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130XE Repaired!

You might recall that earlier this summer I picked up an Atari 130XE in the box on eBay. I never had one back in the 80s as I moved on from an 800XL to a 1040ST, skipping the 130XE. But I always found the 130XE fascinating.

Although the 130XE that I purchased was in great physical condition and it powered on and worked, it had one big issue: the color was all messed up. I wrote about this earlier, guessing that the problem was related to the R38 color-adjusting potentiometer.

Shortly after I posted about the color issue, a Goto 10 reader, Rick of 8-bit and more, contacted me with an offer to take a look at it. I shipped it off to him and he was able to confirm that that R38 POT was bad and replaced it with an equivalent. He even made a video of the repair which you can watch here:

Many thanks to Rick for getting this repaired for me! Be sure to check out the 8-bit and more channel on YouTube which has many Atari 8-bit videos and a few recent ST videos as well. His web site also has some great content.

I now have the 130XE hooked up in my office with an S-Video cable to my LCD display and it looks great. Everything is super-sharp and the colors are fabulous.

I tried out several of my cartridges (such as Ms. Pac-Man and Pole Position) and they worked great.

Wanting the 130XE

So why did I want a 130XE? After all, it is certainly possible these days to get an 800XL (which I already have) upgraded to more than 64K of RAM (1MB is an option) and have its s-video output fixed.

The main reason is that I really like the design of the 130XE. It matches nicely with the ST models and I like that. I always wanted one back in the day, but it is actually pretty hard to find here in the US today. The 800XL and 800 are far more common.

Did you know that for a short time in the early 80s, the Atari 400/800 outsold the Apple II series?

Overall, Atari is claimed to have sold about 2 million 8-bit computers (about 1/10 the amount of Commodore 64s that were sold). Most of these seem to have been 800XLs. By the time Atari released the 130XE, 65XE and XE Game System the 8-bit computers were not selling all that well. This means there are fewer of these old models around to purchase.

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I also think that the quality of much of what the Tramiel-era Atari produced was not as good as the prior 800 and 800XL models. This is not too surprising as they had some low price targets to hit. The 130XE sold for $149 in the US, after all! Still, I have heard that 130XEs are prone to failure, particularly with the memory. So the rarity was another factor. We will see if mine ends up affected by this quality problem.

But like I said above, at least the 130XE fixed the video issue. In addition, all 130XEs had Revision C BASIC which fixed a nasty lock-up bug in Revision B that was installed on most 800XLs (although my 800XL is a late model with Rev C BASIC).

Lastly, I like the idea of having a (relatively) bog-standard Atari system with more than 64K so I can set up a RAM disk for use with the various programming tools I want to get up and running, such as Action!, Kyan Pascal, BASIC XE, Turbo BASIC XL and Lightspeed C.

The keyboard on the 130XE has that familiar mushy feel that is also on the ST. I’d say the 800 keyboard and most 800XL keyboards are better. I do like that the graphics characters are printed on the side, though.

Atari also made two other XE models: the 65XE and XE Game System. In the US, I don’t think the 65XE was readily available. I think Atari still had a lot of old stock of 800XL machines and just sold what they had instead. I think the 65XE was more common in Canada and perhaps Europe, though, where more people were still buying new 8-bit computers.

The XE Game System (XEGS) was even less popular. It was released very late in the bit’s lifespan (costing about the same as a 130XE) and marketed mostly as a (somewhat outdated) video game system rather than a computer. I think few were sold, probably mostly to existing Atari 8-bit users that wanted a system with a detached keyboard. Unfortunately it only had 64K of RAM so without doing some 3rd-party upgrades, it did not end up being a great overall upgrade.

As far as 8-bit add-ons go, I already have both a FujiNet and an S-Drive Max. I also have two disk drives: an Atari 1050 and a Rana 1000 with hundreds of floppy disks.

So I think I have enough hardware for now, although a way to automatically set the clock would be nice. Perhaps the FujiNet is able to do this?

I’d also love to get my hands on one of the ICD MIO (multi-I/O) devices that plugged into the parallel port, but those seem even rarer still. I’ve never seen one for sale anywhere since the late 80s and early 90s.

My plans for this 130XE are to get a SpartaDOS boot image set up on the FujiNet, ideally set up to emulate a hard drive. I can then start to play around with some of the FujiNet features, especially its network capability.

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