wilmott@topaz.rutgers.edu (Ray Wilmott) (09/11/89)
---------- Hello fellow Atari enthusiasts! This past weekend, while attending a computer show, I came into a good deal. A stand was selling Atari 800xl's refurbished and in-the-box-with-everything for $35. I ended up saying "why not...I'll hold onto it as a backup in case mine happens to die on me". Once I got it home and did a little inspection of the unit, I discovered that not only did it look new and work great, but it has a 256k Rambo installed in it. This made my day since I've thought about having one installed in my old 800xl, but never did! 2 questions... 1) The video output quality. The 256k machine has a "softer" picture than my old 64k machine...the colors are not as vivid. Not that I think anything can be done about this, but out of curiousity; is the likely reason just that the new machine has a lower quality video circuit (it's a newer production run than my old one), or is the slight "washing-out" of colors a result of the greater power demand placed upon the transformer by the upgrade? 2) Software. Up 'til now, I've more or less ignored software designed to use memory beyond the 64k mark. Now that I've got some extra to play with, I'd like to know exactly which titles work only on 128k+ machines, or those that offer improved performance with more memory. I am interested in hearing about ANY type of software, from games to demo's to utilities to applications; whether they be commercial, shareware or PD. Probably the thing I would like to find MOST is a word processor that takes advantage of extra memory and allows editing of larger documents. (up 'til now, Textwiz was my choice with about a 24k buffer...can I assume I can do better now?) -Ray wilmott@topaz.rutgers.edu (alt: @althea.att.com)
usenet@cps3xx.UUCP (Usenet file owner) (09/14/89)
You should not see any video difference between your XL and your XL with an upgrade, at least not from the upgrade. The only real way to check is pull the upgrade, but as a long time owner of a 256K upgrade and installer of many others, it's never been a problem. Some packages that support the upgrade are: Anything that runs on a 130XE, (ignoring a backpage video demo from Antic) as a 128K machine: A large selection of ramdisk software Typesetter 256, a PD bitmap typesetter Paperclip 2.0. It would give 128K as an editing buffer, and when you used the spell checker, it copies the dictionary into the other 128K so subsequent checks are fast. Various disk copy routines. I can't remember which off the top of my head. The new MTOS, I believe, is supposed to support extended memory pages. There are various other titles that will suprise you when they suddenly have more memory than you remembered. For exploring your extended memory upgrade (or making one,) my Detroit BBS, The Club II, has an archive of all the extended memory software I've ever seen, much of it with source code. Some of it is very old software, like BASIC code just to switch banks to see if they're there, but it allows you to "follow" the progress of extended memory Atari history. The Club II is at 313-334-8877 (and obviously has a lot of other 8bit stuff.) Terry Conklin uunet!frith!conklin The Club (517) 372-3131 conklin@egr.msu.edu aren't mailers fun?
Ordania-DM@cup.portal.com (Charles K Hughes) (09/15/89)
Hi Terry, nice to see you on USENET. I'm a semi-regular caller of your BBS. When are you going to hook your BBS into USENET? :) Chuck Hughes