Atari 800 (wikipedia.org)

The Atari 400 and 800 were both based on the 6502 CPU and had a number of custom chips that definitely pushed the envelope in the late 70s and meant that close descendants of these machines were still being sold in the late 80s.

I very much remember the first time I saw an Atari 800 in person back in a office supply store in my hometown in Germany – it must have been 1982, when most affordable home computers where small plastic boxes with the simplest possible keyboards, often no sound, and quite often black-and-white TV video output.

The Atari 800 towered over these other machines, with cartridge ports under a neat lid in the top and the large keyboard in an extremely heavy case. And that machine was able to provide very robust graphics and amazing sound for the time.

Many hours were spent “testing” that machine and the few games available in that store, but I never bought an Atari 800 until much later when I got myself an Atari 800XL in the mid-80s when they were on sale for ridiculously little money after the Atari ST series machines had come out.

The 8-bit Ataris, during most of their production time, were overrun by cheaper competition, chief among them of course the Commodore C64, which had a slightly simpler architecture and a cheaper price, which helped in attracting huge sales numbers worldwide and as a result of that the full attention of software developers everywhere.

There were many great early arcade game conversions for the Atari 800 and I have very fond memories of both Mr. Do and Dig Dug among others. An original release for this machine was Lucasfilm’s Rescue on Fractalus – which made the most of the limited 8-Bit machine and certainly was one of the highlights of this era.

There it was! The tiny Spectrum suddenly contained a three-dimensional world you could run around in. This was so different from all the 2D platform games of the time and was certainly an inspiration for me to stick with programming as a life choice.

The page is also interesting as it shows how Sandy programmed the game – handwritten and hand-assembled machine code on a notepad! Those were the days, indeed.

Thanks to its learning curve and complexity, most people will never even know what an amazing application the MS Flight Simulator is – it’s not just that you simulate to fly a plane, what is so special is the feeling of really being there. The simulation of the world around you has reached ridiculous levels with the last two versions of the software, to the point where I could just sit somewhere in a corner of a busy airport and watch the simulated world around me for hours.

Well, once the PC was gone, I really missed that.

But one year without flying a plane is enough, so now I’ve bought X-Plane from Laminar Research.

X-Plane is actually the better flight simulation of the two, and I had to re-learn – and unlearn – a lot of my old habits to become a better pilot. The scenery around the plane is actually also very detailed with beautiful weather effects and a much better wind model, but – alas – the world is mostly devoid of life again as it was in MS Flight Simulator three versions ago.

But it’s great to be back flying again!