- #Mac atari 800 emulator upgrade
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The GTIA was exciting since it added more graphic modes and up to 256 different colors.īut all the existing drawing programs on the Atari used its older four-color graphic modes, including the first one I bought, Micro-Painter.
#Mac atari 800 emulator upgrade
Soon after I bought it, there was a free upgrade to a new graphics chip-the GTIA. I also went with the cheaper option for storage with the Atari 410 Program Recorder-which let you load and store programs and data (very slowly) on audiocassettes. As a touch typist, it wasn’t great, but it worked, and I typed in programs from computer books and magazines to learn what the machine could do. Like the ZX80, the Atari 400 had a membrane keyboard to keep the cost down. I did play a lot of games on it, but I was more interested in programming it and using its graphics capabilities for art.
It only had 16K of memory, but that seemed like plenty compared the ZX80.Ītari’s line of home computers is remembered mainly for games. The sound and graphics were amazing for the time-better than the Apple II-and the Atari 400 was a lot cheaper, so I bought one (along with a Star Raiders cartridge). You would “hyperwarp” from sector to sector and then fly around shooting down enemy ships using a joystick. It was a first-person shooter (as they call them now) with a three-dimensional view of stars and space ships. On display was an Atari 400 running a game called Star Raiders. A little hole-in-the-wall computer store had just opened near where my parents lived, and my dad and I decided to check it out. I was 26 years old with a full-time job, but those machines were beyond my means.
#Mac atari 800 emulator Pc
The Apple II was the most popular at the time, and the first IBM PC had just been introduced. It took most of the available memory just to do that.īut I’d gotten a taste of what you could do with a computer and started looking for something better. Trying to see what I could do with it graphically, I wrote a program to display a bitmap-style lowercase “a” using graphics characters and simple PRINT statements. I did some tutorials to learn the basics of BASIC and typed in some demo programs, but quickly learned how limited this little machine was.
#Mac atari 800 emulator plus
It only had 1K of memory (1024 bytes), plus 4K of ROM (read-only memory) that contained the operating system and BASIC language interpreter. There were no moving parts, not even a power switch-just some connectors in the back to plug in the power supply, a standard cassette recorder, and a black and white TV. And it looked cheap. The case was two sheets of vacuum-formed white plastic held together with plastic rivets. It was much smaller than I expected, about 7 by 9 inches and a little over an inch thick, with a flat membrane keyboard. But when I saw an ad for the Sinclair ZX80, which sold for only $199 (plus $5 shipping), I’d found a less expensive way in. A basic Apple II setup cost over $2,000 (over $6,000 in 2020 dollars).
I wasn’t all that interested until I read Ted Nelson’s self-published, Whole Earth Catalog-style book Computer Lib/Dream Machines in 1980. In the late ’70s, microcomputers like the Apple II and Commodore Pet were getting a lot of attention. As I’ve been going through all this stuff, it occurred to me that people might be interested to learn about what I was doing with my Atari back in the early ’80s (and since then), and how I started using computers in the first place.
#Mac atari 800 emulator mac
I’ve been down an Atari rabbit hole lately, organizing and documenting my old Atari files and programs, which I originally transferred to my Mac back in the ’90s.
In the early ’80s, before I had a Mac, and before I was making fonts, I was an Atari home computer user.
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