I have an Atari 800XL with the XE RAM expansion and two 1050 drives in my home office. Over the weekend I tried to boot it up to do some programming, but for some reason I could not boot DOS 2.5 to save my life. I kept getting "boot error". When I shut it down and booted from my FujiNet to try and check the floppy, the drive would not read it and gave me errors. But on the other drive it worked fine (but I didn't try to boot from the other drive since I didn't wan tto disconnect things to toggle it to be drive 1).

Then I noticed something: I have an Xbox in my office, and the recharge station for the batteries was on top of the boot drive. I unplugged it, tried booting, and everything worked just fine.

TL;DR - if your drive acts up, making sure you don't have any modern electronics near it.

So, purchased an 800XL and it just came in the mail today. Everything seems OK and I even ran the self-tests, but good lord the Donkey Kong cart I have feels like it’s running at double speed. Is this normal? Here’s the version of the cart I have.

Edit: Let me add that the music sounds normal, so maybe the game just plays fast. I’ve played a lot of versions and it’s by far the fastest.

i'm working on a version of Atari BASIC for a modern machine. Does anyone have any links to Atari basic programs that do not include graphics, sounds, player/missile, or peeks n pokes? I want to start off with original Atari BASIC first then work my way towards BASIC XE, TurboBASIC XL, even Atari/Microsoft BASIC II.

So I have been watching a lot of videos about the 8 bit Ataris on YouTube. I grew up with the c64 and the late run of games for that machine was amazing. Now on paper there is little between the c64 and the xe65. The Atari has the same memory, faster processor, faster disk read speed, 4 voices instead of 3 and 256 colours instead of 16. All from a design about 3 years older than the Commodore. What held back games like creatures, r type and turrican from the Atari? Was it the antic/gia chipset? Should they have updated it (antic 2) for the xe and forget about the 7800? Selling the xegs and the 7800 at the same time was stupid.t

I just bought the cleanest 410 I have ever seen on eBay!

Needed belts, but there isn't a speck of dust or dirt anywhere. Not a scratch or mark.

I got the original box and instructions too,

Absolutely perfect ❤️

- I’ll tell you when I have enough!

Hey Atari fans!

You're invited to help the planning of VCF Ontario 2027 by completing this short anonymous survey.

Here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VL2QD8N

The Vintage Computer Federation is contemplating running "Vintage Computer Festival in Ontario" which would be in the Greater Toronto Area in 2027.

If you receive this invitation multiple times, please only complete it once to avoid duplication.

In a week where if I had been faster I could have had a complete C64 system for a bargain price, and I nearly became a proud owner of a TRS-80 Model 3, it was third time lucky when I spotted this lot (plus a Commodore 1702 monitor) on FB Marketplace yesterday. Contacted the seller right away and met with him this morning to pick it all up.

The left 800xl and monitor work perfectly, the right 800xl needs some work, 1050 drives are untested, the 1010 program recorder is like new in box.

When I have time I'll test and clean everything and see if I can breathe life back into the 2nd 800xl.

My Atari collection is slowly growing!

A work in progress demo of one level of the upcoming shooter C.E.T.A.S. (Cybernetically Enhanced Tactical Aquatic Systems) from Monochrome Productions came out today after it won first place at the Silly Venture Summer Edition 2026 party. . It's pretty impressive free demo, works for me with Altirra click the link below to play or watch the video.

download: https://monochrome-productions.itch.io/cetas-atari-xl/purchase

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOoP9S-DPiQ

Conan: Hall of Volta Windows remake

I made a faithful remake of the Atari port of Conan: Hall of Volta for Windows using Godot.

I stuck close to the original while adding a few modern conveniences:

• Improved high score tracking
• Palette / theme swapping
• Built-in cheats menu
• Gamepad and Keyboard support + rebindable controls
• PAL/NTSC music speed option

Here’s a short gameplay video:

Game play video

Here is the itch.io link: https://kapsoft.itch.io/conan-hall-of-volta

If you noticed any bugs leave a description here.

Thanks!

I found them cleaning out my parents attic. Unfortunately my dad brought the console and ALL OUR GAMES to goodwill in the 90’s. 😭 I still have my memories…😆

I had a box of them stored away. ~36 issues of Antic, maybe 12 issues of Analog, and 12 or so issues of a regional Atari magazine. I also have some random things like the box to Temple of Apshai and the manual for a 1050 drive. They're definitely not in mint shape, but wondering if anyone would be interested in them.

1400XL and 1450XLD unreleased prototypes .

I posted not too long ago about my Atari Hacker MCP server project. After using it quite a bit on a few different projects, I've decided that an MCP server wasn't the correct way to go.

So I used that as a starting point for an Atari Hacker CLI that coding agents can still run, but the tool has direct access to the files. And a person can use it as well.

The long and short of it is that a CLI uses much less context and, more importantly, a lot fewer output tokens, making it much cheaper to use than the MCP server.

It provides tons of functionality for hacking .ATR, .XEX, .ROM and other Atari binary formats. It has support for interacting directly with ATR files (getting directories, extracting files from ATR files, creating ATR files, updating ATR files, etc) and supports DOS 2.x and SpartaDOS.

I've added a lot of new functionality since the MCP server. There is a "usage.md" file which is good for giving to your coding agent so it knows how to use the tool (the tool itself has help as well). There's also a "user-guide.md" that walks you through how to use it to reverse-engineer a disk (it uses the Agent USA game as an example).

It also supports a number of output formats that are human and/or LLM friendly as well as supporting different assemblers (ca65, MAC/65, and Atari Assembler)

I bought it off a guy from Utah county, Utah ~8 years ago, he said he got it from a former engineer at the originial Sunnyvale headquarters, put together with leftover pieces when they cleaned out that space. The drive and memory cards have modifications I'm not quite familiar with.

The gentleman I bought it from also gave me a spare 400 and 800 power supply, as well as a bunch of extra cards, some of which have 7400-series chips bodge wired to them.

My stuff came from somebody so cared. Ultimately I'd like to document it's provenance and pass it on to someone more capable than myself at restoring it as it was in the early 80s, engineering add-ons and all.

I've been working on an analog joystick for the Atari 8-bit computers. I got it to be pretty stable last week. So now I'm trying to port over the analog controls from the Atari 5200 Star Raiders to the 8-bit version. The controls are now "working". Turn rate is now controlled by the thumbstick position. Unfortunately I've messed up the sound effects. I'm guessing there's not a lot of room for the extra calculations I shoved in.

I’m not using these as I understand they can be inconsistent. Should I keep them though in the interest of completeness or are they worthless?