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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

Nothing but happy memories about this machine. My dad wrote books about programming microcomputers throughout the 80s so we were very lucky to grow up around a menagerie of machines, but somehow this one has the warmest place in my heart. I suppose I was even aware that it was inferior to the Amiga, but that did nothing to cheapen the hours I spent playing Rock Star Ate My Hamster, Player Manager and Xenon II (which I sometimes put on just to hear the intro). I even plugged the midi cables into our keyboard once or twice.

That said, have their ever been less satisfying keys in all computing history than those mushy function keys?

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Same here, some of my earliest memories were of interacting with the GEM desktop on one of these when my Dad wasn't looking so that I could load up robocop :P then he caught me and was like "how did you figure out how to do that".

Silly little things like the bee are now permanently etched in my mind.

https://www.dwitter.net/d/19166

I even embedded it as a cursor for some of my internal pages at work :P

    cursor: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQCAYAAAAf8/9hAAAAvElEQVQ4T32TURLEIAhD9Rx6/5PpOdqNM3FeEZcvpiUhEKwF0Vp7xhil917mnNW/9J11zlWzi/QxIzBYxAw1URwEZCepcoOUW2mlPEmyCgPcmeAPwfOLjJ0EN/AagQpit6y7pe8RuGkCYi4VEfxx4aaE2+cotnm5kFmVdYwjLQUR7C7R93hIPrbDNhZy5uiU6zbBzapssQYLkxK4sw/m31EdBNEqXl02UrpEvshoL93Zjyl7rnzOtJpLVs0LZPjTMbC4RZoAAAAASUVORK5CYII=);

The busy bee, much nicer to look at than Microsofts hourglass

Keyboard and machine in one, was also very nice. Currently, in the same genre, there are raspberry pi keyboards. I remember running around at brattaccas and being frustrated each time it crashed when i found all evidence envelopes... But what i loved most was GFA basic, a basic that was fast enough to compete with C, but much more convenient to use.

Brings back memories -- I developed this hardware sync unit http://www.oldschooldaw.com/forums/index.php/topic,6763.0.ht...

Hat's off to you!

Same here. It was like visiting the future a little early.

The IBM XT it sat next to looked depressing in comparison.

And there has never been a game like

Revenge of the Mutant Camels since.

Or a tweener that was as simple and powerful as the one I used then.

And.. I think I’m off to go look for an emulator.

There were also plenty of drawing apps, very sophisticated for that time, a poor man's mac, i've heard it being called.

It was more of a poor man’s Amiga.

It was as capable or more capable than the original Macintosh gui.

If Atari had broken through in North America like they had in Europe as business machines tech adoption would have progressed quickly.

I was randomly lucky that my Canadian 7th grade computer lab was full of them, when everyone else was in the stone ages on IBM XTs. There was a Original Mac lab too and those were archaic in comparison.

Did I hear that you're looking for an emulator? I recommend Hatari [0] if you want to run games and demos. You'll likely need a TOS ROM image [1]; Hatari comes with EmuTOS, which doesn't work with a lot of games that make assumptions about the memory layout of internal OS structures and the like.

If you want to run well written GEM applications then I recommend ARAnyM [2], which is a lot faster, due to not attempting to do a cycle-accurate emulation of all the original hardware.

And if you have any issues with the above, there are still lots of people hanging out in Atari-Forum that might be able to help [3].

[0] https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/

[1] http://www.avtandil.narod.ru/tose.html

[2] https://aranym.github.io/

[3] https://www.atari-forum.com/

Hey. Thanks so much. Really for the links and the guidance on how I might want to navigate it.

Help like this makes a passing wish but little time a lot more doable.

I know some HNers don’t like unprovoked longer form content but I have always been appreciative of it like this and try to do it myself cuz you never know who it might reach passively.

Signing up for Atari forum :)

>That said, have their ever been less satisfying keys in all computing history than those mushy function keys?

Have you tried the Sinclair offerings?

The ZX Spectrum keyboard was a thing of wonder, and probably single-handedly responsible for me getting into programming just because of the keyword labels. I'm sure if I revisited it today I'd find it annoying but I don't remember it that way.

agree completely about the function keys - and they were diagonal! why?

hehe, maybe because it makes it look faster?

Yes: the membrane keyboard on the Sinclair ZX80.

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