5200 and 400

[littleman jack]

In the Retro Gamer #80, and here on Atari Age's Trivia section, I've seen it mentioned that the 5200 is pretty much a 400 with no keyboard and a different set of controllers. If that is true, what makes the difference in their ability to play certain cartridges. For instance, the 5200 can run a color Choplifter cartridge, while the 400 cannot (while a 64k 800XL can). I imagine it has something to do in how the machines read the cartridges, but what exactly is the difference?

[Rybags]

The 5200 Choplifter is obviously reworked to be able to run in just 16K of RAM.

 

Isn't the computer colour version a later XE type?

Plenty of those cartridges are a bit unconventional in that they only use the ROM as a kind of big virtual disk drive. The game itself is actually copied into the machine's RAM and run from there.

 

Nothing really wrong with that, makes no difference to the gameplay but it does mean it won't work on older unexpanded systems.

 

In theory it would be entirely possible to hack the 5200 Choplifter to be able to run on a 16K computer on homebrew cart but the effort vs how many would actually benefit means it's not worth bothering.

Edited October 1, 2010 by Rybags

[OldAtarian]

In the Retro Gamer #80, and here on Atari Age's Trivia section, I've seen it mentioned that the 5200 is pretty much a 400 with no keyboard and a different set of controllers. If that is true, what makes the difference in their ability to play certain cartridges. For instance, the 5200 can run a color Choplifter cartridge, while the 400 cannot (while a 64k 800XL can). I imagine it has something to do in how the machines read the cartridges, but what exactly is the difference?

 

 

There's some memory locations that are used differently and some subroutines in the OS that are different but not much else really. I used to have a bunch of floppies long ago with 5200 games on them that I ran on my 800. Apparently, it wasn't all that hard for someone with even a rudimentary knowledge of programming on the Atari to make the necessary changes to get the games to run on the 800.