January 27, 2009by Chris

What a difference 20 years of technology can make. At the end of the 1970's, alongside the Apple II, the Atari 8bit computers were cutting edge.

Emulating the Atari 400 or 800 with home technology was an impossibility at the time but right now it is a piece of cake. Our multi-core processors can effortlessly replicate the legacy 8bit microprocessor' functionality -- even a 386 should be able to do it. Hopefully 20 years from now the same thing can be said for the Playstation 3 and the 360.

That various models of the Atari 8bit systems - 400, 800, XL versions, and the 5200 - are now emulated to an extremely high degree of accuracy in Windows, OS X, and in Linux, with several excellent public domain emulators.

There are still some concerns about legally procuring Atari 8bit ROMs so the emulator authors do not include the required Atari Operating Systems with their creations, however, you can get exactly what you need from this site.

Atari game ROMs are a little bit tricky to find on the net but huge stashes are available, if you're willing to wait a little bit (and if the downloads still are available - last tested: January 2009).

You can use this link to rapidlibrary.com acquire a 71.6MB installation package of the Atari800 emulator with over 2000 games! (filename: Atari 800 plus setup.exe)

The games appear as disk images and can easily be read from the emulator. The package contains two pdf's that map out the games for each image.

You can trust this file as I installed it last night and was more than delighted with the archive & emulator (my system is still alive and virus free). There are many other archives at www.rapidlibrary.com too - Atari 2600, SNES, Playstation, Commodore 64, etc.

The Emulators

Atari800Win Plus by Richard Lawrence is your best bet for win32 emulation. The emulator includes an installer and will get you up and running Atari 8bit programs in seconds.

Atari800MacX by Mark Grebe is easily your best Atari 8bit OS X solution with fullscreen and extended emulation functionality over the original PC counterpart - the Atari 800 win32 emulator by David Firth.

Atari800 will get you running in Linux.

Atari 8bit computers and the 5200 console were machines of beauty with their advanced audio and graphic chipsets. Sure they seem silly compared to our mindbending graphics and sound of today, but these devices, and their emulators, show us where we came from. The genesis of home computer technology is a beautiful thing.

CS 1.9