For whatever reason I love all things ATARI. Not that ATARI of today which just does video games but rather the ATARI that intoduced the first home gaming console, the first round of 8-bit home computers and even their 16-bit computers. As my wife will remind me from time to time I have a collection of ATARI 8-bit and 16-bit hardware in my basement that she would consider huge but I consider modest.

I still have all my old computers, my floppy disks, joysticks, tape player (used for storage) and different disk drives. It’s funny to think that my USB drive that I carry in my pocket is big enough to store 46,000 ATARI floppy disks. My how times change.

I keep intending to finish my ATARI collection. I’m missing an ATARI 1200XL which was the computer I always longed for. I also don’t have a Happy Enhancement on any of my drives. I also keep intending on hauling out my old ATARI 800 and plugging it into my TV and play Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves.

I was super excited that there is an ATARI 800 emulator for the Wii (by way of the Homebrew channel). So now I need to transfer my floppy disks to images I can manage using today’s storage. Us used to have an APE cable that I build myself but now I’ve found an SIO2SD that looks like the way to go. I’m just trying to decide if I should buy it and transfer my games and data.

Just as a point of interest, at work the cover of my “work notebook” is a color print of Atari Age magazine featuring the Swordquest scene. The icon on my home coputer that I use for my windows badge is the ATARI logo. If I ever got a tattoo (which I won’t) it would be an ATARI symbol. I guess I’m a pretty big fan, eh?