The Atari 800 : (as seen in Terry Stewart's computer collection) 

The Atari 800 was the bomb.

It really was the Amiga of its time with graphics and sound that were a leap beyond the established players. It's designer, Jay Miner, indeed went on to do the Amiga.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching this, Terry. It’s great to see a new video from you after all these years. Thanks for taking the time, it’s much appreciated.

Glad to see you back, Terry. Just want to say thanks for taking the time to put these out, and looking forward to whatever else may come!

Terry, yours was the first retro channel I found when I first got on RU-vid 10 years ago. It's good to see you re-visiting and updating your videos. The Atari one was the first of the new updated videos I tripped across. I just got an 800 a month ago when I traded a C64 with a local collector and I finally have an 800 again after nearly 30 years. I'm surprised that you thought it was small as I always thought it was a bit of a beast after my Atari 400. I had many questions for you when I first watched your videos and I'm looking forward to watch the updated versions.

WOW! A new system in the collection! We're in for a treat!

Atari's game releases were usually high quality affairs in terms of the art on the cartridge, the box and the manual. Even the 2600 games usually included glossy paper if slightly less elaborate than the manual shown in your collection. But keep in mind the 800 came with 16k of RAM (in 1979, more later) and was a $1000 USD. This was 4000 2023 Dollars (this is using the BLS (official keeper of us statistics) BS numbers. You can probably add at least 50% to that number, so more like $6000). Though Galaxian was not a launch title, it came out at a time when 800 cartridges were being sold at a large premium for a 4000 Dollar computer.

5:26 The special "Atari key" was a commonly used key. It's used to "invert" a character on screen from it's background color. This made characters on screen appear blue on white, instead of white on blue. All this did was enable the 8th bit in the ATASCII character set so that you could type ATASCII character between 128-255 on screen. This key was NOT removed in later versions of the Atari 8bits, they just changed the logo to a black and white box to indicate what it's purpose, and moved to the other side of the SHIFT key. What wasn't commonly used was the secondary right cartridge slot on the Atari 800, and that was omitted in all future generations.

Got that 400/800 book with a 400 complete in box with like 40 games. I was impressed by the sound and graphics when I first played mine. I still actively collect for it.

Yes! First new video is the Atari 800, my family's first computer!

I remember peeking and poking back when i was around 9 years old. My introduction to programming was quite overwhelming with the Atari basic. Nevertheless, it was a fantastic 8 bit machine. It took many years to appreciate how much it actually cost my dad at the time, given that he was on a regular wage. Thanks for helping me go down memory lane...

I have an Atari 800 and enjoy using it. The graphics are surprisingly good.

Great to see you back Tezza!. I always drooled over the 800. But I could never afford such a machine as a kid.

The 800, which is a model of what is commonly called "the Atari 8 bit line" has a pretty active modern scene. Not quite as active as the 2600 or the C64, but still a fairly active scene with pretty regular releases of new games and software for the 8 bit line. The really nice part is the software that gets released tends to be very high quality. No rushed ports. No cash grabs figuring out how to combine ninja and BMX into one game. At least for the larger games. A couple of years ago a new version of Pac Man came out which is extremely close to the arcade, almost 100% arcade accurate. It uses the same algorithm so that your old pac man patterns even work. Prince of Persia was recently released for the 8 bit line.

This made my day, seeing a new video from your classic computer collection! Thank you Terry!

I had a 2600 when was a kid, I was so proud of my 64 + cartridges. Congrats on your pristine videos, Terry.

excellent sir! It makes me so happy that you are thinking of more videos. Thank you so much for taking the time remastering your older videos as well. It’s great that you not just a collector but truly enjoy and cherish your machines!

That second book is an excellent introduction and reference for the 400/800. It's the one I had. The 40-column text display was to avoid color artifacting on a television screen. Later, 80-column mods were available, either hardware or software, but the narrow text usually didn't look acceptable on anything except a computer monitor. The Commodore 1702 was the best monitor for the Atari computers.

I love your videos, so glad you are back. I was an avid 8 bit fan back in the day when I had my C64 so I love seeing some of the other micros, some that I know and some that are new to me. I hope you keep the videos coming as they are always interesting, especially with the backstories you supply to give some context to the particular machine.

It’s so great to see you again. Thank you so much for all the hard work on your channel.

Great to see you again Terry! I always enjoyed your videos - I’ll watch whatever you put out ❤

Great video Terry. Best of luck and I hope you do decide to make those videos. You have a very good review style.

Yay, your're back! :) I appreciated the remastered old videos and I'm looking forward to some new ones :)

Nice to see you back Terry.

The next iteration after the 400/800 was the 1200XL in December 1982. The rest of the XL series came out a year later due to the 1200XL being a flop.

Great to see more videos Tezza! Like "Ice Cold in Alex" this was "worth waiting for"

Good to see you back

Terry is looking better than I expected. I was expecting a wrinkly old man with a droopy face and one eye looking down to the left.

Nice to see you back! Good looking beard too! If you make any more new videos I look forward to seeing them.

So happy to see you making new material. Thanks so much!

