Atari 400 Mini

[Takumaji]

Aaaand the emu-in-a-box releases continue with the Atari 400 Mini:

https://atari.com/products/atari-400-mini

"The 400 Mini is a half-sized version of the distinctively styled Atari 400, emulating the whole 8-bit Atari range from the 400 to the 130XE, and the Atari 5200 home console. Also included is the CXStick, a recreation of the classic Atari CX40 joystick, with an additional seven seamlessly integrated function buttons and USB-A connectivity.

Play one of the 25 built-in games, including: Lee, Berzerk, Millipede, Miner 2049er, M.U.L.E, and Star Raiders II. Save your progress at any point in one of four save slots per game, or even pause and rewind gameplay to help you through the most difficult parts — a feature new to the 400 Mini. Play your own compatible games via a USB flash drive."

I never had an 8bit Atari computer, jumped aboard when the ST came out. The 8bit systems were quite popular and capable micros, a friend of mine had an 800XL and we had loads of fun with it.

 

[madmanjock]

Yeah interesting but I’m too young to have played on one of these first time round. Is there actually stuff worth playing or is it just a big plastic box of by gone ?

I got my brother the Amiga Mini for Christmas and he’s having a blast with it, mainly for Speedball 2 and Worms.

 

[Burning Fight!!]

Yeah interesting but I’m too young to have played on one of these first time round. Is there actually stuff worth playing or is it just a big plastic box of by gone ?

I got my brother the Amiga Mini for Christmas and he’s having a blast with it, mainly for Speedball 2 and Worms.

Have you ever seen anyone losing their shit over the Atari 5200?

There's your answer

 

[madmanjock]

Are these the games they ported to the Amstrad GX4000?

 

[Xavier]

I had an uncle give us one of these but I could never find software for it ANYWHERE BITD.
Had Ms. Pac Man for it, better than the other ports at the time.
Then it got given away to Goodwill.

There's a million games made for these systems when you consider homebrew/public domain and so on.
Hard work would be sorting through it all and figuring out what's playable.

You know what think Imma get one If it's plug and play and has a working GUI.
I've tried to play these systems before and there's always issues using emulation with those systems bios-es/ what kind of game... it's size

For example some emulators frequently give me this prompt:
Is this a 8, 16 or 32kb file?
It's like I dunno you're the computer, you tell me

 

[StevenK]

I had an uncle give us one of these but I could never find software for it ANYWHERE BITD.
Had Ms. Pac Man for it, better than the other ports at the time.
Then it got given away.

There's a million games made for these systems when you consider homebrew/public domain and so on.
Hard work would be sorting through it all and figuring out if anything is playable.

It really is pathetic how I've bothered to read one of your posts for the first time in about 6 months just because you've put some tits in your picture.

 

[Xavier]

It really is pathetic how I've bothered to read one of your posts for the first time in about 6 months just because you've put some tits in your picture.

Happy New Year!

 

[Takumaji]

Yeah interesting but I’m too young to have played on one of these first time round. Is there actually stuff worth playing or is it just a big plastic box of by gone ?

I got my brother the Amiga Mini for Christmas and he’s having a blast with it, mainly for Speedball 2 and Worms.

The 5200 console and the 400 and 800 computers are on a similar level, which means the games have a higher resolution than 2600 games, more colours, the computers have more RAM for running user programs/tools, games can be bigger, etc. The computers came with cartridge slots for games and other stuff (BASIC carts, etc.) and either had a membrane keyboard (400) or proper mechanical keys (800). They were NOT compatible to 2600 or 5200 game carts, that was because the computer and console departments were competing with each other, they were in constant fear they could be cancelled in favour of the other ticket. This led to a lot of questionable decisions which didn't help to prolong the shelf life of Atari's early computers - production stopped in 1983. The follow-ups were 600XL and 800XL with more power, bigger RAM, etc.

Whether or not you find these games worth playing depends on your preferences, many of them look decent and play very well, like Star Raiders, M.U.L.E., Miner 2049er, the legendary Rescue On Fractalus, etc. The Pokey sound chip of the 400/800 series makes for great chiptunes and the games are always very colourful, which was a trademark of Atari games of that era.

