Atari 8-bit Projects & Stuff

The Atari 8-bit ROM Documentation Project

It has already been more than a decade since the 8-bit computers were superseded by faster (but not necessarily better!) computers. Many former users of computers like the Atari 800 XL, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum remember the thrill and excitement of those days...

It is quite unbelievable now, in a time when the average harddisk appears to need an operating system of something like 64 kilobytes, that the biggest Atari ROMs were only 24 KB in size, with an 8 KB BASIC, 2 KB of font information, 2 KB of floating point routines, and still room to spare for the allmost totaly useless, but still mildly entertaining 'selftest' mode of another 2 KB, leaving only 10 KB for the core OS: interrupt handlers (about 3 KB) and device drivers(about 7 KB)!

For no good reasons other than nostalgia and curiosity I am trying to find all ROMs which were ever released for Atari-8 bit computers. Unfortunately, up until now I have only been able to get definite data on my very own 800 XL and 130 XE computers. So please contribute, by downloading ROMCRC-32 below!

About ROMCRC-32 release 1.0.2

The ROMCRC-32 program is a small Atari DOS 2.5 compatible binary executable, i.e. you can execute it using the 'L' option in Atari DOS. After being loaded, it will start to calculate 32-bit CRC values of 8 important memory areas of the Atari. After a few seconds, the screen will look something like this:

Click here to download ROMCRC-32 revision 1.0.2, including documents, source code and a response submission form!

Data collected so far (not a lot - please contribute!)

Download ROM images:

Download the latest XL-It, SID-LOAD and BINTRIM!

XL-It is the near-perfect Atari 8-bit emulator brought to you by Markus Gietzen. It's probably the single best 8-bit emulator for any system available today. We old-time Atarians can consider ourselves lucky that Markus didn't have a C64 or ZX Spectrum ten years ago! This emulator finally clinches the long-lasting 8-bit wars; the Ataris are now the hands-down winners!

Note that you will also need these Atari ROM images; for copyright reasons, Markus doesn't want to distribute these with the XL-It package, but I am willing to take my chances (sue me!).

But seriously, if you are the holder of the copyright to the Atari ROMs and object to them being distributed in this way, please notify me and I will remove them immediately.

Otherwise, if you're some anti-piracy Don Quichote fighting for justice on behalf of people who don't care, go find yourself another windmill to play with.

Current version: XL-It! version 0.20

SID-LOAD is a nifty little utility I've written which allows you to easily access your Atari games, on your PC harddisk, from within the XL-It emulator. The only thing you have to do is point the H1: device in the Emulator Settings to the directory you keep your games in - and off you go! I have about 1200 games on my PC harddisk, and SID-LOAD works like a charm, giving me instant access to all of them without bothering with large images or anything.
The SID-LOAD ATR disk image is a cute little thing (a few hundred bytes!) - it may well have the best usability:size ratio to be seen in modern-day software... Be sure to give this one a try, and please tell me what you think of it, and (most importantly) how you think it could be improved!

Current version: SID-LOAD 1.0.5

BINTRIM is a package consisting of 2 utilities; BIN and TRIM. BIN allows you to examine the structure of an Atari 8-bit binary executable; as it happens a lot of them (for example: many of the files at Yogi's Jellystone site) have been damaged when they were transferred to the PC, mostly because some bytes were appended to them (like CTRL-Z: the EOF marker). After spotting the trouble it is possible to 'cut off' the excess bytes with the TRIM utility.

All in all, the BINTRIM package will, in my experience, recover about 95% of all damaged files (though it sure takes a bit of practice to use it well). Give it a try, if your favourite program won't run!

Current version: BINTRIM 1.0.1

Utilities to transfer disks from the Atari to your PC

In the newsgroup comp.sys.atari.8bit questions are frequently asked about transferring files from the Atari to the PC or vice versa. The low-cost solution of reading Atari Single Density floppy disks with a PC 5 1/4" disk drive is often mentioned, also in the FAQ - yet I have personally experienced some difficulties in getting this done. Here's a step-by-step guide to how I (finally) got it to work:

1. Format a 5 1/4" floppy on the Atari, on both sides. This means you'll have to cut a piece out of the floppy at the place where the write-protected tab would be placed, otherwise the diskdrive will think the back-side is write-protected.
2. Use Anadisk 2.0.6 (instead of the newer Anadisk 2.0.7 which appears to be buggy) to read the floppy from the PC, using the DUMP option. Specify 40 tracks, first side only, include sector information as options.
3. Exit Anadisk, then use DEANA.COM to convert the dumped image to a standard ATR format disk image.
4. Use ImageMan or another utility like that to grab the files you need from the image.
5. If they are text files, you will have to use an editor or other utility to replace the ATASCII code $9B (155, decimal) character to newlines. In MS-DOS, you can use the utility TT.EXE which translates Atari 8-bit files to PC files and vice versa.

Here are all the utilities mentioned above, for download:

• AnaDisk 2.0.6
• AnaDisk 2.0.7
• DeAna.com
• ImageMan 0.3
• TT.exe