Ages ago – 1985 / 1986 – I had an Atari 800XL computer that was my gateway to an online world through bulletin boards and things like Compuserve.
Prior to that my family had an Atari 2600 that lived on top of the television in the late 70’s, and that was my introduction to video games. I still remember the day I got home from school and caught my mother playing Breakout… It was so incongruous for my mom to be playing a video game that the memory has stuck with me forever.
Anyway, today my CFO rolled into the office with an Amazon box and stating he had something for me… This isn’t unusual as the company buys all sorts of stuff from Amazon on an almost daily basis, but what he pulled out of the box was unusual.
It was an Atari 400 “mini”.
Apparently he was cruising Amazon late at night, saw this thing, and knowing of my retro-computing habit / addiction figured I’d like to play with it – so he bought me one.
After some jaw-jacking about both of our experiences with old Ataris, he left me to get it hooked up to something so we could mess with it… Inside the box was an old-school Atari joystick and the 400.
The machine itself is a pretty good homage to the original Atari 400, right down to the raised edges around the membrane keys – it’s just “fun size” compared to the original machine.
The keyboard and cartridge slot don’t function, of course, but otherwise the thing is really exacting in its replication of the original. It has four type-A USB ports on the front for the new USB joysticks (where the original had four 9-pin ports), and on the back are a USB-C for power, an HDMI, and another type-A USB for extra storage.
Anyway, it took all of 5 minutes to get an HDMI monitor up on my desk and get this thing plugged in and running.
It comes with something like 25 games, one of which is “M.U.L.E.“, which I played a lot of back in the day. But my CFO wanted to play some old Broderbund games – so I quickly pulled down “Lode Runner” and “Choplifter” for us to play.
My CFO ripped through the first five levels of Lode Runner before my CEO called and he had to run off. I then flew around in Choplifter for a bit before getting back to work.
All in all the 400 “mini” is a pretty neat system. It’s an emulator, of course, and it’ll emulate a 400, 800, 130XE, 800XL, and 5200 pretty faithfully – which is roughly a bajillion games from the 80’s, some of which I still have in my collection. So I guess I have a “new” 800XL now and I need to update the list of retro systems I have before I run off to play far too much “Archon“. 😀
Listening to "Rio" by Duran Duran