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My first computer was the Atari 800XL.  My dad brought it home sometime in 83-84 with a couple generic carts.  I still have the 800XL but I usually run the 130XE these days for no apparent reason.  The 130XE is essentially the same 8-bit wonder as the 800XL with double the RAM and the custom Freddie chip to do memory bank swapping.  I’m not sure I know anything that uses the extra features but it is the best Atari 8-bit ever made so why not give it some love too?

The 800XL was the best selling Atari 8-bit computer.  But I could easily argue that they’re also the greatest Atari gaming machines ever made.  The game processing power of the 800XL was only overshadowed by the Atari 7800.  But Atari was dead as a gaming giant by the time the 7800 was ever released so there are few games that took advantage of the extra power.  The Atari 5200 was closer to the 800XL (like the Colecovision) but was plagued by bad design and terrible joysticks (unlike the Colecovision).  I’m still looking to purchase my own 5200 to finish out my Atari collection so I don’t have first hand experience with it.  As for the Atari 2600/VCS?  Sure it’s the most loved best selling Atari but I always went back to the 800XL.  Many of the 2600 games made it to the 8-bit line anyway.  Also arcade ports to the 800XL such a Pac Man were great on the Atari.  And of course there were plenty of custom 8-bit apps as well as ports from other systems on this line.  Everything just seemed to culminate around these 8-bit computers.

Star Raiders was the Atari 8-bit killer app. Yeah, I have it for the 2600 as well and it even came with a custom controller since you really need some extra buttons.  But the experience on the 800XL is 100x better.  Which is why I had to order a copy on Ebay today.  While I had something like 12-16 carts back 20 years ago they’ve all vanished on me.  I guess I have to buy back my childhood as usual.  Star Raiders holds up pretty well on the retro gaming scene.  It’s no Elite but considering it came out in 1979, five years earlier, it’s a technical masterpiece of 6502 engineering.

Apart from cartridge gaming you could also hook an Atari 1050 disk drive up or two and load up a ton of, well, ripped off games.  I have a collection of a couple hundred floppies with 4-8 games/apps each which I picked up from somewhere.  It was an awesome experience to get to play with all these different games while your typical 2600 owner had a few dozen carts max.

That was then.  This is now.  I have the SIO2PC and the Atari Ape software which pretty much lets my little Dell laptop work as a native Atari peripheral.  The games load 100x faster than they ever did from the 1050 drives.  Also I probably have the entire Atari library of stuff downloaded from the internet so I get to try things I never had access to as a kid.  The reason I actually got this thing though is so I could download some of my old programs and work from the Atari to my PC so I can keep them.  Those old Atari floppies are rotting and degrading and fairly difficult to replace.   Not that the hardware is going to last forever either.

I wish I had one of their 128-in-1 ROM carts though.  They’re a bit costly but I’ll grab one someday.  It’d save a lot of wiring and just let me keep the Atari hooked up to the TV instead of having all the drives and their power bricks and the SIO2PC and the Dell all working together to play a darn game.  Sometimes I think it might just be easier to hook up an Atari joystick or two to a PC.  Emulation is near perfect for these old machines.

I did buy an upgrade chip for one of my 1050 drives anyway.  My original drive has a double-density chip in it already but the other drive is stock.  So I got a chip for it that does the double-density as well as enhance the IO speed.  An interesting thing I learned today is that MS-DOS floppies are sort of based on the Atari DOS format.  Wiggy.

I can’t end this post without discussing the C64.  The Commodore won the 8-bit computing war back in the day and went on to become the Amiga.  I daresay it had more games than the Atari 8-bit.  I still have a C64/128 on my wish list and I really only got to play with them in grade school.  The 800XL came out after the C64 and is technically superior in the graphics department.  It’s got a faster 6502 under the hood and runs a bunch of C64 ports better than Commodore ever could.   I said the Atari 8-bits were the best Atari gaming machine but it’s possible that the C64 is the best 8-bit gaming machine of all time.  I must find out.

I’m still digging Mabinogi.

My time has been eaten up with Mabinogi these past few days.  It’s a free online MMORPG and you can’t beat the price.  I guess this game has been a big hit in Asia for a while but was released in the states as an open-beta on 3/6/2008.  These are the same guys who do Mapletown though I never got in to it.

