Wait what kind of atari atascii sourcery is this? The southern amis web site has atascii access to the southern amis projects Atari BBSs?? Yes. Yes we do… southernamis.com FYI desktop recommended 😎

With the release of the 400 Mini, I’ve been putting together a USB drive of all the old Atari 800 games I used to play. To make it faster to get into playing, I made a folder of Favorites and (for me) those included classic arcade games like Joust, Donkey Kong Jr, Ms Pac-Man, Kangaroo, and Zaxxon. Outside of the classics, I also added Blue Max, Star Raiders, Alley Cat and, of course, Realm of Impossibility.

So, what are other folks go-to favs from the 800-era?

I have a 1050 and an 800XL which I retrieved from my parent's attic.

The 1050 worked once and loaded a disc and then the busy light/motor never worked again.

Trying to troubleshoot it but struggling. I have the service manual which I'm trying to work my way through. I don't have 12v DC on TP14 but I am pretty sure that when I first started to troubleshoot it I did have 12v on TP14 so not sure if I have mucked it up even more! Checking the 7812 gives 21v on the input but nothing on the output, so I replaced the 7812. The new regulator does exactly the same so I'm baffled? I do have 5v on TP13.

I tried registering on Atari Age which I thought would be a good place to try to get help, but didn't seem to be getting approved so I deleted my registration. Will have to try again tomorrow now that I know that a delay in approval is normal!

Cheers!

Edit: Just checked again. I get 0.5v on TP14 and the output of 7812 and it should be 12v

I rediscovered my 130XE recently and I have about 5-6 dozen disks worth of data that I'd like to somehow export to my Windows 10 PC. This includes miscellaneous games that I typed in from Antic, programs that I wrote myself, word processor documents, software disks that I purchased, etc. What is the easiest way for me to do this? Can I mount my 1050 drive to my PC somehow and navigate though it like a typical mounted drive? I've seen people mention FujiNet, 10502PC, and SIO2PC as options. FujiNet seems overkill for what I want to do. Any suggestions?

Hi all!

I got my 800 back when I was 18 (in 1979, sheesh!) and played the hell out of it. I still have it, but hooking it up got harder with every passing year as screens changed and coaxial ports disappeared. Now I'm thrilled about my new 400 Mini and have been building up a USB drive to play games from.

A few of questions:

Is there anything special about the USB connection on the back of the unit? Seems like a good place to connect the USB drive.

Anyone else find the USB ports very snug? (Not complaining as that's better than too loose.)

Anyone tried connecting a Logitech USB flight stick to it? Be fun to play F-15 Strike Eagle using one.

Is there any difference between .ATR and .XEX files?

The unofficial 8-bit Atari port of GEOS released a couple of years ago stirred up a fair bit of excitement at the time. Many commented that this Atari port ran smoother than the original version for the Commodore 64, not really surprising given the Atari's faster clock speed.

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Brian Dougherty, the founder of Berkeley Softworks who developed GEOS, will be participating in a Zoom conference with retrocomputing fans worldwide. If you'd like to join and interact with one of the most intriguing entrepreneurs of the mid-1980's home computing era, please see the information below.

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Date: Thursday, April 18, 2024.

Time: 7:30PM ET. (Toronto, Canada).

Zoom details: https://www.tpug.ca

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You're invited!

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I loaded a bunch of games on a USB stick and the 400 Mini can read most of them (.xex, .atr, .com etc.) successfully. However, it does not seem to show .atx files when browsing the stick, even though the manual says the format is supported. Is there any way to get this to work, or to convert .atx files to one of the other formats?

I registered there last week - there are some people posting that they have got USB sticks working with THE400 and I am very curious to know how - but I have still not been approved.

The site message says contact them if it hasn't happened within 24 hours. The link to do that goes to a missing page, but that has a link to a contact email address.

I emailed them five days ago. No reply, no activation :(

Anyone on there? Are the mods active or is it running without a crew?

Update: approved after nearly two weeks wait.

What USB to 9 pin adapter will work best for an original trackball… ?

I know that you can use USB keyboard with Atari 400 mini, but can you use standard PC joystick with it? I am asking because I had more modern joystick on my Atari 800 XL than the original one from Atari.

