How Atari 8-Bit Computers Work!

I loved this video. I had two of the computers you showed: the Sinclair and the TRS-80, which I rented by the month from Radio Shack. Sinclair was very difficult to use the cheap membrane keyboard and to load programs from a cassette tape. It felt like an unfinished product. The TRS-80 was just the opposite and had COLOURS!

LOL! He says that Atari was the first to realize that games were important. Atari didn't have a clue as to what was important. They made their game console into a PC. Didn't even bake BASIC into it, and provided no productivity software. And then wondered why everyone was buying Apple II's and Commodores. You gamers don't get it. Early PCs were NOT about games! And as for those post XL 8 bit Ataris? No one game a damn. Also, you could walk into a store and buy 8 year old Atari games new, so I don't know what you are smoking. There were very few 8 bit Atari games on store shelves in 1985, which is why you would have been nuts to buy one of those PCs at any price. Either get a C64 or an Amiga or something more expensive like a PC.

Great video. Killer info! Thank you

I still have my Atari 400, my Atari 800XL and my Atari 800 which I prefer to play mostly the original 8K and 16K ROM game cartridges on all of them. The Atari 800XL had the GTIA graphics chip that rejects certain game cartridges like GORF by Roklan Corporation, so that is why I had bought the original Atari 800 as well as retained my Atari 400. I would have to say that my software is in essence 90% compatible with all three computer systems that I have.

Finally got around to it. And nice coverage of the topic. Also there were three versions of Atari Basic (as far as I know), and it also had a few tricks up its sleeve unique to the system. The part I liked (on the XE) was that you could use shorthand for the majority of commands, which saved a lot of time typing in stuff to make a working game or demo. There was also ways to do color cycling and paging through sprites that you didn't see much on other systems, although not too many games took advantage of that (likely for the reasons you mention here). The 130XE also treated it's memory more like two banks of 64K, so the few things that took advantage more likely used it to pre-load stuff rather than treat it contiguously. Again it's a shame that issues with software licensing and catering to the most basic hardware often meant the full feature set wasn't utilized like it could have been. Another dumb move I think was sticking to the same controllers for so long. There were things with peek/poke and custom made peripherals that could easily have had something akin to the SEGA controller working just fine on an XE. (I'm guessing it would have used a clever way of separating signal voltage into discrete steps with overlapping resistance, and using the same method of handling things as the paddles vs. the regular joystick?)

I remember the Atari 800 but never got to use it because my elementary school had just bought Apple IIs to replace them. Then we moved a year later and the school I went to had the Texas Insturments. I remember that the Texas Instrument computer seemed to be a better computer for learning to program with. The Apple II was better for playing games. I had a TRS80 at home and as soon as I could talk my parents into it I switched to a C64.

Great voyage down memory lane.
Had the TRS80 way back then.

TI99 my first computer!!

I actually picked up the Atari XF551 drive about 7 years ago for only $5 - $10 at a thrift store. Was quite happy with the find. Came with a free disk for it too

I put this one while wrapping presents but ended up watching instead and got maybe 2 presents wrapped.

We just called them player missile graphics, not sprites.

There was a basic language game cartridge for the 2600.. So actually you could use it fir general computing, but I never used it, and how much coding can you do with 128 bytes of memory?

My first computer! The Atari 400! At the age of 14, I literally had one desire: to have a software distribution company when I got older. My wish came true, when I founded JAST USA, a company selling, um, "anime visual novels" from Japan. It wasn't exactly as I expected, but it's all good!

Great video!

This video is making me die of nostalgia. Back in 1985, I wrote a font editor for the Atari 8 bit series in machine language which is super hard to conceive of. You could make any font easily. I won a silver prize at the science fair and freaked out my computer class teacher, since I knew more about computers than he did. Good times.

This is my favorite video from you. Literally my entire proto-adulthood compressed into 34 minutes. I wanted the 1450XLD so bad back in the day, you have no idea.

The 800XL brings back memories. It's how I learnt to write 6502 code when I was dissatisfied with the speed of Basic. I think a small mistake has been made, the 5 colour 'text' modes didn't display the same as the initial text mode (Graphics mode 0 in basic). They did use characters, but divided into 2 bit segments that would span 2 character pixels on screen to give 3 colours plus, I think, one more if the top bit of the character was set - and then the background. They were meant to use a re-defined character set, in a type of graphics tiling mode. They were basic graphics modes 12 and 13. I never bothered with setcolor commands and instead just used the shadow memory loications instead, something like 708 to 712 with poke commands.

