400/800 compatibility ???

[RMila75]

Are all 400/800 game carts compatible with the Atari 600xl?

[Bryan]

90% of the time, yes.

 

-Bry

 

edit: Let me make this more clear:

 

Most of them work. Sometimes a game requires something specific to the OS in the 400/800 and it won't work in an XL/XE.

[RMila75]

I thought it might be something like that.

I had heard that the 600 was the "replacement" for the 400. It didn't make sense that the two would be identical but I had hoped they would have made all the game carts compatible. Do you know of a compatibility list for the cart games?

And what of those multi-game carts available from sunmark.com? I guess I can just e-mail them, but I'm curious about everyone's practical use of these carts and how well they work.

[deathtrappomegranate]

Some games that won't work on XLs:

 

Shamus, Monster Maze, Astrochase, Gorf, Slime, Chicken, Picnic Paranoia, Demon Attack.

[oesii]

There's a translator disk or cart which makes 400/800 games work on XL's. My main use of the translator disk was the disk version of One on One Basketball (they fixed this in the XE cart version).

[Bryan]

I thought it might be something like that.

I had heard that the 600 was the "replacement" for the 400.  It didn't make sense that the two would be identical but I had hoped they would have made all the game carts compatible.  Do you know of a compatibility list for the cart games?

 

Well, as for compatibility, most games that don't work fail because they rely on something in the OS being at a particular address. Some things were guaranteed never to be moved in the OS and some things weren't. The things that weren't aren't supposed to accessed directly by programs.

 

-Bry

[Callipygous]

The 8-bit faq has a good section on this topic.

 

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/atari-8-bit/faq/s...section-58.html

[Shannon]

Yeah... programmers got lazy and instead of using a vector call to a subroutine, called the routines directly. Which atari just happened to move in the new OS.

 

Whoops.

 

Other incompatibilities are related to the switch from 4 joystick ports to two joystick ports.

[Voch]

I just snagged an Atari 600XL for myself and intend to pick up a bunch of the cart games and have the usual worry about the limited RAM on the machine (16K). But it sounds like I can play all of the common stuff that I want to play (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Missile Command, etc.).

 

Voch