Atari 400

Introduced in time for Christmas of 1979 the Atari 400 was the little brother of the Atari 800. It differed from the 800 only in form, not in function. Both Atari computers had the same processor and chip sets. The 400 had a membrane keyboard (kid safe) where the 800 had a full-travel keyboard and the 400 was limited to one expansion slot and, at least initially, a fixed 16k of RAM.

The Atari 400 computer is a 6502 based machine with custom graphics and sound chips that made it a gamers delight. The Atari line had a fairly wide variety of peripherals available including tape and disk drives, printers, modems and interface units. The 400, like the 800, was compatible with them all.

The Atari 400 also worked with all Atari computer cartridges that could run in its more limited RAM.

Included with the Educator package is a nice, clean and apparently never used Atari 410 program recorder.

Elsewhere in the other boxes are near-new examples of several Atari game and application packages and paddles and joysticks still in their boxes.

(Submitted June 27, 2008 17:08:33 by Bob H)

I have an Atari 400 for sale. It is still in box and comes with all that came with it for set up. Games also included with track ball, are; Quix, Robotron, Centepede, Ms. Pacman, Pacman, Dig-Dug. Only one Kraft joystick survived. If interested contact me at countingmoney10@charter.net

(Submitted December 18, 2007 21:50:15 by Carlton)

The 400 was excellent. I spent countless hours programming in BASIC, learning from code in the back of magazines. That machine provided for my future by setting a direction for me. Since mine disappeared, I am trying to find a replacement, but it's been difficult to win ebay auctions for these things. Evidently everyone still wants one. :)

(Submitted November 16, 2007 14:03:00 by Najeh Ben Kacem)

I have a computer and its new and i want to sell it. This computer arent inatlaion and made in 1992 (15) jears old and with all Accessories. are you intersted ?? please mail back . I am from germany. and plesa i want that my name is anyme. thanks

(Submitted September 25, 2007 01:33:51 by mike)

i had an ATARI 400 that i programmed using Basic. Peek and Poke statements

(Submitted December 5, 2006 20:34:11 by Tara )

I am looking to buy a few games for the atari 400/800. Does anyone know where I could find a few? Thanks, Tara

(Submitted October 13, 2006 13:36:25 by Eric)

The Atari 400 and 800 were capable of 320 x 192 in 256 colours using interlacing and Display List Interrupts (DLIs). Plenty of games and demos came out which showed off this ability at the time. No other home computer was capable of this colour resolution at the time - as inflexible as it was.

(Submitted September 9, 2006 20:06:54 by Ray Taylor)

For those trying to hook your old atari up to a modern tv, note that it does not just 'plug in', you will need to tune it to a preset channel also.

(Submitted July 10, 2006 12:31:45 by (a href=mailto:)tom(/a))

The Atari 400 is not worth a whole lot, unless you have alot of software and accessories, so please don't think you've hit a goldmine.

Also, on the connection, the 400 should have a switch box with it. The box has a slider from computer to TV. To use it you have to hook the computer video cable to it and then have a converter to convert the two wires to a coaxial connection. The converter is fairly cheap.

You can't just insert the video plug directly into the A/V or coax jack on your TV.

(Submitted February 27, 2006 14:16:40 by Tony)

For Kari. I've got one of those! I found it at some car boot ('garage') sale years and years ago: it's a 400 which had it's keyboard replaced by a real one. Shame that it didn't work, but still. . . I assume that one could have the membranes replaced by keys - if it happened here in the UK it must have happened in the States.

(Submitted January 21, 2006 06:47:32 by frank)

I found an old atari 400 promotional video tape... it is really funny. I was a dealer for Atari in 1979. I am making it into an mpeg I video file... I will trade to someone for an atari T-shirt.

(Submitted January 2, 2006 21:36:36 by Kari)

has anyone seen an atari that is a mix of the 400 and 800? the atari i have has the keyboard of the 800 but the cartridge spot of a 400 and i cant find one like it anywhere else. just curious if anyone knows anything about it.

