Atari 800XL Composite Video Cable
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Atari 800XL and my TV
Thanks to this page about the Atari 800XL’s monitor connection output I was able to cobble together a composite video output cable for my parents old Atari 800XL. Thankfully the monitor connection is a standard DIN5 connector, so it was made by sacrificing a spare MIDI cable and an old red / white RCA cable pair.
After the SIO2PC adapter arrives and I’m able to either fix my Atari 1050 floppy drive or borrow one from someone I’ll begin imaging the whole box of floppies leftover from my youth. This will be done using Ape and ProSystem to copy all the old disks to images so they can be archived. Then they can either be run under emulation, or directly on the 800XL with the PC pretending to be the floppy drive (via the SIO2PC).
I should probably also consider doing something with the tape drive as well. Maybe pulling data / games off of that or something… Hmm…
I <3 the Atari 800 :)
One day soon I’ll even have room to unpack mine & have at all those great old classic games!
I’m wanting to image the disks I have now before they become completely unreadable.
That’s a good idea… I’ve got a ton of ’em, including unreleased games and stuff from ATARI software divisions, maybe even source code, not sure on that, though.
How many do you have? If / when I get this set up I wouldn’t mind imaging disks from other people either… If things are going as I hope I’ll just be able to drop the disk in and read it straight to a .ATR or .PRO file which can then be used loads of other places or written back to disk.
A few of the little hard boxes worth, though I have no idea what kind of condition they’re in. They were inherited (step grandfather was an early employee at ATARI), as I never owned one myself until much later. I have a working complete 800 system out in the garage (along with my other vintage computer rigs), but as you know, so much stuff, so little space to fire it up.
Hmm. I’ll let you know when I get this going… I’d really love to archive as much as possible.
Just so you know, if you have a working floppy drive, this adapter, the drive, and Enhanced ProSystem are all you need to image them.
Then using that adapter the PC can emulate a Atari disk drive at any point in the future.
Oh, neat.
Any ideas how all this stuff is done for c64 as well? I’ve got a bunch of those, too. I know there must be something, as there’s plenty of disk images around…
I’d imagine there’s something very similar. Unfortunately, until the SID stuff I’d never done anything with the C64, so I don’t really know. There seems to have been a really big effort in the past 15 years or so to be able to use PCs, flash media, and all sorts of things other than the old floppy drives as storage. I’m fairly certain similar things exist, I just haven’t checked yet.
What I really need now is a good 800XL emulator. The one I was playing with earlier kept failing while running images which shipped with APE / ProSystem. Then again, with the 800XL still working great (and others available for cheap), a component video cable, the potential for an s-video cable, and a video capture device, maybe there isn’t much of a need for a good emulator.