Our stories.

[Ross PK]

Here's mine, my parents bought me an Atari 800XL for £200 when I was 8 back in 1984, the first game I bought was Quasimodo. My nephu (sp?) also used to give me tapes with games copied onto them.

 

I loved this computer and really enjoyed the games on it, but none of my friends had one, they all seemed to have Spectrums (and a very rare few with a C64) for some reason which had way worse graphics. Hmmm maybe Atari weren't advertising enough.

 

Anyway, I really wanted a disk drive so I could load games quicker and copy loads of them off of my nephu. A few months later or maybe a year there was an offer in an eletrical store for an Atari 800XL with a 1050 disk drive for £200.

 

So, we took the 800XL back to the shop, got the £200 back, and then bought the Atari 800XL with disk drive for £200

 

Eventually I ended up with loads and loads of great games copied to disk, in 1992 I was still enjoying playing my 800XL. By this time the Atari ST was attracting my interests with it's flashy graphics, my mum said I could have one if we sold the 800XL, I didn't want to let it go but I thought it'd be worth it for an ST.

 

What a mistake, I didn't enjoy the games anywhere near as much as the games on the 800XL, in fact I didn't enjoy the games that much at all.

 

Ever since I was trying to get an 800XL again but could never find one anywhere, fastforward to the year 2000 when I had my DC I had a look on the net for one and bought it for £40 with Star Raiders II and never looked back

 

Now I'm trying to get all the games (the original versions though) that I really enjoyed playing as a kid.

 

So, what's your story?

[Plastron]

Well I guess I got my first Atari 400 in 1981 it was second hand and was mine and my brothers xmas present. We had a copy of Star Raiders on Cart and a cassette of the Scramble clone can’t think what it was called now. I remember we tried hours to get it to load before we finally read the instructions and found you had to advance the tape to 10 on the counter first . About 2 years later got an Atari 800. I remember paying £260 for a 1050 in about 1985 I guess. Atari was quite big in Nottinghamshire and there was a very good club in Nottingham City centre were a bunch of like minded folks met and gave each other help. Have to confess I started to get interested in 6502 as I wanted to copy games that a friend and I would buy. Games were very expensive back in 1984 you could pay £30 for a game then. But I did buy many games as well as copy them so not so bad. I then got a 800XL and finally a 130XE. Imported a happy chip from the states at some point two and a couple of printers first the plotter then the ribbon printer. Best buy ever was the Mac 65 Cart I still have quite a lot of these items in the loft. Count Down was my first game well you have to start somewhere before that had played with demos just for fun to see what effects you could get tried to sell one once to BOOTS the UK store for them to run in their shops to show how good this little gem was.

[Heaven/TQA]

it seems that Star Raiders was one of the killer apps??? everybody i know who had an atari had that cart...

 

my one were donkey kong & joust and Spelunker (i had a copy on disc number 4... on the otherside was ghostbusters)...

[Wrathchild]

After cutting my teeth on a 1K ZX81 (occasionally borrowing a 16K RAM pack from a friend) with a cassette deck, one Christmas my brothers and I were bought the 16K 600XL with tape deck pack but my parents had also got Defender on cart - very cool.

 

So after a couple of years typing in listings, buying/renting tape games it was time to upgrade to an 800XL - by this time Dixons in the UK were selling these quite cheaply (about £80 I think) but we couldn't stretch to the pack with a disk drive. It wasn't until I was at college that I persuaded a friend's brother to sell me his drive, around that time I'd also bought a MAC/65 cart - far more powerful than the assembler editor I had been using previously.

 

The 800XL followed me through uni - good memories of attending the Atari shows at the Novotel in Hammersmith/London and the journey up to Stafford for the Alternative Micro Shows where I helped Dean Garraghty out on his stand for 2 or 3 years.

 

After getting a job and moving to Reading around 1994 I wasn't doing to much Atari-ing until around 1998 when I started getting stuck into helping out with getting the CC65 cross-compiler project for the Atari's established. That led me into re-commencing my reworking of 'Elite' and also using my IDAPro disassembler to examine the code of a number of C64 titles I'd like to see on the A8 one day.

 

I remember getting bored of comp.sys.atari.8bit in the early 2000's, but finding the AtariAge forum mid-2002 as (IMHO) the best point for A8 activity/assistance. csa8 is a little better these days and I occasionally look into atari.org. I don't

speak Polish and so can't follow those boards.

 

The continual bettering of A8 emulation, combined with using a PC for compilation, graphics/music preparation etc - help with the A8 continuing to provide worldwide enjoyment. I enjoyed attending AtariAda in the Czech Republic this year - I just love Fandal/Raster and Emkay's "Cubico".

 

I'm going to stock take my A8 collection soon as I've been stockpiling a few XLs in order to build internal myIDEs into. Quite a few disk-flashcart ports in the pipeline too - then I'll probably get back into the C64 ports of The Sentinel and Bard's Tale.

