Atari 400 makes a comeback in miniature form
- Reference: 1705389968
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/01/16/atari_400_makes_a_comeback/
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But a year before the ZX80’s 1980 debut, Atari produced a contender: the Atari 400. And in March you’ll be able to buy it again, in even less useful form.
The Atari 400 and its sibling the 800 were the storied company’s follow-up to the Video Computer System (VCS - perhaps better known as the Atari 2600). While the VCS/2600 is now legendary, it didn’t sell spectacularly well, and Atari’s engineers knew its sequel would be a big upgrade.
[1]
While it worked on that sequel, early PCs picked up pace and gathered plenty of attention. Atari decided a computer with excellent graphics would be a better idea than another console.
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The result was the Atari 400 and 800, both packing a 6502 processor and plenty the fastest graphics chips of the era, plus sprite-handling code that improved games in myriad ways. The 400 scored the abovementioned rubbish membrane keyboard and shipped with 4K of memory at $550. The 800 offered proper keys and 8K of RAM, a combo deemed worthy of a $1,000 price tag.
Both machines featured a bulbous rear that concealed a slot for software cartridges. The 800 also boasted three expansion slots that could be used for extra memory.
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The machines were lauded and sold decently well. But Atari struggled to see off competitors like Commodore and Tandy, while in the UK Sinclair made the market. By the mid-1980s IBM had defined a de facto desktop standard and Apple carved out its niche. No manufacturer of proprietary PCs survived the resulting market crunch.
Once the Nintendo Entertainment System and its ilk reached loungerooms in around 1983, Atari couldn’t even mount a retreat to the console market.
The company arguably never recovered.
[5]Atari pulls nostalgia power move and buys homebrew community forum
[6]Start rummaging: Atari's new 2600+ console supports vintage cartridges
[7]Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead
[8]Atari Video Computer System returns in Lego form
But British company Retro Games has recovered the Atari 400 and last week [9]announced the imminent release of a half-size recreation of the machine that we imagine will make its keyboard even more dire.
The package will be familiar to retro fans: the machine’s been updated with HDMI for video and audio output, and five USB-A slots for joysticks and gamepads. Or perhaps an external keyboard. 25 games are burned into the machine’s internals, including Berzerk, Lee, Millipede, Miner 2049er, M.U.L.E. and Star Raiders II. Side-loading other games from a USB stick is also possible.
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There’s also a little non-volatile memory that allows progress to be saved, or the recording and playback of up to 30 seconds of gaming.
And maybe coding, too. Retro Games claims the machine is an utterly faithful replica of the 400, so it should include ATARI BASIC. The computer is also said to be compatible with all of Ataris’ eight-bit efforts, namely the 400/800, XL and XE series, and the 5200 home console.
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Retro Games' Atari 400 miniature recreation - Click to enlarge
The machine costs $119.99/£99.99/€119.99/AUD$189.95 and is available for pre-order now with a release date of March 28th. Just in time to frustrate buyers whose consoles don’t arrive before Good Friday on the 30th, leaving them with a long weekend to hit “refresh” on parcel tracking websites, a game that got very tired, very fast, during COVID lockdowns.
The Register hopes the machine doesn’t turn out to be an April Fool joke once it lands.®
Bootnote: Your correspondent won’t be pre-ordering one. The Atari 2600 replica in my front room is used for about 20 minutes a year. Which is not to say I dislike retro: I rescued a rainy day on a recent beach holiday when I found 80s classic Lords Of Midnight on my phone, and won by having Fawkrin the Skulkrin destroy the Ice Crown even after Luxor the Moon Prince was slain by Doomdark's forces!
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/atari_snaps_up_atariage/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/23/start_rummaging_ataris_new_2600/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/28/nostalgic_for_basic/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/08/lego_vcs_2600/
[9] https://retrogames.biz/products/the400-mini/
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[11] https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/01/16/suplied_atari_400.jpg
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: The flickering screen
Exactly what I thought when I read the article.
Re: The flickering screen
You could also have ZX80 "classic mode" for flicker as you type if you put the ZX81 in FAST mode, but as you say, nothing to do with the keyboard.
The bulge
"Both machines featured a bulbous rear that concealed a slot for software cartridges."
