ATR 8000

[Tempest]

I've had one of these beasts for awhile now, but I never got around to actually hooking it up. Yesterday I decided that I might as well give it a try since it was just collecting dust, but I'm curious as to exactly what you can do with it. As far as I can tell it's just a large 850 unit that gives you CP/M capatibility. Mine also has the IBM Co-Power board so I guess I can run some IBM programs as well, does anyone have a compatibility list? I know it can't do any programs that use graphics (since it has no graphics card), but what about the bulit in character set graphics (like the ASCII stuff) can it handle those?

 

Tempest

[Bryan]

I've had one of these beasts for awhile now, but I never got around to actually hooking it up.  Yesterday I decided that I might as well give it a try since it was just collecting dust, but I'm curious as to exactly what you can do with it.

 

I remember using one to hook up PC floppy drives. It also had a CPM mode where it used the 800 as a terminal, and you ran stuff on the internal Z80. It was really an ambitious idea, but I think the cost killed it. Plus maybe the fact that Atari owners probably didn't buy their machines to run CPM.

 

I've never seen one with a PC upgrade. That might be kinda cool. Remember when DOS compatibility was the holy grail of emulation? Now no one would care.

 

-Bry

[Bill Lange]

I had one of these when I was a kid. I basically used it as a disk drive interface. I was running four quad densisty 5 1/4 drives with my Atari. Of course now I can't read a good portion of my Atari floppies since I no longer have the ATR8000.

 

A friend of mine also had one and he was running a CPM bulletin board system with online games and a good amount of disk space.

 

WRL

[Tempest]

Do you need to use IBM or CP/M floppy drives to read IBM or CP/M disks or can you use the standard Atari 1050 drives?

 

Tempest

[Bill Lange]

If I remember correctly, the CPM software came on 5 1/4 diskettes that used myDos. These diskettes were readable by the Atari drives. I had an 810 drive at that point.

 

Once you hooked up the ATR8000 and connected generic drives to it, you could use myDos to format these non-Atari drives which could then store large amounts of data (compared to the 810 or the 850).

 

I'll see if I have a picture of my set up from 20 years ago. I had an Atari 400 with the keyboard removed and replaced with a "real" keyboard that I picked up at an electronic junk store. That was then connected to the ATR8000.

 

WRL

[Bill Lange]

Here is a picture of my ATR8000 back in the day ... circa 1984-85ish.

[Noeljb]

I also had an ATR 8000. I hacked a copy of Kapro Word Star to run on it. Inverse video was a Biatch. you had to set up Word Star to push an ADM-3A data terminal then change the way Word Star dealt with invers video.

 

The ATR8000 was built in Grand Prarie, TX I forget the name of the owner, really nice guy, hated to see the companey go under.

 

The interface would push many different types of drives including 8". It would push 8 at onetime. The software that came with it would format something like 36 differant formats including ZORBA.

 

WOW I haven't thought about this stuff in a long long time. Thanks!

 

Noel B

[kheffington]

There is an atr8000 manual located here

 

http://www.a8maestro.com/atari/info/atr8x0...00/atr8kman.txt

[ZylonBane]

Ah, the ATR-8000... the machine that introduced me to good ol' MyDOS.

 

When my dad purchased this, he fortunately also got the 80-column cart. It was just a dumb terminal program that did software 80 columns, but thanks to display-list scrolling it more than kept up with the CP/M stuff.

 

Dual DS/DD drives were awesome back in the day.