I'd like to relive my childhood and play some of the old Atari 8 bit games. I have tried to download Altirra, which is see is the most commonly recommended emulator, but when I run it on my PC (Windows 10 64bit) it gives me a blue screen error "this application will not run on your pc". Anyone run into this before or have an alternative emulator I can try?

Not the Mini but a highly modified 400 BBSing to Southern Amis BBS on FujiNet Prof.

Looking for advice on the best way to offer a game I have written in assembly for Atari 8bit computers. I don’t have a real machine to test with. I have an obx file produced by the MADS assembler. Not sure what the most convenient format to provide is these days. Would also love anybody with real hardware to try it out.

Anyone else having problems with these not being recognised?

I've tried two, one 8GB and one 1GB. Both freshly formatted to be definitely FAT32. The LEDs on them flash when they're inserted, but no "USB Media Access" item appears in the carousel.

Power supply is more than capable of supplying 2A and there aren't any more useful suggestions at https://retrogames.biz/support/the400-mini/faq/using-usb-sticks/ .

Update: what worked was formatting them with Partition Wizard. Although it was showing previous efforts as having FAT32 with an MBR, and shows them now as that, these are recognised.

It's possible I still have a couple of floppy disks with stuff I wrote for the Atari 800.

Unfortunately, I sold all the hardware around 2010 and didn't ever make the SIO2PC cable to copy it onto a PC first.

Now the Atari 400 Mini is out, it would be nice to see it again, but obviously it doesn't come with a floppy drive..

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Hello.

So, I received an XEGS and it powers on with no video. I replaced the RAM because the one chip got hot on turn on (I'm using a converted 7 PIN connector with a USB plug and a 5V charger). Once I replaced the RAM, I still have no video. Now, the Missile Command/OS chip gets hot after about 30 seconds. Where should I go from here? Do I need to replace freddie first? Thanks for your help.

<cross-posted from r/atari>

It was a two-player turn-based strategy game.
There was a field of "pins" and you would move paddles around, and launch balls diagonally from a launcher. When the ball hit a paddle, it would bounce 90 degrees off it, and the paddle itself would rotate 90 degrees so the next bounce would be different.
Players took turns moving paddles and launching balls.

Maybe a type-in game from Compute!, Antic, or Analog?

I thought it may have been called "Reflex", or "Reflection", or something like that, but apparently not. Been searching for a while. ChatGPT in particular was less than helpful, ha ha.

Thanks for helping out an old geezer who had a bunch of fun playing this with Air Force buddies in the barracks.

Just waiting for a warp os chip before i reassemble my 800xl, but I have my setup complete. Made a binder with all pertinent manuals too for easy access

https://preview.redd.it/87rlbw9rsumc1.png?width=1152&format=png&auto=webp&s=b6ab72a1fa8ec269fac7ecbee6bde0eeae8a4d6a

https://preview.redd.it/kfnodltrsumc1.png?width=1152&format=png&auto=webp&s=68cf9863382000fa054749c991a961cf7140fbb8

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Hello out there fellow Atarians! I may be in over my developmental head and I need some expert help... over the past year, I have been simultaneously developing a clock utilities application and a game for the Atari 8-bit. I write all of the code in C, use KickC as the compiler, then load the .xex file in Altirra on a variety of Macs and Linux machines for testing and so forth. Both of these applications run great in Altirra. I finally got around to setting up my TNFS server at home so that I can easily get the code running on my Atari 800 + FujiNet; unfortunately, this is where things seem to be going sideways. The software loads and executes just fine, but the drawing routines are MUCH MUCH slower on the 800 than on the emulator, and the Player/Missile Graphics elements don't work at all - they just show up as a vertical band of garbled pixels. Yes, I'll be the first person to say "Well, that's why we test on real hardware," but I am flabbergasted by just how differently the exact same program runs. Before anyone asks, no, I am not using the increased speeds that are available in Altirra; the emulator is configured at totally normal speed. Having seen this, I then switched Altirra to use a rev B Atari OS ROM, and I duplicate the exact same behavior in the emulator - scrambled PMG and super slow drawing, exactly like I see on the real thing. What gives??? Is Altirra much faster than the Atari OS for some reason? Or is there a step that I'm missing here - perhaps some additional feature or register that needs to be set on the 800 that AltirraOS is doing for me? Help!!!