Things you'd like adding to The400 mini

[mimo]

After watching several of the reviews and the excellent after show Q+A from Gen X Grownup I'd like to see the following updates.

1- more RAM

2-Stereo Pokey

3-Ability to swap from NTSC to PAL without doing a factory reset

4-VBXE

 

I'm sure there will  be lots more when I actually get my hands on one, but really looking forward to having a play 

Edited March 26 by mimo
Remembered something else

[woj]

Is it known on which emulator code it runs? The memory thing and stereo Pokey is rather surprising...

[+Stephen]

It advertises rewind functionality, so it's pretty much a guarantee to be Retro Arch.

[FifthPlayer]

I'd like to see improvements to the BASIC support, so that you can mount an ATR of your own for saving program files, as well as use other language carts like Assembler/Editor, Altirra BASiC, or the OSS language carts.  Ability to boot into a DOS besides Atari DOS would be great as well.

[Spanner]

It uses Retroarch so do not see them been able to do any of that without changing the emulator to the Atari800 Emulator 410 or newer, thats why PCUAE uses it not Retroarch, there a lot of stuff missing from it because its like MESS a multi emulator, this is the first time RGL used Retroarch.

And the carousel is identical to THEA500 Mini so it feel to me like your playing THEA500 Mini especially if your using Media Access, its identical, when the Atari400/800XL was nothing like the Amiga A500, its a weird feeling, or maybe I am abit weird, well I am...

Edited March 26 by Spanner

[Irgendwer]

If there would be CX77 support via mouse (like in Atari800 with the "-mouse touch" option) I likely will be tempted to buy one... (or more as presents...)

(That would mean you could use a mouse as paddle controller too...)

Edited March 27 by Irgendwer

[mimo]

54 minutes ago, Spanner said:

It uses Retroarch so do not see them been able to do any of that without changing the emulator to the Atari800 Emulator 410 or newer, thats why PCUAE uses it not Retroarch, there a lot of stuff missing from it because its like MESS a multi emulator, this is the first time RGL used Retroarch.

And the carousel is identical to THEA500 Mini so it feel to me like your playing THEA500 Mini especially if your using Media Access, its identical, when the Atari400/800XL was nothing like the Amiga A500, its a weird feeling, or maybe I am abit weird, well I am...

I thought retroarch was just a front end.

I believe the underlying emulator is Atari800 which has the rewind function.

The full blown version also supports stereo pokey and 320k, Rambo, compyshop etc ram upgrades, so it's odd if these have been removed 

[pjedavison]

14 hours ago, FifthPlayer said:

I'd like to see improvements to the BASIC support, so that you can mount an ATR of your own for saving program files, as well as use other language carts like Assembler/Editor, Altirra BASiC, or the OSS language carts.  Ability to boot into a DOS besides Atari DOS would be great as well.

You can already save BASIC programs. Put in a USB stick and it automatically creates a disk image (assuming one doesn't exist already) that boots into BASIC and loads DOS. Some slightly more robust media handling would definitely be nice though -- such as being able to create new disk images on the system itself rather than having to copy and rename on a PC.

 

I wonder if booting a .car image of SpartaDOS X and telling it to boot with BASIC will work. You'd need a blank disk image ready to format on the USB stick ahead of time, but in theory it could work? Something to try perhaps.

 

The one thing to note is that Retro Games have generally been very good about doing firmware updates with significant additions to functionality on their other devices -- both TheC64 and TheA500 have improved greatly over time. I suspect in this instance they wanted to get the "plug and play" basics up and running properly first of all, then add in more advanced features for power users a little later.

[donjn]

The real question is that if Retroarch is being used would we be able to hack it to enable read ahead at least for the 5200?

[FifthPlayer]

5 hours ago, pjedavison said:

You can already save BASIC programs. Put in a USB stick and it automatically creates a disk image (assuming one doesn't exist already) that boots into BASIC and loads DOS. Some slightly more robust media handling would definitely be nice though -- such as being able to create new disk images on the system itself rather than having to copy and rename on a PC.

 

Thanks for the clarification.  I watched the GenXGrownup review, and there he showed you could save BASIC programs, but that there was no way to access them outside of the machine.  It sounded as if The400 makes a private disk image that you can't access from a PC.   The review also didn't cover if you could boot from a language cart like ASM/Editor and also have Atari DOS available, like it does for the built-in BASIC.

 

5 hours ago, pjedavison said:

I wonder if booting a .car image of SpartaDOS X and telling it to boot with BASIC will work. You'd need a blank disk image ready to format on the USB stick ahead of time, but in theory it could work? Something to try perhaps.

