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From: jhs@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari8
Subject: Re: Video games on 8-bit machines
Message-ID: <8609021529.AA26064@mitre-bedford.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 2-Sep-86 11:41:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: mitre-be.8609021529.AA26064
Posted: Tue Sep  2 11:41:56 1986
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I recommend the Atari 800XL, which is currently selling at Toys R Us for
$69.99.  Also available mail order at that price if Toys R Us is sold out.
(In fact I recommend buying a second one as a spare!)

The 800XL can be used to produce RGB output if you are willing to build up
a special circuit for the purpose (basically requiring 1 IC).  The trick is to
bring out the CHROMA signal separately and keep it separate into the chroma
input of the NTSC decoder chip.  The NTSC composite output has a filter to
band limit the Chroma to keep it from spilling over into the luminance signal.
If you decode the COMPOSITE signal this band limiting will limit resolution to
far less than you can get by handling the Chroma separately.  I am told that
if you use the unfiltered LUMINANCE and CHROMA signals as the starting point
and design the circuit carefully, the resolution of an RGB output can be made
essentially as good as any RGB monitor can resolve.  A relative of mine has
been helping a friend design such a converter, and I might be able to get some
design hints, maybe even a schematic diagram if there is interest.

The 800XL, unlike the video game units, can be expanded into a fairly useable
general-purpose home computer for word processing, learning programming, and
even fairly serious business applications.  In this day and age of megabytes,
it is easy to forget that a 1.78-MHz clock and 65K bytes used to be considered
a darn powerful computer!  (More than a PDP-8 for example.)

-John Sangster
jhs@mitre-bedford.arpa

P.S. - Currently the 1050 disk drive is selling for around $125 mail order.
A TV set, 800XL and 1050 is enough to do some serious applications with.
The Commodore is considerably more expensive, the disk drive is slower, and
those who really know say the operating system is a real kludge compared to
what Atari provides.