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Stuff I Wish The XL/XE Had


bbking67

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Is there software to support it?

 

It being VBXE and 80 column? Yes. The latest SDX (and going back a little too) support it well. Also, FJC's excellent word processor "The Last Word" supports it (in the latest "test" release). And since you use Altirra, you have a VBXE already in your pile of "hardware." Let me know if you would like a pre configured portable Altirra with everything all set up. That goes for anyone else too.

Edited by fujidude
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Years ago, I pulled up, out of circuit, a pin on the PIA chip, I think it was, that controlled the internal Basic in my 800XL, then I never had to hold down the option button to disable it!

 

I used the new Basic C cart from then on.

 

That's one way to do it. Another way, is if you have an EPROM burner to slightly modify the OS ROM. Back around '89 I knew a guy who had a burner and the skills to make the appropriate changes to the OSROM. He basically switched the OPTION button functionality for me so that it was assumed BASIC wasn't wanted unless option was pressed.

 

I had no idea how he did it, but knowing what I know now, I assume it was a simple change involving changing a bit-wise operator.

Edited by fujidude
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I started work on an OS customizer, one of the things it would do is reverse the way Option works. I need to get back and finish that.

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The cost would have been insane. The 6502 was a $25-ish processor. The 6809 was several times that. A 6809 might have been nice for a 1090 card, though.

 

Maybe Motorola would've agreed to a second source contract with Synertek just to help bury the 6502. They sure did have an ax to grind with MOS.

 

As for the 6809 being wildly expensive compared to the 6502, maybe in 1979 but it couldn't have been by around 1982'ish considering the Vectrex used it and the later Tandy CoCo III.

 

One of the Commodore PETs - and this is coming from Commodore which owned MOS and violated Jack Tramiel's vertical integration mantra - had a 6809 in it in addition to the 6502...

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Great list, but I'd add:

 

11. a second joystick button

 

Which is another reason why I mentioned the 5200's DB15. Atari [Corp] didn't really see the light, so to speak, until the STE and Falcon with the Enhanced Joystick Ports which is now more famous for being the Jaguar controller ports.

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As for wish #7. SpartaDOS X is DOS in ROM cartridge. It has the BASIC ON, BASIC OFF commands.

And.... Here's a MyDOS 4.53 .ATR with BASICON.OBJ, BASICOFF.OBJ and binary load BASIC A, B, C

I realize your wish list is for things that come with the Atari hardware, no extra purchase.

SpartaDOS X is as good as an internal DOS because it has a pass-thru cart port.

As for #2. There again you'd like to not buy something extra. I guess you know you can buy 1050 dbl density, the US DBLR from ICD.

There was a market for these updates, supporting companies, mostly ICD.

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The comment about holding option down to boot is that this single issue caused a lot of Atari computers to be returned at retail. I worked at a store that sold Ataris and many people couldn't figure it out. It's completely non-intuitive. I personally like the cartridge approach, but to save those costs, Atari could easily have included a switch or some other method for disabling BASIC. I just don't like the approach taken--heck it would have been better if BASIC was disabled by default and you had to hold down option to enable it!

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The comment about holding option down to boot is that this single issue caused a lot of Atari computers to be returned at retail. I worked at a store that sold Ataris and many people couldn't figure it out. It's completely non-intuitive. I personally like the cartridge approach, but to save those costs, Atari could easily have included a switch or some other method for disabling BASIC. I just don't like the approach taken--heck it would have been better if BASIC was disabled by default and you had to hold down option to enable it!

 

Well, obviously someone had to make that decision: Does it boot with or without BASIC? Someone made the convincing argument that most people are going to want to see a READY prompt when they take it out of the box and they probably also concluded that binary software would disable BASIC automatically going forward.

 

The other option is you take it out of the box, turn it on and it goes right to SELF-TEST which isn't any better and makes the machine look broken.

 

It comes down to who you think the typical consumer is. Are they buying it to explore computers and programming or to play disk-based games on? I would have been okay with continuing to ship BASIC on a cartridge.

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At the time the 600XL/800XL were released, the majority of the software on the market would not have been updated to turn BASIC off, so I could see plenty of software failing to run on these machines when you do the obvious thing: stick the disk in the drive and turn the computer on. I completely understand why customers would be confused by having to hold down OPTION to make a piece of software work.

 

And 30+ years later, it's still a bad decision. The built-in BASIC constantly gets in the way and if I do BASIC programming, I'll use one of the alternative BASICs.

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In my opinion, the #1 mistake was the the loose piece of paper thrown into the XL documentation that was supposed to tell you about the OPTION key. There should have been a sticker on the XL's case:

 

"This computer has the BASIC programming language built-in. To boot without BASIC, hold the OPTION key while turning Power on."

 

That would have solved 90% of their problems.

