Notebook

Amazing find on eBay! I always wanted a 410, I love the design of these but at the time I was caught up in just playing the games and didnt care how it got loaded as long as it was fast, and Atari tapes are NOT fast at all. I had a 1010 and hated it as it was an unreliable cheap piece of junk. I then went straight to a 1050 as they could handle double density disks, but always had a soft spot for the 810 because of how it was designed.

This beauty was an absolute bargain at £50, partially working (no play or ffwd) Play wont work unless you connect it to a computer, and the ffwd, rew and tape counter are all driven by belts. 40 years destroys belts and this is what had happened. One quick service and its working perfectly (cant test the play as my 800xl is still being repaired at time of writing...)

But the condition! Look at it! its unmarked, no dust or dirt anywhere! I tried to clean the heads expecting 40 years of oxide and nothing! The swab was perfect, I honestly cannot belive how clean this unit is. I even have the original box.

All I can think of is that it was either not used or immediately replaced by a disk drive and shoved in its box to wait for me to give it a loving forever home.

The internet has been a buzz lately since the news dropped that Sony would no longer be producing physical media (discs, basically) for their new games. Tie this to earlier reports from Rockstar that the new GTA6 would be digital at launch and the socials went nuts. It spawned reddits and sub reddits, brother against brother, digital bile was everywhere and companies like Evercade, that built their whole business model on physical carts and instruction manuals, saw interest skyrocket.

For me, I have always preferred the tactile feel of a cartridge or disk, and as it looks like more and more this is the way its going It looks like more and more I will be building my Evercade collection rather than my Playstation one. Im not sure if its realated, Im not even sure its a fad, but I am getting more joy out of my Atari 800xl than I am from my Steamdeck and PS5. I think its possibly a nostalgia wave, remembering the stuff I had (I worked in Silica Shop in the 80s and never got over it.) or I am just bored with the same old nonsense coming out of AAA devs these days.

Right now, I am trying to learn to program a little, and I started with Python, which is, dont get me wrong, amazing. But its that amazingness (is that a word?) thats also its downfall for me. It does all the hard stuff for you. Its like a black box wrapped in so many layers of absraction you cant see or feel what you are doing.

I am now backing up a bit and learning some C, Assembly and Basic on the 800xl and it feels ok to just produce tiny, useless programs to see how the computer works rather than try to create the next killer app or letest hi res thing. Poking a memory location to change the colour, reading documentation and understanding that poke and lda are the same thing is pretty cool. Im never going to go anywhere with it, heck I dont know how long this nostalgia wave will last. My new Chromebook still wows me but for different reasons, the abstraction is there with it too, even when using Linux in the container, you bump into the sides constantly and, like a plump nursemaid, you are brought back to safety.

Continuing my deep plummet into the Atari programming rabbithole, I grabbed the official Atari Assembler Editor CXL4003 today. My MC knowledge is LDA and STA and .SBYTE and .BYTE thats it. Hopefully I can build on this limited foundation and actually make something useful! I also have an ACTION! cart coming, bought it blind as normal, I read its a bit like C, hardly any documentation available, no books written so this might be fun times...

My Atari is currently in the repair shop so I cant test if this is actually working.