A new video! Fantastic!

Was looking forward to this!

Great to see new content! Loved re-watching the upscales, and so glad you are back making new videos! Welcome back

So excited for the new content!

Its great to see a new video from you Terry. Watching your original videos started me off on my own retro journey. Thanks !

Great to see you back. I always found your videos informative and enjoyable to watch and remained subscribed in the hope that if you got a new machine to add to your collection we would get another video. Very happy to see you back again.

Tezza, it’s been great to see the Remasters. I’m glad you didn’t simply add reverb, like Jimmy Page did! 😂. Good to see you back in glorious HD, I’d very much enjoy further videos. Thank you and all the best.

Great video! Thanks much.

The most advanced Atari 800 video game was a 3d game called Star Raiders. Its Sprite graphic and Sound chip set was more advanced than the Apple II but less advanced than the Commodore 64/128. It was replaced by the Atari 1200XL.

"Big Brother" sounds wrong. The development names for these machines were "Colleen" and "Candy" for the 800 and 400 respectively. Apparently they were named after a couple of secretaries in the office. The "Atari" key was used by the OS to switch to and from inverted text. Basically it set the high bit in the ATASCII text code. In this way the keyboard could produce all 256 byte codes. The Atari Logo was changed to a simple half-black, half-white box on later models, and was referred to as the "inverse key." Having been originally designed to be a game machine, the system clock was timed to match the 60Hz NTSC video signal. The ANTIC chip ran a Display Loop that could change the display mode of every single scan line on the screen. Microsoft BASIC was available when the newer expanded cartridges became available. Originally they couldn't squeeze BASIC into the 8K cartridges so they had to get a custom BASIC called Shepherdson BASIC, which couldn't do string arrays, but strings could be up to 32K long, you could easily get the address of a string and then jump to a machine language that was loaded into the string. As strings were often relocated in memory, the ML program had to be fully relocatable (no direct jumps to an address, only a relative branch). Atari 8K BASIC also had many graphics commands that Commodore64 could only perform with POKEs. Also, having the BASIC in a cartridge allowed revisions (there was at least one) and other versions like Microsoft and BASICA+. "Star Raiders" was the original showoff demo game for these machines. I haven't seen this in any of these collectors' videos.

This was my first computer. I got one fairly late (mid-80s). My parents purchased it at a garage sale. I was 8 years old at the time and it was where I learned to program BASIC. One thing I always thought was cool was that (on my machine) the memory upgrades were giant cartridges that plugged in. But from the look of your image of the internals it seems like your computer has something different? I always thought it was cool how modular it was.

If you want to play a more faithful version of Space Invaders for the 8-bit Atari computers, check out Roklan's Deluxe Invaders. One of my favorite carts back in the day, and it's pretty easy to find in game collections, like the ones you were accessing with the Lotharek device.

You make a pretty good video mate!

Great!

The FCC ruling never happened. The 800 was released before the new FCC standard was finalized. They were anticipating much more stringent regulations than what actually were eventually put into law. This is why so many of the subsequent releases had much lighter shielding and plastic cases. I think, but I'm not totally sure that this is the reason so many subsequent computers had external power supplies. The power supplies were exempted from the rules. They put out a ton of interference, as do fluorescent lights and many other things. But in the US, AM was collapsing around this time. (AM is where most of the interference happens) FM stereo had been around 15 years at this point and FM receivers could be had under 50 Dollars and probably even less for cheaper handheld receivers. Am listenership was collapsing. As a 10 year old boy in 1979, I only listened to FM because it sounded better and didn't drift. As I understand it, NZ and Australia had AM as the primary radio well into the 1980s. So the rules were probably a lot more relevant in NZ and Australia. I lived in a major US city at the time, the 5th largest in the country(Philadelphia). By no later than 1985, music AM radio was more or less a memory. This is about the time they came up with AM stereo as a way of trying to revive it. (BTW... AM stereo sounds excellent. In some ways, is actually superior to FM stereo. It is a terrible shame it never really caught on).

8:43 Atari was overly paranoid about the FCC guidelines, and they read too much into RF interference. So the 400 and 800 were OVER BUILT which is why they look like tanks. Later iterations had light thin shielding. The older 6-switch Atari 2600 consoles also had some thick shielding too which came out before the 400/800s.

This is the first computer I ever used. You have died of dysentery!

Would it be hard to one day convert all my disks to SD cards? How long per disk might it take?

Is the Atari 400 mini worth getting?

19:50 The VIC was simply not in competition with the 800. It really cannot play the arcade games very well. In some ways it is actually less capable than an Atari 2600, which was significantly cheaper than a VIC. Just search youtube for videos of the 800 and VIC playing various arcade games. Outside of the Apple II, the 800 had no real competition until the C64 came out. Anyone who bought a VIC over an 800 was doing so on price. But they got a MUCH less capable machine. I would say the 400 was closer to the VIC and even the 400 is better than the VIC by a pretty wide margin. Though the 400 was still more expensive, it wasn't that bad at 499 vs the Vic's 299. You got a lot more for that extra 200 Dollars.