 

Take care all,

Mark

[Gunstar]

My first computer was also a [ZX81] Timex/Sinclair 1000, the U.S. equivelant with 2k internal and the 16k 1016 memory module and cassette deck. I was learning Microsoft Basic on Apple II's in highschool. This was all around 1981 or '82. I would run home and translate everything I learned at school onot my T/S 1000 the best I could into Sinclair(?) basic. I started begging my parents for an Apple IIc around 1984/5 and after months of begging with no mercy, I finally got a summer job and started saving for one myself. We had owned a Pong machine clone by Coleco and the Atari 2600 (I had about 200 games), and I vaguely remembered Atari XL commercials and looking at an 800 on display several years earlier, but my focus had been on what I was using in school: Apple. Then I came across an artical about the "New" Atari Corp. from the ashes of Atari Inc. after the video game crash. They had the new ST and XE lines out. They looked to be superior in performance than the Apple lines for half the cost. So I ended up buying an Atari 130XE in the summer of 1985, adding a 1050 to it a year later and never looking back. I owned the underdog brand, but I always felt I had made the right choice, smugly. I've been an Atari fan ever since, and an avid preacher of Atari computers and systems until they died a second time. I stuck with the 8-bit until about '95, though I bought the Jaguar and 3DO in '95 and '96 respectively. I still have my 130XE, as well as the 1200XL and 800 systems among the long list as seen at the bottom of this window. I don't recall what my first game was for sure, it was either cartridge or cassette. I know I had Star Raiders and Temple of Apshai both early on, the latter being on cassette. The ST is an after-thought system for me; the one I always thought I really wanted when I settled for an 8-bit, that I finally got in 2003-4. The XL and 800 systems recently.

 

Star Raiders has always been thought of as IIRC, "The First Killer App." Remember that when this 3D space simulator/action game came out, nothing close even existed in the Arcades...let alone the highly inferior Apple and Commodores of the time (Pre-C64)

Edited June 30, 2005 by Gunstar

[Chunder]

We upgraded from a Vic-20 to a 130-XE - my brother and I were adamant that we wanted a Speccy or C64, as all our friends had one or the other. Dad, however, did his research, and determined that the A8 was much better... so that's what we got - one each!

 

Loads of favourite games: Quasimodo, Zybex, Draconus, Ninja Master, Pole Position, Spy Hunter... all on tape, naturally!

 

Later, I decided I wanted to upgrade to disk - the XF551 came out and I thought "Ooh - sexy!" but it was too expensive. My uncle had an 800XL, and lots of A8 owning contacts (mostly in Germany, through the army), and he managed to source a 1050 which I got as a birthday present... along with a stack of copied games *this* high. Very naughty - but there was heaps of stuff there that I'd never heard of, and would never have bought: Pooyan, Neuromancer (? - a wizard flinging tree seeds around, avoiding a giant hand, etc. Most odd...), BC's Quest for Tires, Behind Jaggi Lines...

 

Over a few years, I bought lots more games - cartridges (Rescue on Fractalus, Karateka, Ballblazer, etc.) and disks (ALTERNATE REALITY! Woo!) and discovered gems such as MyDOS, SpartaDOS, TurboBASIC, etc. Brilliant stuff.

Also, having a tape-to-disk utility was awesome - gone were the loading times (and failed loads!); hello multiple games per disk!

 

My brother also got a 1050 drive (again, secondhand) - only when it arrived we discovered that it had the Happy modification... cool! Faster and quieter!

 

Eventually I migrated to the Amiga, as less stuff was being released for the A8, and it was getting harder to source good games. I've still got it all tucked away at my parents' place...

 

I'm back into the scene because of the A8 emulator on my new Mac mini, and Alternate Reality the City... IMO the best game ever released, and one on which I have "wasted" far too much of my life already!

[Wrathchild]

Alternate Reality the City... IMO the best game ever released, and one on which I have "wasted" far too much of my life already!

For me that was "Elite" on the ST, but then again - including the waiting time for "Hardball" or "Leaderboard" to load from tape probably equates to the same amount of time

[DanBoris]

My parents got me my first computer (an Atari 800) in March of 1982. I still have the invoice for the purchase, and the prices are just amazing:

 

800 16K Computer $679.00

810 Disc Drive $449.00

850 Interface $169.00

410 Recorder $76.00

Joystick $20.00

Video Easel $35.00

Star Raiders $60.00

Epson MX80FT Printer $559.00

Printer Cable $30.00

32K Expansion Board $159.00

Touch Typing $20.00

Atari Word Processor $159.00

Breakout with Paddles $43.00

Graphit $17.00

Statistics $20.00

Visicalc $169.00

Atari 800 dust cover $7.99

1 box floppy disks $36.00

 

 

$159.00 for a 32K expansion board. At that rate the 256MB of memory in my PC would have cost $1,302,528 back then!

 

When my parents bought this my mother said to my father that this was just going to be another expensive toy that he will be board with in a couple weeks. Nothing could have been further from the truth since that system ignited my passion for computers and technology, and lead a career in computers.

 

Dan

[Fres]

Star Raiders cost $60.00 back then? Wow. One of the best games for the 8-bit, indeed. That's more than the typical blockbuster for xbox or ps2 currently. What were gas prices back then ('bout $1.25 / gallon, I guess).

[ATARIeric]

  What were gas prices back then ('bout $1.25 / gallon, I guess).

883904[/snapback]

 

1982 $1.2460 GOOD GUESS!

[Bill Lange]

I think I purchased my first atari computer in March of '82 though it may have been '81. I purchased an Atari 400 from a Consumers catalog store in Toms River NJ. I was in either 7th or 8th grade.

 

We got home, ripped open the box, hooked it up and then ..... "MEMO PAD".

 

Back to Consumers.

 

One of my brothers purchased "The Programmer" kit and another purchased "The Entertainer Kit".

 

From there we played a lot of Star Raiders and started to learn BASIC.

 

The 810, which cost more than the 400, came later.

 

Bill

[Heaven/TQA]

again...star raiders... to be honest...sad that there is no star master port on 800... i played activision's clone till death on my 2600...