Almost three years ago I did a recap job in trade for a Atari 65XE computer, it sat in the trunk of my car for darn near a year, then one day with a baby on the way I am sitting there looking at this thing, which I had never even taken out of its box, and sold it here on Atariage for what I had invested into it ... 40 bucks.

Fast forward pretty much two years later, I catch a deal on a untested Atari 400 computer. I tore it apart cleaned it up, upgraded it to 48k, added composite out and installed a SIO2SD internal to the case, and its a pretty kick ass little game machine. So much so I had to talk myself into selling it, cause every time I went out to the garage I would spend half (or more) of my time playing games on it!

But I would run across games that would not play on it, which is no big deal, there's a ton of games that will run on the older setups, but I wanted demo's, I love demo's. I have been addicted to demo's since the early 90's and I still check pouet.net just about every darn night, and for the non XL/XE machines there is not a whole lot of them besides cracktro's and simple (but impressive) scrollers.

Dang I really loved that 400, but there was only 1 kick ass demo out of hundreds, if not thousands that I could find to run on it (and I checked every single one in the TOSEC archive on archive.org!). What I needed was a XL or XE machine to pimp out.

While the 400 was still sitting on my bench in pieces, only working with jumper wires and careful touches, I started looking out for newer machines. Most were way out of my price range ... cause I am cheap, no not cheap, willing and able to fix these machines, one kept popping up on my searches. A 65XE missing its screws, looking like it had sat in a gas station toilet for most of its post useful life, advertised as broken, wont power on, buy it now for more than I wanted to pay.

There was a couple things that tweaked my spidey senses, but I am no Atari computer expert, move along and keep looking. Finally after the 400 was put together, sold and moving to its new home in Canada, I really wanted to play with an atari computer. I popped back on fleabay and the only XL/XE computer still in my price vs risk of repair range was this darn 65XE.

I had since read up on the nuances of the machines I was looking to find, and observation of the ebay photos, which were pretty good, I had a idea of what I was actually looking at. I shot the seller an offer, they accepted, I sent in darn near 30 dollars to someone in Georgia USA and its quickly put in the mail. OMG what have I just done!

I just spent almost 30$ on a 65XE with no screws, claimed to totally dead, and dirty as a truck stop griddle. It arrived today, but I will make a second blog entry about that in a little bit as this one is already long winded.