Meet the Atari64. What is Atari64 you ask? It’s the Commodore 64 KERNAL, modified to run on the Atari 8-bit line of computers. Apparently they’re practically the same machine.
The project is still in beta, and at this point the keyboard, the PETSCII screen editor, and BASIC work.
- The Atari logo key will type the pi character.
- Shift-Atari logo will switch between uppercase-graphics and lowercase-uppercase character set.
- Hold the OPTION, SELECT, or START key to type the graphics characters you’d ordinarily type with the Commodore logo key.
- If a lot of text is scrolling by, you can hold the OPTION key to slow down the scrolling, like you would hold down CTRL on a real C64.
Theses are the known issues:
- If the C64 OS is in RAM, RESET reboots the original Atari OS. Supposedly the old Translator disk got around this somehow.
- There is no way yet to save or load BASIC programs
- There’s no I/O at all actually
- PETSCII color will never work.
For more information about the Atari64 and how to setup your own version check out the authors Github page Unbibium/Atari64.