(Submitted December 1, 2005 08:34:16 by steeldude)

i got a atari 400 on ebay but it wont work on my tv doe's the vidio card go to the vidio on tv and i put it on vidio on tv and still don't work

(Submitted June 16, 2005 09:10:03 by jerry )

Dude if you want to keep your old pc's in top condition you need a technical service manual personally i have the service manuals for the ATARI CX5200, ATARI 400, ATARI 500, also the 810 Disk drive, 410 TAPE drive. I have multiple copys of some. I found these in the back of an old tv shop the boss said to get rid of em' along with these are service bulletins, tech tips,revision requests, and other goodies. might be generous and post a site but only if responce is desernable.

feel free to e-mail me!

(Submitted May 16, 2005 01:52:01 by Jordan Bouzeneris)

(Damn, I make one small statement about ram & all the hardware hackers start talking)

(Submitted April 15, 2005 16:33:41 by chris)

I am looking for an old atari game that I loved, i thini it was called king of the mountian,none of the atari web pages have it listed as existing, it was a little man that had to run through caves looking for something, it was over 20 years ago and I am having no luck, was hoping some else out there besides my little brother remembers it

(Submitted November 27, 2004 12:04:09 by Shannon Smith)

I just found my Atari 400 while cleaning out my parent's basement. I'm trying to hook it up to my 2004 TV set, figuring I could just insert the video jack into one of my video inputs. Thing is it's not working ... any ideas or solutions?

(Submitted November 1, 2004 14:04:19 by Lane Flinders)

Would any of you be interested in buying the upgradeable 48kb of RAM hardware for the Atari 400? I found the hardware at a thrift shop in its original box and manuals. Let me know if its even worth anything or not. Lane

(Submitted October 24, 2004 12:23:22 by stefan oetter)

I had an Atari 400 that came with 16k. I remeber having to solder in exta memory. My big dilema at the time was 48k or 64k. I went for 48k assuming one would NEVER need 64 in a computer! P.S. I'd also added the Happy Computing disk duplicator and regular keyboard.

(Submitted October 19, 2004 11:33:23 by Tom Gurak)

I have an Atari 400 that a friend and I upgraded with 64K-bit chips, giving the machine a total of 52KB of RAM. At the same time, we replaced the membrane keyboard with a real one. And yes, it definitely was a color machine.

(Submitted September 21, 2004 10:10:11 by Steve Holcroft)

The Atari 400 was very definitely a colour machine. I can't remember the resolution exactly, but I remember programming in colour and playing colour games.

(Submitted July 23, 2004 12:20:03 by Jordan Bouzeneris)

The Atari 400 did have 16kb of fixed ram, but was upgradeable to 48kb. I wouldn't try to find one, they where only upgradable by sending your 400 to a service center and no one did.

(Submitted July 19, 2004 15:30:42 by Dan Ritter)

I think you got the video description completely wrong on the Atari 400 and the other atari 8bits if you used this same description for the video (I haven't looked yet). But the 320x200 resolution was 1 bit color (meaning black and white with no grey levels). However some color (Red and Blue) could be done with something called artifacting. I don't completely understand artifacting but it has something to do with the frequencies generated by the video chip and the effective resolution using this technique would be 160x192. I know of no other abilities even when using machine language low level programming for any of the atari 8bits to do any higher resolutions.

Description
Manufacturer	Atari
Model	400
Date Announced	1979
Date Canceled	1982
Number Produced	Hundreds of thousands
Country of Origin	USA
Price	Approximately $500
Current Value	$10-$75

Specifications
Processor	Rockwell 6502
Speed	1.79 MHz
RAM	Up to 48K (almost always 16K)
ROM	10K
Storage	Cassette Tape or 5.25" floppy disk.
Expansion	1 cartridge slots, 2 well protected memory slots and a daisy-chainable expansion bus
Bus	N/A
Video	Up to 320x192x16 color composite video or TV out standard and much higher resolutions and color depths with low-level programming
I/O	I/O bus could connect to an optional interface unit with parallel and serial ports
OS Options	Atari OS

Notes	The Atari 400 was a very advanced machine for its time. Although it was built around the same microprocessor as many of its direct competitors such as the Apple II Plus and the Commodore Pet it added various co-processors to handle graphics and sound generation tasks. The 400 was the little brother to the 800. It had a membrane keyboard (to protect against spills from the children who were its target market) and less expansion capability.

Related Items in Collection	810 disk drive, 1050 disk drive, software and cartridges, Atari 800
Related Items Wanted	Additional disk drives (810, 1050, RANA), cartridges and software. 850 interface, Atari brand joysticks.