The game is clearly a work in progress.  Very little of the cool things you see in the Asian versions have been activated here yet.   But there’s more than enough to keep you busy in the mean time.  I guess technically you need to compare this game more to something like Ragnarok online rather than WoW.  Warcraft does set the bar quite high.

I’m level 18 tonight and I’m feeling a bit frustrated with it honestly.  I seem to be out of any major quests to do.  At least any that I’m supposed to start before level 20.  I may just be missing something.  Going from 18 to 20 with part time jobs is going to be a huge grind.  I suppose I can run Ciar dungeon again but that gets expensive with the potions for me.

Overall impressions are that this game is worth trying.  It has serious potential especially given the videos I’ve seen in Asia.  I’m not sure I know how much is missing from the beta version right now.  It would be nice to see some more varied races and areas.  Oh and enemies.  This game is never going to be a WoW just due to the sheer size of WoW.  But it’s a cute little respite.

For a beta the technical problems are few and far between.  There are some lag issues especially when trying to use the Bash attack.  Starting the game up gives me a non-descriptive blank white screen for several minutes.  Connecting USB devices, or in my case using a USB KVM, while in this game causes the USB devices to not respond at all.  In fact the game loves to completely eradicate kb/mouse on a whim while trying to start up or shut down the game.  Windowed mode works okay while in the game.

Fighting is interesting and strategic in a nice sort of way.  Movement is a nightmare.  They really need WASD support because this mouse click to move stuff is aggravating on these tight complex maps especially when you need to run from town to town.  The auto-walk checkpoints-in-map system gizmo is handy though and I wish WoW had that.

Give it a shot.  It’s free.  Or at least check it out in 3-6 months when it’s got more to offer.

I have been collecting various games here and there on the internet that end up in this Games folder I have.  Things that always looked interesting yet I never got around to installing.  I tried a couple tonight to pass the time.  Narbacular Drop is the precursor to Portal.  It’s mostly a great idea wrapped inside of an amateur game designers and coders tangle of code.  I didn’t bother getting past the first level.  Not because it’s bad but because they don’t give me an option to invert the mouse.  I must be one of the few fools who needs an inverse mouse.  I don’t know.  It’s very well done for what essentially boils down to a game made by students.  I’m jealous.  i suppose Gabe Newell was a little as well which is why he bought it.  This idea wouldn’t have gone very far without Valve to perfect it.

Mythos beta is very beta.  They utterly ripped off World of Warcraft.  Only it’s not that nice.  I’ll hold judgment until they release and I suspect they could do good things with this.  It feels very much like Diablo and WoW made a pretty baby.  I didn’t play very much of it because, again, the interface annoyed me.  I guess GUI stuff is always left until last, and in some cases isn’t dealt with at all *cough* UT3 *cough*.

This also made me think about PC software, and how every piece of software I install forces me to go through and change 50-80% of all the default settings.  Am I just stubborn?  Do I use everything that differently?  Windows is the worst and I can generally get by just toggling every single option they have to the inverse value.  It’s things like this which make me question my very soul from time to time.

I picked up the new Crystal Chronicles today.  It seems to get rid of a lot of the stupid things that plagued the original Cube title.  Most importantly the cost of buying between 1-4 Gameboys to use as controllers (but hey you could always use them for Four Swords as well right?).  It’s a DS game which means I’ll barely be able to play it until they come out with a damn DS player attachment for the Cube or DS.  What I’m really waiting for is Crisis Core.  Also a complete shame it’s stuck on the PSP although RPGs on the PSP are much easier to read and deal with in general.  AND!  I do have the PSP to TV cable.  Now if I only had a progressive scan TV that the cable worked with, I’d be set.  It turns out that this dumb $30 cable is only good for displaying UMD videos and memory stick photos on your standard non-HD television.  To play games you need progressive scan.  This seems like the biggest dumb thing ever to me but I suppose that interlacing hardware costs extra money or something?  I can’t afford a new TV (or can I hmm…) but perhaps there’s some device around that can convert a progressive scan signal in to an interlaced signal.