Welcome back to The 8-Bit Guy. Today I'm going to be looking at The 400 mini,
and it seems I was one of the last youtubers to receive theirs,
so most of you are probably already at least a little familiar with this by now.
But for me, this is actually going to be an interesting journey because I didn't grow up
with Atari computers. In fact, if you take a look at this picture here of me at age 5,
I'm playing an Atari 2600 on our livingroom TV. This was the extent of my knowledge of Atari,
and when I first saw an Atari 400 in an electronic store, my thought at the time
was "Oh, it's an Atari 2600 with a keyboard. The keyboard must be used for when you need to type
in your name for a high score or something." Little did I know that it was a full computer
and that even the gaming capabilities were significantly more advanced than the 2600.
As such, I ended up taking the path of the Commodore VIC-20, and later the C64 and 128
instead of the path of Atari. I never owned an Atari computer until adulthood when I started
collecting vintage computers. And while I've learned a lot about how they work, the one
thing I am not super qualified to talk about is what games or software were popular at the time.
And so, here's a real Atari 400 from my collection, and here's the 400 mini
next to it. The resemblance is quite remarkable, actually. Not only does the color match perfectly,
but even the feel of the membrand keyboard is closely replicated on the mini. Of course,
like all of these products, the keyboard on the mini is just for show and doesn't actually work.
As you can se, the original Atari 400 had 4 joystick ports, and likewise the
mini has 4 USB ports in the same orientation. So, presumably we could have a 4 player game of MULE.
OK, so one problem that has to be addressed is that these keys here are actually kind of
important to being able to play games. And since the keyboard does not work on the 400 mini,
that means these keys do not work either. So, to compensate for that, they've got an
interesting little joystick here. So this is an Original Atari 2600 joystick. Now, apparently,
some of them had the little rings here painted and some did not. Obviously, this one does not.
But as you can see they are pretty much identical in size. But one of the neat things that they've
done here is they've given us some extra buttons, but they're not super obvious where they are. For
one thing this ring here is actually buttons. So you can push up here, to the right, and over here,
and down here. So there's actually 4 different buttons along this ring. You just kind of have to
know that they're there. There's also two buttons here, and another little kind of hidden button in
the corner right here that you can push. And of course, obviously the connectors
on the joysticks are not the same. So, powering it up, you get this cute intro
screen, and then it takes you to a carousel of games with a catchy little pokey tune playing in
the background. So, before we play any of these, I just wanted to take an inventory of the included
games. It does appear there are 26 included games. OK, I should preface this by saying that we're not
talking about some kind of cheap, you know Chinese game console, full of you know, 100 bootleg games
that you can get on ebay for like 30 or 40 bucks or something like that. This is a legitamately
licensed product. And I understand that it can be relatively difficult to track down distribution
rights for 40 plus year old games. That being said, when you are talking about a product
like this, I think that the included game list is probably just as important as the hardware itself,
at least as far as the general buying public is concerned. So, I think I should make at least some
attempt to provide prospective on the software. Now again, having not grown up with Atari,
I can't tell you if this is a good selection or not. But what I can tell you is that I'm
only personally familiar with these 13 games. Some of these I know from the arcade versions,
some from my time wih the Commodore 64, and two of them from my time with the Atari 2600.
But, one thing I can do is look at Atarimania's list of games and especially the top 100 chart
to see how these games fit in. And only 10 of these games are found in the top 100,
and only 3 of them are found in the top 10. So read into that whatever you want.
But enough of that, let's play some of these games. I'll start with a few that
I'm at least familiar with, like Asteroids. And well. I'm sort of surprised. This looks
identical to the Atari 2600 version, the best I can tell. here's Battlezone.
And Berzerk. Let's try Boulderdash. Centipede. Miner 2049er. Missile command. And MULE. This
game looks and sounds remarkably similar to the Commodore version I grew up playing.
This one is a bit weird. It is called Lee, and has an intro picture of a dragon. But when you
start the game, it is clearly the game Bruce Lee, which was available on just about every
platform of the day. Here's a screenshot of the original Atari title screen. It
seems this version was designed to remove the references to the late actor for some reason.
