commodore branded typewriters were mechanical designs like this one [1] that still dominated in the 50's (there were certainly electric typewriters available, but that market was mostly dominated by IBM and Remington Rand).

[1] http://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/atypewriters.html

That terrible PET keyboard was allegedly made of existing calculator key matrixes wedged together, as CBM was a calculator company beforehand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PET_2001_Series-IMG_1724.... vs something like http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/us1.html

I seem to recall that they later profited from that supply chain by cutting costs of their proper keyboards too, as they knew suppliers who wanted to break into the computer parts market that they could get to accept really thin margins, whereas most other home computer manufacturers who wanted "real keyboards" went to established keyboards manufacturers that were used to supplying the higher margin business market.

On the supply side their ability to cost-cut was even more legendary than their early designs...

After squeezing all the potential I could off my VIC-20 (and there was way more than meets the eye), I bought a 2nd hand Atari 400 which was fitted with an actual keyboard. Never asked them how they did it and never bothered to check if this was something you could add for a price or whether it was a home-made hack by the guy I bought it from - anyway, many fond memories of endless hours of gaming, though all those gaming hours meant that I developed and experimented on it far less than the previous VIC-20 ... :)

There were keyboard kits you could buy. I ended up buying an Atari 130XE instead since I didn’t have the money earlier. Dad bought me a 48k kit for the 400 which required some soldering.

The Sinclair computers (sold under Timex in the US) had membrane keyboards also, but had really cheap and easy to install full keyboard kits. Sinclair doesn’t get enough credit as a computer pioneer.

I had one. It was horrible, but it looks futuristic.

https://goo.gl/images/kvQzMm

Replaced it with a real keyboard the moment I could.

I had one of the first batches of Atari 400. The keyboard on it was great, once it got broken in. Since then, I'd also had an 800 and other 400s but the their /keys/ really were crap. Fave was still that original 400 keyboard.

My Dad and uncle started running an Atari store named CompuPlace at the Jane/Wilson mall way back when after noticing my avid interest in computers. That link-up got me some great stuff: 'de re Atari' and pre-release ST docs, Chicago CES.

I saved up my allowance to buy a real keyboard kit and a 48K upgrade kit for my 400. It was quite the computer after that, until they came out with the 800XL with 64K and an excellent keyboard, and I got that.

Since we are in Atari mood :), Atari Archives is a nice website for those that miss the old Atari programming books.

https://www.atariarchives.org/

There really is some amazing work done on the Atari 8-bits, still. Especially in eastern Europe, where there's a very vibrant enthusiast community. Some really great expanders (VBXE adds Amiga-quality hi-rez graphics, and there's expanders that bring it up to 1MB graphics, high clock rates, etc.).

I was a Tramiel user back then -- VIC-20 then Atari ST. But as an adult have gone back and played with the other lineage (Atari 8-bit and a bit of Amiga). The A8s were great machines. In some ways a far better architecture than the C64 -- the SIO expansion bus a precursor to USB, very novel powerful video hardware, etc. And what's amazing is that the 400/800 came out quite a bit before the C64 (albeit for far more money)

The graphics capabilities of the 8-bit Ataris are quite mind blowing. Having grown up on an Apple II, the whole idea of the graphics chip running through not a bitmap, but a kind of "program" that caused pixels to appear on the screen was extremely liberating.

Had an Atari 400 back in the day that's been lost to time. Recently picked up an Atari 800. Looking for an Assembly cartridge to pick up programming on it again.

Finding a lot of interesting pdfs on 6502 processor specs that are out there : Atarimania is great for these: http://www.atarimania.com/documents-atari-400-800-xl-xe-book...

Played Star Raiders with my son -- that was awesome!

This is an amazing resource.

Anyone know of similar documents for other families of 8-bit computers? c64, TI 99/4, TRS-80, Apple ][, ...

>TI 99/4 That was a 16-bit machine

Parts of it were 16-bit, parts of it were 8-bit.

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