The Atari 600XL forms part of the second generation of computers that Atari had produced. The system is very compact and well designed with a small hatch on top for cartridges. Unlike the previous machines Atari had incorporated it?s basic into the machine itself, and not as a cartridge. The machine was also upgradeable to 800XL by simply adding a Memory expansion at the back of the machine. Atari released three versions of Rom for this particular machine. It seems that when you de-allocated a 256-byte block by simply deleting or edited the line number, the machine freezes up. This problem was partially solved in Rev B by corrected only the move-up routine which made it worse. This new changes also included an extra 16 byte file size during saving. Rev C is the final Rom that Atari had produced for this series. The most common accessory for this computer was the 1010 Tape Recorder. This device has a fantastic feature that most machines do not have. While you are loading you could listen to the music on the other track. This was possible only because Atari included a Stereo head and one of the head?s wiring is directly connected to the Audio in of the machine. Mainly this feature was designed for educational purposes, but soon it was used for background music while the software is loading.
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| 600XL |
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US$550 introduction Price later reduced drastically
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| Boxed: 83AEU33815034 |
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| 1983 |
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| 6502c 8Bit CPU running on a frequency of 1.79Mhz for NTSC users and 1.77Mhz for Pal users. The system also has 3 Co-processors for sound and video. |
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| 24 Kbytes Rom (16Kbytes OS and 4 Kbytes Basic Interpreter.) 16Kbtes Ram expandable to 64K Ram. |
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| Long Plastic Case with a Medium light brown colour and the keys in dark brown. There are Five silver metal function keys, located on the right hand side of the machine. The Keyboard is almost a standard US QWERTY style with 57 keys including CONTROL, ESC, CAPS LOCK and CAPS. |
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| The 600XL display is identical to the previous models. The display is controlled by a LSI custom chip named Antic Actually it’s a microprocessor that is capable of running programs. The ANTIC chip controls a gate array chip code named GTIA that generates the TV output from the data sent to it. Although a bit slow, the above method made it possible that even the CPU can talk directly to the GTIA for producing images. The GTIA is also capable of producing sprites on screen.
The Atari Text Resolution are as follow: 40×24, 2 Colours 20×12, 5 Colours, 20×24 5 Colours, 40×12 5 colours & 40×24 5 colours, 40×19 2 colours. Characters are formed in an 8×10 matrix with 2 colours. The Atari Graphic Resolution are as follow: 40×24 4 colours, 80×48 2 colours, 160×96 2 colours, 160×96 4 colours, 320×192 2 colours 80×192 16 colours (Shades), 80×192 9 colours 80×192 16 colours (hues) & 160×192 2 colours 160×192 4 colours. All colours are selected from 16 colours with 16 shades each which gives a total of 256 colours.
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| The sound is generated by a custom chip processor code named POKEY. The chip is capable of producing 4 channels with 8 bit pitch resolution each. This means that you can produce 256 different tones at 16 different volumes. The channels can be combined into two pairs to produce a 16 bit pitch resolution (65535 tones). |
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| 2 x Joystick Ports, 1 x RF output for TV, 1 x Cartridge Port. Mainly this port is for game cartridges, but it can be used for another language interpreter such as MC, 1 x Expansion 30 pin parallel bus port, for memory upgrade & 1 x I/O Port. This port you could attach any peripheral from a tape recorder with a baud rate of up to 4800 bps, disk drive, and printer. |
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| Very heavy and bulky external power supply, with two +5v outputs and one -5v output. |
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| Dimensions 375mm x 220mm x 60mm (WxLxH) Weight Approx 1.90kg. |
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| Around 16,000 units |
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