@cwebber Probably just a first love thing. Atari 800XL, attached floppy, and a few controllers.

My sisters and I always fought over the red handled joystick.

An old CRT with dials and a button for switching between Black & White and Color display. The color didn't always cooperate.

@brooke @pwloftus @cwebber

we had the regular 800, and my friend had the XL

I was so jealous, though I'm not sure it made any actual difference.

What i really wanted was an Atari ST, which one of my Dad's work friends kids had, and it ran this insanely awesome game called BRATACCUS

And then I wanted an Amiga, and then I wanted a NES. But no, we stuck with the friggin' Atari 800 (and a 2600) all the way up until we got an 80286.

we may have have 2 disk drives and a custom "cartidge emulator" circuit board which allowed for playing pirated games. who can say

sigh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPzlR0bnruY

@dannotdaniel @pwloftus @cwebber i think of stuff we used when i was a kid, only a couple of games actually made use of the full 64 KiB RAM on the 800XL (the 800 only went up to 48 KiB)

of which one was Sublogic Flight Simulator 2.0 (cousin of the modern Microsoft Flight Simulator line) which required the additional memory to display the wings/tail in the side/rear views, and to enable radio navigation features

(I still can't believe how much they packed into that flight sim for 8-bit computers!!)

@brooke @pwloftus @cwebber

I have to ask - what were your favorite atari titles?

Couple of my faves:

• Bruce Lee, obviously  🏆
• F-15 Strike Eagle - the only sim I had.. but I think an apache helo one also existed
• Rally Speedway for 2-player offroading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_Speedway

of course at my buddie's house with the XL... I don't think he could play the pirated games... we mostly played Donkey Kong..

@dannotdaniel @pwloftus @cwebber

Top favorite to this day:
* Rescue on Fractalus!
I regularly pull this one out and just stream myself rescuing pilots for an hour lol

* Sublogic Flight Simulator
really fascinated me though I was *terrible* at landing

* Ballblazer
had great graphics and 'twicthy' gameplay but it didn't hold up well imo

* Dig-Dug
I played a *lot* of dig-dug.

* Ghostbusters
Incredibly hard, not sure we ever actually beat the game. Just like real life! But by god you get sick of hearing the 'Ghostbusters' theme playing 24/7 during play

and of course:

* Star Raiders II

I really enjoyed this even though it was quite different from the original (because it was actually designed as a Last Starfighter media tie-in and got repurposed when the license fell through)

* Star Raiders (the original)

I spent many hours as a child zapping zylons.