Atari 800 XE Laptop 180
Lester Oats writes "Benjamin J. Heckendorn (of Atari VCSp, NES Micro, & PS2p fame) has been at it again! Summary from his site: "Of all the portable videogame devices I've ever built over the years one system has always been my 'Holy Grail' to make - my 'dream portable' if you will. (Yes, even more so than my Neo Geo arcade machine) And now after a couple years of tinkering it is complete! Without further ado - the Atari 800 XE Laptop!""
Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
coral cache (Score:5, Informative)
Just in case (Score:5, Informative)
Uses (what's left of
8" TFT active matrix display
Compact Flash "hard disk drive" utilizing MyDOS 4.53 for maximum drive size of 16 megabytes. Card is removable for swapping.
Built-in NiMH battery pack and charger (uses external plug like a normal laptop) Also battery is removable from base as with most laptops.
Full (Atari 800) sized keyboard
Built-in Player 1 & 2 controls, plus joystick ports. Built-in joypads great for playing Robotron 2084!
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Brushed aluminum and wood grain everywhere! A weird combo style, sure, but I like it!
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Cursor control knob - Allows you to move the cursor around the screen without pressing control+arrow keys. That's awesome if you're an old-school Atari programmer "from the day"
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Slim (compared to an original SIO port) DB25 printer-style port for connecting to disk drives, printers or PC's using an SIO2PC cable.
I have to see, it's looking pretty sweet.
Re:Was the Atari his webserver as well? (Score:4, Informative)
Odd Site (Score:3, Informative)
Or it could be that they just pulled the plug when they got a slashdot referrer
Picture (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
Pictures (Score:2, Informative)
http://img280.imageshack.us/img280/9113/mainpicbi
http://img280.imageshack.us/img280/1714/topandrea
Re:sweeeet (Score:2, Informative)
Coral Cache works fine. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I didn't see a supplier list anywhere? (Score:3, Informative)
how to make an auto coral cache shortcut (Score:3, Informative)
javascript:location.hostname=location.hostname+".
(remove the silly space that slashdot puts in the "nyud" part)
Then whenever you get to a site that is slashdotted or otherwise not very available, just hit your shortcut (ideally right on your top bar) and there you go!
Re:Ok.. (Score:5, Informative)
These days you can even get ethernet and an IDE adapter for the things (though not cheaply).
"MyDOS 4.53 for maximum drive size of 16 megabytes"
I had an atari back in the day with a 15gig drive using a scsi to mfm controler... so I imagine with the right hardware anything ide could be supported. I recently saw an "ICD multi-io" with scsi and 1meg sold on ebay for $700ish. While the ram wasn't an expantion it could act as a printbuffer or ramdisk and was powered seperatly so it acted like a small hard drive. That's there and abouts of what they cost new in 1990 or so. Atari dos near as I'm aware never supported anything above and beyond 360k or 720k floppies... the largest drive Atari them selves came out with was 360k drive called an XF-551.
I got the atari when the whole atari dos thing went crazy. You had atari dos 2.0 which supported only 90k floppies, but then they came out with some odd ball enhanced density dos which but shipped with atari dos 3 which wasn't compatable the old disks... not even the discs that shipped with the drive. It had a utility that would convert old disks to the new format... but not back again which was a problem as most disks that were shipped employed copy protection... so atari dos3 had a nice feature to render disks totally unreadable. And the only reason anyone knew this is if they had access to a handy dandy user's group... it's not like the places that sold them actually were able to support them.
Eventaully I was able to get the newer dos 2.5 which was compatable with the new enhanced density yet could read the older single dos 2.0 disks... which was the standard of all boxed software. Most annoying was when they released a double sized double density drive and didn't ship it with a version of dos that supported it. Probally the most interesting were the various other DOSes that were on the market including SpartaDOS and MyDOS both of which could support hard drives and just about any disk standard available.
There was lots of really good hardware for the Atari... the problem is that most games didn't support anything above a single drive, and those that did only used flippable disks and didn't allow you to say copy side B to another floppy and run the game flipless.
Re:Where's the Portable Commodore 64? (Score:4, Informative)
http://oldcomputers.net/sx64.html [oldcomputers.net]
Re:There was a plan to make a portable Atari 8-bit (Score:4, Informative)
You must be referring to the 130XEP (?). It wasn't s***canned because of portability issues. It was canned because the Tramiel crew could not figure out the AMY sound chip coding. Tramiel had fired the majority of the Atari engineers after he purchased the company, and only they knew how to get the chip to function. Its a shame; the Atari 7800 could've really used the AMY sound chip added to a lot of its titles just as the POKEY (you may correct me if I am wrong - the standard soundchip of the 400/800/XL/XE computers) chip was added in game titles like *BallBlazer* to improve the sound capabilities. Hell, the ST computer line could've used the AMY chip as well.
Re:iPower dies from a slashdotting... (Score:5, Informative)
I called Ben up and said he had two options - suspension for going over bandwidth, or quick hack to keep the pictures up until we can work out a better solution.
So, we hacked him on to an empty machine, and will work out a dedicated server for him soon so that this can't happen again.
Last time he got slashdotted, he used over 130Gb of transfer in 24hrs (actually, for the first 3hrs we had a suspended page, so it would have been even more if we'd done this before (we left him on the host last time and watched the load *very* closely).
No warning this time either, hence quick hack. By the time he next gets slashdotted, we'll have a solution in place so that we don't need to do this again.
cLive
ps - still damn funny point though.
Re:Ok.. (Score:4, Informative)
Problem with SpartaDOS, while being a spiffy command line super duper useful that you can jump to to peform disk maintance or hell even enable basic was that alot of programs wouldn't work under it.
For the most part... There was a very basic form of dos that acted as a bootstrap that simply presented a list of programs you could run. This was one of the few ways you could have your enhanced 180k or 360k floppies and run your games. Unfortunatly most of the offical user groups were so against piracy that they wouldn't even share this software, this freeware software. Quite sad as I saw no issue with having a stack of 10 to 20 games backing them up onto a single floppy for convenient access.
I had no direct experence with happy enanced drives or US doubler drives... or that other odd ball disk drive that had the nice smoked plastic dust lid that foled down over the slot. But I did own a Percom controler that could accept standard PC drives... up to 4 per controler IIRC. Cost a pretty penny... but considering the time period it was worth it. It was a tad querky.. as all things for the Atari were.