Atari 800: Going Online Like it's 1979

Remarkably, the Atari 8-bit is in a bit of a renaissance now, with many fascinating projects being developed both commercially and as open source. There are products to upgrade the memory to 1MB (significantly more than stock), upgrade the CPU to 20MHz (nearly 20x its original clock speed), and output modern digital video directly. One of the most impressive projects to hit the Atari 8-bit scene recently is FujiNet.

via yellowplastic

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It’s been remarkable seeing what Thomas Cherryhomes has done with FujiNet. He’s demonstrated how you can remotely boot an Atari over the internet, so you don’t need a physical disk drive, and save and load programs and data from remote network drives; how you can do online chat with an IRC client written in Atari Basic; and how you can easily convert simple Basic games that were originally multiplayer into online games that multiple people can play on over the internet.

It’s gotten me fantasizing sometimes about, “Oh, if only this was available 35 years ago,” but then I remember that the technology to do this was not this small (it would’ve required an Ethernet connector, since I don’t think WiFi technology was standardized then), was not nearly this affordable, and broadband internet was not widespread.

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