Atari 800XL (or 3) found in my loft!

Okay, this will be a QUICK post... honest...

I was watching a YouTube video about a new Retro-Museum being opened in DERBY....

...and I was thinking, well, there we go - when we pop along in the motorhome to the Peak District we can "pop-in" on a Saturday 10-4pm for a visit.

Then my missus said, "you could probably open one of your own".  This got me thinking.

I then decided to take a little look up in the loft(s)..and whilst I had sold off an entire room of Amstrad related retro-hardware about 10years ago (I dread to think what that lot would be worth now - but hey-ho)

I found quite a few boxes of interesting machines that I had bought back in the 2007/2008 timeframe.

As I said, I'll do a more indepth post on each setup etc... in the future, for now here is a taster; there are quite a few Spectrum machines (something I never had as a kid), a few Toshiba MSXs and a few Atari 800 XLs.... with lots of peripherals.

Yes, that is 2 x 5.1/4" floppy disc drives - I'll be looking to get them working too!

I quickly discovered that one of the connector cables was a little damaged - swapped it out and the tape drive works fine now.

pretty well impressed, I can tell you!

...and then after doing a bit of reading and searching, I found that I have to connect the cable into a specific slot, turn on the device with select+start pressed with play already pushed on the tape-player and then press SPACE and it loads the game from the tape.

I must admit, I was pretty impressed with the speed / graphics from an early 1980s Atari!  and yes, I did plug in Pacman and Joust cartridges and then booted up straight away and worked absolutely fine.

It looks like it might be a proper retro-xmas this year :-D

Now...I wonder what I can do with the new Raspberry Pico W devices and the SPIO connector on the back of these....hmmmm..... also, it would be rude not to write some C code for these... and well, I have 3 of them, it would be a shame to not network them up and get them onto the WiFi (hang on - I think I've been here before over an xmas period!!!!) okay, I'll stick with buying some UCB power cables and maybe a disc/tape sd-card thingy and a new monitor cable and stick with being a "user" for a bit longer.... 

Apparently I still have the Aloe Vera soil sensor project to finish off.... oooh, I wonder if I can connect that up to one of these?... stop it!