However, the 400 Mini also seems to support XL and XE machines plus 5200 console so there's more to it than just the early 400/800 games. I wonder if it's possible to use application software with the keyboard and (virtual) drives.

 

[Xavier]

They were NOT compatible to 2700 or 5200 game carts

They must be pretty close because that's what a bunch of the homebrew is, porting the games from the 5200 and vice versa.

Ohhh I misread and thought I saw it did 7800 as well.

 

[Takumaji]

Technically they're close but 400/800 carts have a different size, a 5200 cart does not fit into a 400/800 slot.

 

[SpamYouToDeath]

I bought an Atari 800 from a thrift shop, in 2002, for $75. It came with a disk drive and a bunch of software.

It had a decent port of Frogger.

It got destroyed in a fire and I didn't care too much.

 

[Hattori Hanzo]

No one used the cart slot. We bought the cheapest tapes we could find and copied with double speed on a double tape deck.

 

[NeoSneth]

How many 50+ year old's care to relive the Atari 400?

 

[Takumaji]

I didn't have an Atari 8bit computer back in the day, they were very expensive compared to the Speccy or even C64. In Germany, the Atari 400 was officially released in 1981 and cost almost 1500 Deutschmarks (original US price was $549.99) while the 48k Speccy cost 500 Deutschmarks. Launch price for the Atari 800 was a whooping 3000 Deutschmarks (US price $999.99), it was simply unthinkable for us to spend that much on a computer.

That said, two of my friends had Atari computers (Atari 400 and 800XL) and I really liked some of the games they had. Due to Atari's huge back-catalogue and their arcade games, the launch game lineup was quite big with lots of quality titles and software support was good until about the mid/late 80s when Atari shifted the focus to 16bit machines. Due to the tech specs of the Atari machines, the games had a distinct style which made them quite pleasing to watch, even though screen and sprite resolution of the common display mode for games was lower than on Speccy or C64 which lets some games look blocky.

Of course micro computers could do more than just running games so there were lots of expansions and peripherals you could buy, like floppy drives, digital tape drives, printers, modems and so on. There also was an active user scene with lots of excellent home-made games and applications, actually that's the interesting bit here because it should be possible to rediscover some of these games with the new Atari 400 Mini. Of course this calls for a properly configured and configurable system which may or may not be the case from the get-go as we've seen with the 2600+.

However, the new Mini not only supports Atari 400 games but covers the whole 8bit range from Atari 400 to 130XE, which spanned 13 years from 1979 to 1992. There wasn't a huge technological jump from the original 70s concept to the late 80s/early 90s XE versions, they got more RAM and a new case which made them fit more evenly into the Atari ST range which was the company's main horse in the race by then. Most fans agree that the overall built quality of the later machines was only a shadow of its former glory during the early 400 and 800 days. Those two were built like tanks, also due to FCC rules which were much stricter back in the late 70s so Atari had to put in a lot of shielding which made the machines big and heavy.

I'm not sure whether the Mini is gonna be worth it or not, let's see what it really brings to the table once it's available. If it does what I hope it will do, it could be a nice and relatively inexpensive way to dive into Atari 8bit micros without having to fiddle with aging hardware and rotting media. Yeah, you could do that with emu/Mister/etc. as well, just sayin'.

 

[sirlynxalot]

There's some neat stuff on the 8 bits. Like versions of megamania, Atlantis and other well known 2600 games that look like they've had a graphical upgrade, higher resolution, and a little more refinement. There's also lots of stuff that is much more complex than what you saw on 2600 such as flight simulators. The game library is huge. It's primitive by 1990s gaming standards, but there are still good arcade action games that are worth trying out if you have an easy way to get access to the library.

 

[wataru330]

River Raid, Pitfall, Zaxxon-good times, on the 400.

 

[famicommander]

Fuck this, just download an emulator. Stop giving Atari money for putting out horrible, overpriced shit that doesn't even emulate the target system at a reasonable level.

 

[Takumaji]

Fuck this, just download an emulator. Stop giving Atari money for putting out horrible, overpriced shit that doesn't even emulate the target system at a reasonable level.

