THE 800XL

I already have an Atari 800XL, but this is about THE 800XL, a new retro computer announced by Atari on October 8, 2026. It is a recreation of the classic Atari 8-bit computer, featuring 25 built-in games, a full-size mechanical keyboard, a working cartridge slot, HDMI output and more. It also includes THE CXSTICK 8-button USB joystick.

All this for $220, but is it worth it?

I should point out that this has only just been announced and won’t actually be available until April 2027. You can pre-order it now, if you’re into that.

It appears that this is very similar to Atari’s THE 400 Mini (a shrunken Atari 400 with a joystick, but no keyboard and no cartridge port that sells for about $84), which also includes the same 25 games:

• Airball

• Asteroids

• Basketball

• Battlezone

• Berzerk

• Boulder Dash

• Bristles

• Capture the Flag

• Centipede

• Crystal Castles

• Elektraglide

• Encounter!

• Flip and Flop

• Henry’s House

• Hover Bovver

• Lee (aka Bruce Lee)

• M.U.L.E.

• Millipede

• Miner 2049er

• Missile Command

• O’Riley’s Mine

• Star Raiders II

• The Seven Cities of Gold

• Wavy Navy

• Yoomp!

THE 800XL is also an emulator under the hood and only uses USB-A for connecting devices, such as joysticks and USB drives to use other software.

It is weird that on Atari’s store page, one is called ATARI 400 MINI and the other is called THE 800XL (with no mention of Atari). But then the box photos show THE 400 and THE 800XL. That all seems rather inconsistent.

I never picked up THE 400 Mini as its form factor didn’t interest me, even though the Atari 400 was my first computer. But unlike THE 400 Mini, THE 800XL is full-size. In fact, it is nearly the exact same size as a classic 800XL and has a full-size mechanical keyboard. I’m excited for that!

With my growing collection of Atari 8-bit cartridges, I’m also thrilled that it has a cartridge port. I’m sure it will have no trouble with my various game carts, but I’m curious if it will be able to use my OSS language carts such as BASIC XL, BASIC XE, Action! and MAC/65. I’d also be curious to know if my Sidecart will work with it. Somehow I doubt it.

Having HDMI output will also be really nice. Without a video upgrade, the best output you can get out of an original 800XL is S-Video, which is not bad and certainly fits its graphic resolutions, but fewer TVs and monitors have that connector these days.

It also has BASIC built-in. From the marketing materials, you can boot from disk images on a USB drive, which means you ought to be able to run some other programming languages on it and save things back to the disk image. This would be wonderful, especially with that keyboard.

There do look to be some settings you can change. I hope that you can increase the memory to 128K (or more) to take advantage of RAM disks.

Unfortunately there is no support for native peripherals. You cannot use a standard 9-pin joystick, so you have to use the included USB joystick or add your own. I also have a Trooper 2 USB joystick which I expect will work fine.

You also cannot plug in any SIO devices, such as disk drives or something newer such as FujiNet. I have a couple of disk drives and tons of floppy software in addition to a FujiNet, so that is a significant disappointment. Perhaps someone will be able to come up with a USB-to-SIO cable that doesn’t also require software to allow peripheral connections.

One extra feature that I’d love to see is the ability to use THE 800XL as an external keyboard with another computer. That would be so much fun!

Overall, I’m pretty excited for this. It’s not like I need yet another Atari 8-bit computer since I already have an 800, 800XL, 130XE and (non-working) 1200XL. But those are all 40+ years old at this point and can be fragile.

Although I’m pretty happy with this announcement, I won’t be pre-ordering one. I prefer to wait for products to be actually available before I order them. And if history is any guide, most Atari retro hardware tends to drop in price a short while after release.

I expect this might make a wonderful Father’s Day 2027 gift!

If you’d like to learn more, the YouTuber Jon at GenXGrownup has some hands-on videos of THE 800XL from the Portland (Oregon) Retro Gaming Expo that are worth a quick watch.