Not true in the case of the ZX80. The bulge was there for the heat sink for the linear regulator which provided the 5V supply. If the author of the article had even studied the ZX80, they would know that there were no "software cartridges" and that all software was loaded from a cassette tape. While there was an IO expansion slot at the rear of the machine, this was for connecting an expanded memory module which, rather than being held within the case of the machine, stuck out the back and resulted in the machine locking up if the expansion module was even nudged slightly.
Re: The bulge
Both machines being the 2 Atari machines - the 400 and 800.
Re: The bulge
The back of the ZX80 was for supporting the milk carton that was an essential add-on due to the poor heat sink!
Retro
Never had an Atari, my retro history was a Vic20 then a Spectrum+ 48k before going to a PC. I do remember the sheer delights though of playing on a friends VCS/2600 as a kid, even though it was ridiculously simple by todays standard, or even a Vic20's standards, I was blown away as it was the first time I had ever played on a computer/console.
Loving this series of articles, thanks for bringing back some fond memories :)
Re: Retro
I must admit I did initially covet my mates Atari 2600 but found the joysticks awful to use, which limited the length of time I could play on the thing. It's good to see these being resurrected though, and I hope they have more success than the previous Spectrum reboots that had lunatics running the companies.
Gibberish
"both packing a 6502 processor and plenty the fastest graphics chips of the era"
Even by the new (merry can) El Reg English standards this makes no sense - did you mean "probably the fastest" or "plenty of"?
Atari 400
A friend of mine at the Atari 400 and we loved writing programs on it. I had a VIC-20 at the time. We both wanted to be programmers (we were 12 years old at the time). I ended up more in a support role and my friend is still a programmer now. I can't remember much about the Atari other than thinking that the keyboard was better than the ZX81's because at least each key had a little ridge around it so it sort of felt like... something.
By the mid-1980s IBM had defined a de facto desktop standard and Apple carved out its niche. No manufacturer of proprietary PCs survived the resulting market crunch.
I think the author is missing 10 years here (too much fun at the time?).
In the *home* computer market, the Amiga and Atari ST were mostly dominant until ~ the mid 90s, and the Amstrad versions of the Speccy (+2 & +3) which came out in the late 80s weren't uncommon either. The biege boxes weren't really affordable (or desirable) in the home until then. I personally got my first PC-Compatible in the late 19990s.
I think he's also missing the BBC Model B, a staple of many a school's computing department.
Re: BBC B
True, but pretty rare in homes due to the high cost, even in affluent middle-class Woking when I was growing up. I think I knew of one BBC in amongst all the Spectrums and C64s. I was proudly in a gang of two with our Dragon-32s, a far superior machine.
GJC
Re: BBC B
Agreed, the only person I knew with access to a BBC B at home had a dad who was a teacher. Did see the odd Electron though.
In school, it was all BBC/Acorns (including an Archimedes) all the way to at least 89. Biege boxes only appeared at school when I started secondary at the beginning of the 90s, and I suspect my prior junior school kept the BBC Micros for a while after.
The article author could well be antipodean, so maybe things were different in Oz.
Excellent games
As a teenager I had a Saturday job in a computer shop at the height of the 80s home computer boom, so we had all the possible models and plenty of games to play on them. The Atari 400/800 was one of my favourites because it had some excellent games (Miner 2049er was the one I played most), but the keyboard on the 400 truly was a joke for the price it was sold at. The 800 was much nicer, but even more pricy, and since all the games were imported from the US they were expensive too, so it wasn't a very big seller.
(64bit >> 3) Computer
I watch way too much 8-bit repair videos on Adrian's Digital Basement and Noel's Retro Lab YouTube channels. Fascinating stuff, to be sure. But I cannot imagine ever having to use one of those machines again in my life, especially if your relic employs a custom chip and will be rendered useless if you cannot replace the part from an ever shrinking pool of stock and ever increasing supply of fake parts. The details on that Atari remake are sketchy, to say the least. It's probably just a Raspberry Pi running an emulator, so what's the point of owning one of these? You might as well just run MAME or something like that.
The flickering screen
The ZX80's flickering screen had nothing to do with the keyboard. It was caused by the fact that the screen was driven by the Z80 processor, if it was servicing a keystroke, it could not update the screen at the same time. It was an architectural and software limitation, not anything to do with the keyboard per se.