Hi, I just want to say I enjoy your videos whenever I get the chance to watch, I just noticed and hope you don't take offense in this but your audio quality is not as it should be, I went back to the older videos and it's always the same, it's like an EQ is amplifying the mid range with slight clipping. perhaps a mic of better quality of a change in your mixing would help.

The TRS80 Model-I only had less than 90K on a single-density floppy (which was also only 35 track), and about half of this was taken up by the DOS. The 180K quoted was on the Model-III and 4, and Model-i's upgraded to double density.

Nice video. I started with ZX81 then Vic-20 but i really got into computers when i saw the atari 800 but my parent's couldn't afford it. So i waited until the 600XL come out and that's what i started with. Then went to 130XE and 1040STF and i still have both. Playing games and making basic programs was so much fun. Did a few programs that was featured in UK mag Atari User. Had the tablet and that was so cool. Now days i emulate the Atari on my Mac and raspberry Pi. But it all was kickstared as an 8 year old boy getting a 2600 for my birthday. Fun times. And i was Atari for life. The Atari 8 bit family is still my favorite platform of all time.

Remind me of my first coimputer, an Atari 130XE

I had a 65XE in the early 90s that my stepbrother and stepsister left at home when they moved out and my mom and stepdad got married. Star Raiders is still the game I remember only. I had a few others but remember none of them.

tnx for the video - i am a child of the Commodore64 and greatly enjoyed assembly / machinelanguage programming there. Nice to see a system introduced in 1979 so 4 years earlier than the C64, which aparantly had similar capabilities.

Around the last demise of the Atari 8 bit line, ANTIC magazine, known for its Amazing Atari programs and news transitioned into the back pages of Start Magazine as Atari was solely focused on expanding the Atari ST line. They dominated the magazine, and only a few pages at the rear remained for us Atari readers in those days.

I learned so much. Thank you!

We had an 800XL with a cassette drive, a disk drive (maybe two? I don’t totally recall), and a printer; it was the computer we had from the mid ’80s to the early/mid ‘90s. My dad got his degree in… some tech discipline—I never knew because I was barely in elementary school—in the mid/late ‘80s using that computer for all of his projects and writing assignments. A lot of the games and the programs were things he’d written in basic either from a magazine or as an assignment and stored on floppies, and we had a small handful of cartridges and cassettes. For most of the time we had it, the PC had taken hold of the computer market share and the Atari seemed pretty quaint in the later years, but I still have a real soft spot for it.

Hey so I have 2 vcr that need repair can you help me or I can send them to you

The GOAT returns!!! Welcome back!

I’m glad to have seen stuff behind the Atari computers. I’ve seen enough on how the C64s and Tandy computers were, but the Atari timeline was odd given how many models there were.

I love the show dude.

I wanted an Atari, but the C64 was so much cheaper. And so went history.

I got an Atari 800 in 1981 with a cassette drive. I think it cost about $650. It took me the better part of a year to save up for a third party floppy drive.

The Tramiel era was a good era for Atari. Got the ST for the same reason I got the C64: could not afford the Amiga.❤

Funny how you see Atari getting the GS and the portable system once former commodore management went to atari - whilst the brilliant Atari engineers went to from Atari to from Amiga and the being bought by Commodere. Now I understand where some of the later Amiga naming scemes came from (1200, 600,..) - while the frist Amiga names were based on their Ram configuration.

And it shows you are rather a fan of the people than a company - so fanboy wars are useless 😅

I had an Atari 130, a grey computer.
Spend all day typing in a pile of script ( Atari basic) for the Atari choo choo to choof across the screen . Turn off, and it's gone like a doubtful breakfast burrito an hour later.😮

i personally would love to see more 8bitguy restorations, some of these guys need retrobrite 😀

Make Atari Great Again. These were fun machines in their day.

I have an 800XL that was handed down to me from my grandfather-in-law. Something is not quite right with it, I would love to be able to restore it to function.

Fantastic video, as always. Thank you! I do feel like you missed the opportunity to go more into the SIO port, which was decades ahead of it's time. It may even be worth it's own video. Keep up the good work and don't forget your roots. I know you are busy with so many different irons in the fire, but I can't be the only one who found and fell in love and stuck with your channel because of the deep dives into retro computing. Thanks again!

How has it been 1 week already?

You missed the prototype 65XEM.

So my 1200XL is a unicorn? So many great memories!

📎💥

As always, excellent video man! I love the trips down memory lane I get to take while watching. I was too young to know much about computers and consoles when I was young and was astonished when I'd go to my friend's houses to play games on their systems. Your passion for this subject shines through and I I have a great time watching your vids. Much love and thank you!

Sorry, the first version had only been rendered to 720p for some reason, so I had to re-upload it in 1080p.