The Atari 400 mini
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/why-i-hope-the-atari-400-mini-will-bring-respect-to-ataris-most-underrated-platform/
I remember going to CES once during the 1980s at McCormick Place in Chicago. I'm not sure why a telephone central office maker like GTE qualified us but it was fun. The most memorable thing for me was the Atari booth where they had Star Raiders running on a projection TV. I'm sure that people today would consider the chunky graphics and minimal sound effects to be nothing but I thought it was really cool being able to hyperwarp and shoot at bad guys and even blow up your own space station :)
Not sure if I got an Atari 400 before or after CES but I was able to justify it due to the aluminum castings under the plastic exterior. That provided shielding and both the 400 and 800 were the quietest home computers HF RF wise so therefore perfect for ham radio. Unfortunately the RF quietness of a TV set wasn't going to be as good but at least the Atari didn't make things worse.
The membrane keyboard wasn't that great but I got around that by putting a mechanical keyboard into a nice Ten-Tec sloping front aluminum box. I also built my own cassette interface, believe it had both active filters and a 567 tone decoder ? Not sure what happened to it.
I bought the Kantronics cartridge for ham radio applications. Built an interface of some kind that plugged into the joystick ports. I also remember getting a keyer program from Nick, WA5BDU.
I also bought cartridge games like Star Raiders and eventually Miner 2049er and other games. Miner 2049er was my downfall with Atari - it was a jumping game kind of like Donkey Kong with something like 10 levels. At the time I didn't know the cheat code to get to upper levels so to level up you had to make it through all the lower levels. I remember one time the balky Atari joystick frustrated me so much while playing 2049er that I stomped it into the hardwood floor of my apartment.
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| miner 2049er - watch out for those green ghosty guys |
That was too much, so while I bought an 800 and a bunch of the other accessories like a disk drive and printer I stopped playing games on the Atari.
Actually we did use it for preparing the Cooking with the Blacklocks book:
http://wb9kzy.com/cooking.htm
But eventually I succumbed to the IBM PC clone universe and abandoned the Ataris.
No, even though $120 is pretty reasonable for the Atari 400mini I won't be buying one, I can't afford the frustration :)
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm
