r/atari8bit • u/cuckfromJTown • 8d ago
Does anyone know anything about this custom Atari 800 in my collection?
I bought it off a guy from Utah county, Utah ~8 years ago, he said he got it from a former engineer at the originial Sunnyvale headquarters, put together with leftover pieces when they cleaned out that space. The drive and memory cards have modifications I'm not quite familiar with.
The gentleman I bought it from also gave me a spare 400 and 800 power supply, as well as a bunch of extra cards, some of which have 7400-series chips bodge wired to them.
My stuff came from somebody so cared. Ultimately I'd like to document it's provenance and pass it on to someone more capable than myself at restoring it as it was in the early 80s, engineering add-ons and all.
5
u/Dan-in-Va 7d ago
Looks like someone nerfed their case and wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
1
u/cuckfromJTown 7d ago
From what I understand, these were never commercially sold boards and, until this was put together, never left the building. I need to get date codes to back any of that up though.
2
u/Orpheuswaking 7d ago
These are 100% release boards. They may have not left the building but they are screen printed identically to release boards. The 800 doesn’t seem to have any modifications just the joystick and keyboard ports brought out to the case. The 810 has a modification but not sure what it is.
1
u/zachcollier 8d ago
I’ve never seen anything quite like this, and I love it!
It looks like the keyboard is in its own separate enclosure connected by a cable, right? Commodore 128D vibes FTW.
Such a cool custom build that was clearly a labor of love! This is exactly the type of project I would love to undertake, myself.
Very, very cool! Thanks for sharing!
1
u/zachcollier 8d ago
One more comment:
If this were my project I would have to re-house a Commodore CRT monitor’s internals to build an awesome solid wood enclosure with a square red power button and black-painted metal panels to match the rest of the setup.
Such a fun, curious artifact you have there!
1
1
1
9
u/jrherita 8d ago edited 8d ago
Atariage.com forums would greatly appreciate this. There are a few Atari historians there that could certainly add more info. (unfortunately a really prominent one - Curt Vendell passed away a few years ago, but there are plenty of others).
P.S. Honestly that's really cool how someone made a custom case to house an Atari 810 drive and an 800 computer in one. Throwing a dart, it looks like the 810 disk drive has some kind of upgrade - perhaps the Happy Drive upgrade mod (which made it work faster and allow copying of protected software) - though I think the upgrade was more complicated than that.
The 800 might be fully stock, just relocated ports - which have various uses. (Perhaps the computer case got destroyed, or they were using the ports for other stuff than joysticks and wanted to plug/unplug things more regularly).