r/atari8bit

Total Atari 8-bit noob here. Always was curious about the 400/800 even though I was fully ensconced in Apple II land back in the late 70s/early 80s. Picked this up for a great price from FB Marketplace today.

Super impressed with this thing so far. The Donkey Kong is near arcade quality, and it’s the same processor as the Apple II!

The keyboard looks awesome. We won’t talk about how it performs, though.

Is it worth getting the tape and/or floppy drives?

Anyone need this ?

Found a guy in my town who had this baby for sale and I snapped it up! Now I have one of all three A8 generations!

Brings back memories. A 400 was my favorite toy when I was little. I might have to expand its RAM - it only has 16KB, and can't run a lot of the software out there.

I'm guessing this is my last resource...perhaps my best.
Ok.

So I still have a working landline and my old Atari 800 (see title).

I'm interested in some of the stuff I've seen on youtube where people are dialing (literally dialing) BBSs with their old equipment.
It looks like AT&T won't yank their landline service for another few years, and I'd like to get in on this the way I used to 40 years ago.

1. is it worth it? Is it still fun? it looks like it is...
2. Looks like there's a big hurdle in getting it all to work.
3. has anyone here been successful -namely with : An Atari 800, Atari 830 Acoustic modem, working landline

If so,
where do I go!?

Thanks!

Alternate Reality: The Dungeon for the Atari 800, comes on 5 disk (sides) but the game code only scans D1:–D4:. So even if you mount all 5 sides on 5 emulator drives, the game still asks you to swap 1 of the disks in every time it wants the missing side. I made this 4-byte patch to Disk 1 that raises the scan to D1:–D5:. With all 5 sides mounted, the game now plays end-to-end (intro, character creation, all merchants, encounters, taverns) without ever prompting for a disk.

It was a fun little project and even though it's only a 4 byte patch, it took some digging to work out how to do this. Thought it might be handy for anyone replaying this game in an emulator (or mega pimped out Atari with 5 actual drives).

**Repo:** https://github.com/axewater/ar-dungeon-5drive-patch

The patch script doesn't redistribute any game data! You supply your own dump and run a small Python script. SHA-256 hashes of the dump I developed against are included for verification.

ps: I'm working on a complete remake of this game, the City is complete, working on the Dungeon now and will release something soon probably.

My retrospective game review of Raid Over Moscow including all gaming formats. What’s your thoughts on this game? Better than Beach-Head?