I'd love to see some more experiments like this, once more units get in people's hands.  The ability to have a programming environment on or near-par to original hardware, but with a) smaller desk footprint, b) modern connections for power and HDMI video, and c) modern, high-quality keyboards would make The400 a compelling alternative for hobby hacking directly on the device.

 

Edited March 27 by FifthPlayer

[pjedavison]

2 hours ago, FifthPlayer said:

Thanks for the clarification.  I watched the GenXGrownup review, and there he showed you could save BASIC programs, but that there was no way to access them outside of the machine.  It sounded as if The400 makes a private disk image that you can't access from a PC.   The review also didn't cover if you could boot from a language cart like ASM/Editor and also have Atari DOS available, like it does for the built-in BASIC.

 

I'd love to see some more experiments like this, once more units get in people's hands.  The ability to have a programming environment on or near-par to original hardware, but with a) smaller desk footprint, b) modern connections for power and HDMI video, and c) modern, high-quality keyboards would make The400 a compelling alternative for hobby hacking directly on the device.

 

Yeah, there's definitely some scope for experimentation and workarounds for various solutions. Assuming you can access the Media Control interface while something is running, you should theoretically be able to attach a disk image while running, say, Assembler/Editor from cart, but that's something folks will have to test. And if it turns out that's not supported, well, that's something that can be suggested to the folks at Retro Games for a future update

 

I do think it might be worth tempering expectations a little, though. Some folks have been expecting since the announcement that this will be a full-blown replacement for a real Atari 8-bit (I've seen folks bemoaning the fact it doesn't have an SIO port, for example), and it doesn't quite work like that; it was never intended to be that. Instead, this is a games console that just happens to allow you to do some tinkering around with non-games stuff as well. Quite how far one can take that "non-games stuff" remains to be seen, but the retro computer enthusiast community is nothing if not resourceful, so I'm sure we'll start to see quite how far you can push this beyond being a simple games machine in the coming weeks. I'm looking forward to it!

[pjedavison]

On 3/27/2024 at 1:10 PM, pjedavison said:

You can already save BASIC programs. Put in a USB stick and it automatically creates a disk image (assuming one doesn't exist already) that boots into BASIC and loads DOS. Some slightly more robust media handling would definitely be nice though -- such as being able to create new disk images on the system itself rather than having to copy and rename on a PC.

 

I wonder if booting a .car image of SpartaDOS X and telling it to boot with BASIC will work. You'd need a blank disk image ready to format on the USB stick ahead of time, but in theory it could work? Something to try perhaps.

 

The one thing to note is that Retro Games have generally been very good about doing firmware updates with significant additions to functionality on their other devices -- both TheC64 and TheA500 have improved greatly over time. I suspect in this instance they wanted to get the "plug and play" basics up and running properly first of all, then add in more advanced features for power users a little later.

Further to this, for anyone curious, you can indeed mount both a cartridge and a disk image (actually, up to three disk images) simultaneously, allowing you to use cartridge-based software and save to disk. I have tried it with AtariWriter so far and it worked fine. Not tried SpartaDOS X as yet.

 

Only downside is that you need to have prepared the (blank/DOS formatted) disk images in advance, as the only means of creating a disk image on the device itself is the auto-created "boot into BASIC with DOS disk image" it creates in the root of your USB stick if one doesn't already exist with the expected filename. Just look on it as the modern equivalent of having to have enough physical disks to save all your stuff or something.

Edited March 28 by pjedavison
Additional detail

[FifthPlayer]

58 minutes ago, pjedavison said:

Further to this, for anyone curious, you can indeed mount both a cartridge and a disk image (actually, up to three disk images) simultaneously, allowing you to use cartridge-based software and save to disk. I have tried it with AtariWriter so far and it worked fine. Not tried SpartaDOS X as yet.

 

Excellent news.  That should do well for the non-banked language carts like Assembler/Editor, Altirra BASIC, and Pilot.  Could you try one of the OSS language carts like BASIC XE, Action! or MAC/65 to see if it supports booting them along with a disk image?

[+MrFish]

1 hour ago, pjedavison said:

(actually, up to three disk images)

According to the GenX guy (and probably the full manual; haven't looked at it thoroughly enough myself yet), you can mount more for games that need it (like Ultima, etc.), via playlists.

 

[pjedavison]

6 minutes ago, MrFish said:

According to the GenX guy (and probably the full manual; haven't looked at it thoroughly enough myself yet), you can mount more for games that need it (like Ultima, etc.), via playlists.

