A full-size recreation of the Atari 800XL is now available to buy — the company’s best-selling 8-bit home computer, introduced in 1983 with 64KB of memory, dedicated graphics and sound chips, and built-in BASIC.
The announcement trailer.
What distinguishes this from a plug-and-play games console
The retro-hardware market is full of small boxes with a joystick and a fixed menu of games. This is a different product, and three things make it so.
A 57-key mechanically switched keyboard. Full size, real switches. This is the expensive part of recreating a home computer and the part most reissues skip, because a keyboard that is only there for nostalgia is a cost. A keyboard that works is the difference between a machine you use and a machine you look at.
Atari BASIC in ROM. It boots into a programming language. That is what an 8-bit home computer was: the default state of the machine, before you loaded anything, was a prompt that would accept a program. Whether or not anyone writes much BASIC on it, shipping the interpreter rather than a launcher is a statement about what the object is.
A cartridge slot that takes original media — most cartridges released for the Atari 400, 800, XL and XE computer series. And it will load your own software written for 8-bit Atari computers and the Atari 5200 console.
That last capability is the one that matters for anyone making things. There is an active scene writing new software for 8-bit Atari hardware — demos, games, music, tools — and the usual route to running it on real hardware is an SD cartridge on a 40-year-old machine with 40-year-old capacitors. A new machine that accepts the same software and outputs HDMI removes the archaeology from the process.
The modern conveniences
- HDMI output, with optional CRT filters and 12 display frames for tuning how it looks
- Four USB-A ports for additional controllers and USB storage
- THECXSTICK — an updated take on the classic joystick, with eight buttons
- 25 built-in games including Asteroids, BattleZone, Berzerk, Boulder Dash, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede and Missile Command
The CRT filter options are worth a note, because the Atari 8-bit machines are a case where the filter is not optional for accuracy. Their graphics modes relied on artefact colouring — exploiting NTSC composite encoding to produce colours the hardware could not address directly — and on a sharp digital output those effects simply do not appear. A machine that recreates the display behaviour as well as the logic is the only way that software looks the way it was authored.
Why the 800XL specifically
It was the right machine to choose. The 800XL was Atari’s volume seller in the 8-bit line, it is the configuration most software targets, and it sits at the point where the Atari 8-bit architecture was mature: ANTIC and GTIA for graphics, POKEY for sound, and a display list system that let programs change graphics mode line by line — an unusually flexible arrangement that is still interesting to program against.
For readers who came up on the other side of the aisle, the framing writes itself: this is the answer to the Commodore 64 reissues, for people who were Team Atari.