Now that the 400 Mini is available, I thought it would be a nice exercise to setup an emulator for three machines, Atari 400 with tape drive, Atari 800 with disk drive and a 5200 console.

After a bit of research, I opted for the emulator Altirra, version 4.2. It's generally rated as a bit more complicated to set up but is as close to the real thing as humanly possible and has a lot of options for fine-tuning and even a fully-blown debugger for advanced users. It offers cycle-exact emulation of Atari 400/800, 1200XL, 600/800XL, 130XE, XEGS, and 5200 systems.

Installation and basic configuration is quick and easy, you basically follow the on-screen commands and that's that. You also have to source BIOS files for the computers and the 5200, a quick Google search does the trick.

Basically, Altirra has everything on board to run ROMs of the systems mentioned above out of the box, in my case loading ROMs and playing games was more or less straight-forward for the computers but the 5200 emulation took a bit more time to get right, and most of it was spent configuring the inputs for the 5200 analog stick.

At first I tried to play the games with my Competition Pro USB stick, which of course is digital, and it worked for games like Pac Man or Galaxian but others like Missile Command, Super Breakout or GORF need analog input, otherwise they are unplayable. It took me quite some time to figure out Altirra's way of assigning buttons and stick movements to various controllers, the emu covers a wide range of systems so there also are tons of different sticks you can simulate (and tons of errors you can make), the standard Atari stick, 5200 controller, even steering wheels, paddles, etc.

In the end, I connected my PS5 controller to my laptop and configured both the D-pad and left analog stick for use with Altirra. After fiddling with the speed and acceleration settings of the analog stick and creating various input schemes for different games in the process, I was finally ready to play. Since the system only got some 65 or so games, I downloaded the full ROM set and had fun skimming through them one after another.

I have to say that I really like the 5200 library overall. There are not many unique titles but some like Gremlins sure are worth playing. Of course the console got a lot of arcade ports by Atari and others and most of them are great, too bad Millipede sucks, the 2600 version is still superior to it by a mile. As I usually prefer the real thing over emulation or FPGA boxes, the 5200 always was there in the background as a "maybe one day" thing, systems are hard to come by over here and the horrible stories of 5200 owners about the many problems they had with their consoles and specially the controllers always kept me from jumping in. Now that I have spent half a day setting up a 5200 emu and playing the library up and down, I think going the hardware route would be too much effort at this point.

The effort it took to get the analog controls to work got me thinking about the 400 Mini. Apparently, you can connect various USB controllers to it so it should be possible to play 5200 games on it with proper input method, otherwise a good part of the library couldn't be played properly. You may hate the 400 Mini and what it stands for but I think it could be worth it if one specifically wants to give the Atari computers and the 5200 a try, the systems it covers provide a shit ton of great officially released games to play, and don't get me started on the thousands of homebrew games that people have made beginning in the early 80s when the machines were new. It's nice to have a small box that does it all, isn't it.

 

[famicommander]

It's a piece of shit and the results you get from it won't be any better than emulators on your PC.

 

[Takumaji]

It's a piece of shit and the results you get from it won't be any better than emulators on your PC.

The output and overall performance probably wouldn't be better but you'd get a preconfigured emu in a convenient box that is ready to be used on a lcd screen via hdmi.

Basically I'm not a huge fan of these mini machines, I haven't bought one yet, the one I have (SNES mini) I got as a birthday present when it was new. It's just that the 2600+ and now the 400 mini hit the spot as I'm deep in Atari mode ever since I repaired and modded my old light sixer two years ago.

I didn't have a 5200 or Atari computer back in the day as they were too expensive for most of us but a friend of mine had a 800XL and I always wanted to explore these systems to see what makes them tick. I should have done so some years ago when nobody cared for old Ataris and you could get them for less, now that prices have increased a lot, I can't justify spending that much and don't really have room left for another system.

This is where the 400 mini comes in. Yeah, now I got a working emu setup for two classic Atari computers and the 5200 but as a fan of ready-to-run consoles, the 400 mini might be a viable option, considering that I could expand it with a USB keyboard and actually use the emulated computers the way they were meant to be used without having to spend a fortune on old hardware with all the usual problems that come with it.