That's correct, you just set up an .m3u playlist, but you have to do that beforehand on a PC. You can mount up to three on the device itself, which is nice.

 

16 minutes ago, FifthPlayer said:

Excellent news.  That should do well for the non-banked language carts like Assembler/Editor, Altirra BASIC, and Pilot.  Could you try one of the OSS language carts like BASIC XE, Action! or MAC/65 to see if it supports booting them along with a disk image?

I'm not super familiar with any of them but I'll have a look. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work, but I'll attempt it and report back.

[pjedavison]

29 minutes ago, FifthPlayer said:

Excellent news.  That should do well for the non-banked language carts like Assembler/Editor, Altirra BASIC, and Pilot.  Could you try one of the OSS language carts like BASIC XE, Action! or MAC/65 to see if it supports booting them along with a disk image?

Tried Action! Wrote my first ever Action! program. (The "Hello World" example from the manual, natch.) Discovered on-screen keyboard has no "Ctrl" key. Plugged in USB keyboard. Pressed Ctrl-Shift-W to "Write". Saved as "BUMS". Rebooted and loaded DOS disk. "BUMS" was safely on the disk.

 

I'd say that's a go. This almost certainly goes without saying, but you will want to use a USB keyboard to do anything vaguely clever/non-gaming with this thing.

[+MrFish]

16 minutes ago, pjedavison said:

That's correct, you just set up an .m3u playlist, but you have to do that beforehand on a PC.

Easy enough.

 

17 minutes ago, pjedavison said:

You can mount up to three on the device itself, which is nice.

Yes, I remember hearing that said in the GenX guy's review.

 

[FifthPlayer]

4 hours ago, pjedavison said:

Tried Action! Wrote my first ever Action! program. (The "Hello World" example from the manual, natch.) Discovered on-screen keyboard has no "Ctrl" key. Plugged in USB keyboard. Pressed Ctrl-Shift-W to "Write". Saved as "BUMS". Rebooted and loaded DOS disk. "BUMS" was safely on the disk.

 

I'd say that's a go. This almost certainly goes without saying, but you will want to use a USB keyboard to do anything vaguely clever/non-gaming with this thing.

 

Excellent news!  Just being able to boot the major language carts with DOS around means there's quite a lot of coding that can be done with The400 as-is.

 

I was concerned about the OSS language carts because they use their own unique form of bank-switching, and it wasn't a certainty that The400's emulator would support it.

[pps]

On 3/26/2024 at 7:51 PM, mimo said:

After watching several of the reviews and the excellent after show Q+A from Gen X Grownup I'd like to see the following updates.

1- more RAM

2-Stereo Pokey

3-Ability to swap from NTSC to PAL without doing a factory reset

4-VBXE

 

I'm sure there will  be lots more when I actually get my hands on one, but really looking forward to having a play 

Add this, too: Being able to show full ATARI resolution.

[+MrFish]

- It needs a setting to enable artifacting.

- Allowing custom palettes would be nice.

 

[pjedavison]

My personal wishlist, some of which are more likely to happen than others:

• Fix MULE
• Increase max screen height in settings to 240 so we can get the full overscan border without manually tweaking .cfg files
• Alongside that, allow "Vertical offset" to go as low as 0 to, again, allow for the full overscan border
• A means of configuring default settings for USB games rather than having to do everything individually
• Ability to mark and quickly access favourites on USB
• Map the Inverse/Fuji, Reset and Help keys to USB keyboards (and add Reset and Help to the on-screen keyboard)
• Disk image creation/duplication on the device itself to allow for quick creation of save game disks etc.
• Optional realistic load times with I/O sounds
• Option for more simulated RAM over 128K
• Option for dual/stereo POKEY chips

Most of these are "nice to haves" rather than things that I feel are particularly "essential". It would be nice to see the screen size and MULE issues resolved sooner rather than later at the very least, though.

[infinite.pies]

Retro Games has at least now acknowledged the problem with M.U.L.E., and has said there will be a firmware upgrade:

 

https://retrogames.biz/support/the400-mini/mule/

 

 

[pjedavison]

58 minutes ago, infinite.pies said:

Retro Games has at least now acknowledged the problem with M.U.L.E., and has said there will be a firmware upgrade:

 

https://retrogames.biz/support/the400-mini/mule/

 

 

That's good they've acknowledged it (relatively) quickly and provided an interim solution for now. Hopefully it won't be long before some tweaks and fixes! Looking forward to seeing what the future holds.