What to do with an Atari 800XL?

[MameMe]

Got one of these laying around the house.  Can it be used to play arcade games?  Or maybe for parts, but what parts?

Hehe...check out the image... any thoughts or opinions would be appreciated.

[Chris]

Got one of these laying around the house.

[Stingray]

Still plenty of interest in those over at Atariage.com. If you're looking for info on them that would be the place to start.

-S

[Ed ONeill]

I have the atari 400....I say keep it and buy some carts off ebay

 when these first came out they had the best graphics , the pacman was close to the real rcade game

Signed
Ed

[Wyluli]

You could give it to me 

It's a classic machine, you can either save it for the love of classic machines, or sell it.

They had some cool articles about the classic atari machines in Retro Gamer.  Very cool magazine, I highly recommend it!

[DYNAGOD]

overclock it 

[Oddfeld]

Gut it and stick an ITX mobo in it... then you can run MAME 


http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/atari800

[dabone]

Steal the pokey for extra atari pcb parts.


Later,
dabone


EDIT:

   C012294B-01 'POKEY' ('POT and KEY')

    * 4 independant, 8 bit channels, which can be combined to
          o one 16 bit/ two 8 bit channels or
          o two 16 bit channels
      (although overall output is always mono)
    * each channel can be controlled in frequency and volume, and can output tones/ noise created by a noise control circuit (including low- and high-pass filtering)
    * POKEY had also been used in the earlier 8 bit ATARIs (ATARI 400, 800, 1200XL), and in some arcade machines

Also used to control input to centipede pcbs. and others.

[MameMe]

What the heck is a Pokey? LOL

I'd hate to just throw it out.  I remember it cost me $300 CDN back in the 80's. 

[JMDickson]

The Exidy Max a flex system was based on an Atari 800XL.  It looks like the MAME driver is based on the 600XL for some reason...  There are flash based carts that you could put the rom images on.  Not sure if the games will play on a true stock 800, but it might be a fun experiment. 
The games currently in MAME are - Astro Chase, Bristles, Flip & Flop, Boulder Dash.

[Stormy151]

We used to have a 400 and I remember playing the crap out of Star Raiders.  What a cool game...

[missioncontrol]

Gut it and stick an ITX mobo in it... then you can run MAME

[MameMe]

Anyone think the "insides" could be used for parts of a mame project?  Like a keyboard encoder? hehe Just wondering.

[Gunstar Hero]

It's old, outdated technology. Give or sell it to someone who likes that kind of thing and move on. It's day is gone. 

On that note, think I could MAME an Odyssey 2? 

[LordDamo]

It can do the same thing as my beloved Commodore 64... gather dust in a closet.

Dude!!! I keep mine in my closet too, but "air" it every now and then. Do you have a working disk drive (1541 or 1571)?
Ive been looking for one for ages . . .

[daywane]

To bad I just sold most of my Atari stuff a year ago.
I still have a full set up and 2 1050 drives

[Mameotron]

This is what I would do with it...

Seriously, there are a lot of collectors.  You should be able to ebay it no problem.

[Santoro]

Anyone ever play Fort Apocalypse on one of these?  I  spend waay too much time on college doing that. 

[Dexter]

Fort Apolcalypse was my favourite game on my 800XL (which was also my first computer). I got the game for my 9th or 10 th birthday. Still dick around with it fom time to time on atari800win.  Star raiders was amazing (along with part 2, bit of a rarity if I recall, I actually first played it on a 2600 woodie with the extra keypad. The first game I was truly addicted to was on the 800xl, Mercenary. Anyone else play this to the edge of dementia??

Dexter

[daywane]

Yep. at one time I had 30 atari's 800xl and 130xe
with a sio to pc you could say I over clocked them
I still like mine for keeping track of my video library
there is still a bunch of software I like best on the old atari that I can not find or know how to do on the big pc's