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2 buttons is not a problem if you use one of the pot lines to read the second button. This link looks like it's mainly aimed at 2600, but it also works on computers.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/158430-rom-hacks-to-support-2-buttons-with-genesis-controllers/

 

Why stop at 2 buttons when you can go for 3 as Dan Kramer did with a bunch of custom Trak-Balls that Atari staff used in-house on A8 3 Base Missile Command? This what he said on the wiring for the 3 fire button Trak-Ball:

 

"It's essentially the same circuitry as a CX22 in Trak-Ball mode that has a cable using its paddle lines (pins 5 & 9, I think) for the left & right fire buttons. Pressing one of the outer buttons grounds the paddle line to Count 0, so it is read as an active low. Anybody can build their own with the right cable and two more switches. I think the 2600 keyboard has the right cable with all wires present."

 

Here's a pic - from the 2015 Davis Atari Party - of it from Bill Kendrick's website:

 

http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/atariparty/2015/photos/mm/10.jpg

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In my opinion, the #1 mistake was the the loose piece of paper thrown into the XL documentation that was supposed to tell you about the OPTION key. There should have been a sticker on the XL's case:

 

"This computer has the BASIC programming language built-in. To boot without BASIC, hold the OPTION key while turning Power on."

 

That would have solved 90% of their problems.

 

Sticker was probably more costly than a non-adhesive chit.

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I honestly don't think I had a huge problem with the BASIC thing as a kiddie. I don't mean that in a self-congratulatory way, just my observation at the time. Admittedly I had an 400 totally on its own for about five months and only had a 1010 alone for another five years or so. Perhaps that forced me to experiment a bit more than if I'd got a whole - maybe disk - system from scratch.

 

The first actual game I had on non-cartridge media was 'Fort Apocalypse' on tape. Annoyingly it didn't run properly on a 400 and as it had been bought as a birthday present that was an incentive for my parents to go back to Boots that afternoon and buy me the £120 'bargain' kit of an 800XL and a new 1010. By that point I had experimented with all the button combinations so often - just looking for something interesting to do with the machine - that I was well prepared for having to disable BASIC for commercial titles.

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I bought one of the very first 800XL's after the 1200XL disappeared. The 800XL I had did not have any piece of paper in the box that I remember. For the little while nothing I tried to load from cassette worked. My friend (who lent me his old 410) had no clue because he had an 800. The thought was that it would not work because of XL incompatibilities... I was a bit pissed off to be honest and seriously thought about returning the machine to get a C64. After about two weeks when all was worked out I never thought about getting rid of it again.

 

My particular 800XL had terrible video output as well, but I was willing to put up with that. Considering the crummy TV's I was using it didn't matter much.

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At the time the 600XL/800XL were released, the majority of the software on the market would not have been updated to turn BASIC off, so I could see plenty of software failing to run on these machines when you do the obvious thing: stick the disk in the drive and turn the computer on. I completely understand why customers would be confused by having to hold down OPTION to make a piece of software work.

 

And 30+ years later, it's still a bad decision. The built-in BASIC constantly gets in the way and if I do BASIC programming, I'll use one of the alternative BASICs.

 

By that you imply that most of the software came on disks, but that wasn't even Atari's market. Cartridges were the market, and those disable the BASIC anyhow. So if you want to run a cart-based game, just insert it and you're fine. If you're using the XLs as home computers were expected to be used those days, just turn it on and you have Basic. All competitors worked this way, and it would have been fatal to derive from this.

 

Disk drives were already the "semi-professional market" and for those users reading a manual was not asking for too much. Ok, admittedly, the manual was awful. At least the excuse for a manual we got here in Germany with the 800XL in the early days of the machine was worth nothing. Including such wonderful phrases as "Setet ein Tab gest" for the description of the Shift-Tab key. Which is not even German, BTW. I believe the author/translator must have been drunk when typing in this manual...

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In the US, the economics were a little different and disk drives were very common. All my friends with computers had disk drives except one who had a 400 and a tape drive. I even knew a guy with 4 Happy 1050's. Plus, the 400, 800 and 1200XL had been on the market for a while and the OPTION thing wasn't an expected change. I believe what bbking67 says about not getting the piece of paper and I think Atari genuinely forgot to tell people about it at first.

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  • 2 weeks later...

When the 1200 XL was in development, it was intended to be a cheaper to produce than the 400/800 line. Single board, stuff soldered to the MB. So it was unlikely Atari wanted to add more chips for extra features. They were even trying to consolidate the Antic/GTIA into a single chip, The GCIA. Not sure what happened with that. If they wanted to improve the graphics, this Antic/GTIA combination would need the ability to run at 7.16mhz horizontally to get the 80column or double the horizontal resolution. Might need an extra register to switch such a feature on or off.

 

With the cartridge port and keeping the same size cartridge for backward compatibility, how hard would it had been to optionally re-assign one of the "ROM Present" line for an extra address line? Giving it A14, and map 32K ROM at once in memorry. If an 400/800 cartridge was plugged it, these remain ROM present at $8000 to $9FFF and $A000 to $BFFF. But an XL cartridge will activate a switch and a line line become A14. The pin for ROM present at $A000 to $BFFF is now ROM present at $4000 to $BFFF and the other pin is A14. Maybe the "Cartridge Type" at $BFFC would activate this. It would had eliminated the need for bank switching.

Edited by peteym5
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