OK, now I'll play some of the games I'm not familiar with, starting with Bristles. It
took me a bit to figure out how it works, but I finally got the hang of it. It's not bad. Not
great either, though. Now, this capture the flag thing piqued my interest. It's rendering not one,
but two 3D environments on screen at once at a decent framerate. Apparently this came out in 1983
on the VIC-20 and the Atari. I think it's pretty cool from a technical achievement standpoint,
but I didn't find it particularly fun to play. Next I tried Elektra-slide. It appears to be
a racing game of some sort, not terribly different from a dozen other of the era.
Next up, encounter. This reminded me a bit of battlezone or Stellar-7. But
didn't hold my interest much. OK, so this is Henry's house.
I've never heard of this, but I thought it was actually kind of fun. It reminds me a
bit of Monty on the Run for the C64. Next up is Oriley's Mine. It's kind
of neat. I don't think I've played another game with the same mechanic.
And the last one is Yoomp. This game is relatively modern. It came out in 2007, which is long after
these machines were on the market, but at the same time, that was 17 years ago if you can believe it.
I think most of the games we've looked at so far were probably intended to run on the Atari 400,
which only guarantees you 8K of RAM. And I feel that shows in the game complexity. Of course, it's
hard to complain about that when the machine I'm reviewing is quite literally called the 400 mini,
not the 800, right? Anyway, that being said, this game here requires 64K. And it definitely shows.
So, if you don't care for the included games, that can be somewhat offset by the ability to
easily add your own games to the system. So, if this thing works like the Commodore
versions, I should be able to copy some atari games over to a USB stick and plug it in. And
sure enough, the carousel now has a spot for that. And naturally, the first thing I wanted
to try was my own game, Petscii Robots. However, for that, I'd also need to plug in a keyboard,
as there is no joystick control on this game. So that will be two things we can
test. And sure enough, it works just fine. Now, I'll go ahead and say that the Atari
version of this game is probably the version I have the most regret about. And that's because
we targetted a 48K Atari 800. And that's why it looks and sounds the way it does. In retrospect,
I kind of wish we had targetted the 130XE with the 128K of RAM. And I can show you exactly how that
would have looked, because we did eventually do an Atari 7800 port. So yeah, it could have looked
like this, but it would have vastly reduced the number of Atari systems that were compatible.
Since I have a keyboard connected, I can also test out BASIC, which seems
to work just fine if you want to mess around with that and type in some little programs.
One of the games I wanted to try was Master of the Lamps. I used to love this game on my Commodore
64, and I was sad to see that it doesn't even appear in the top 100 on Atarimania's list of
best games. They do have it in the database, though, and it gets a rating of 7.4 out of 10,
which is sort of interesting because Lemon64 shows the Commodore 64 version also ranks 7.42. Anyway,
I mostly just liked listening to the music on this game as I flew through the vortex, and each level
had its own tune. Well, the Atari version doesn't disappoint as it looks identical and the music
is about on par with the C64 version as well. But then we get to the gongs. This is where I
struggled as as kid. And I developed a method of cheating on this part of the game. What I
would do was take a piece of masking tape and put it across my TV screen like this,
and then as the gong order was revealed, I would write the order on the piece of tape, like this.
And that's how I eventually beat the game. My friend wanted me to try one of his favorite
games from the era, called Zombies. And well, it works. But I'm going to have to
have him explain to me how to play it, because I haven't figured it out yet.
OK, next I wanted to try a really modern game for the Atari, which would be Prince of Persia. For
those that don't know this came out in 2021, and it requires the 130XE because it needs 128K of
RAM. Well, at first the game wouldn't run. But that was my own fault because I didn't realize
I needed to go set the atari model to 130XE, like so. After that, it actually ran just fine.
This is an excellent example of what can be done on these machines, especially if you take
advantage of the 128K. Now, as an interesting side note, while I was working on this video,
It was announced that somebody had ported Prince of Persia to the Commodore VIC-20. They had to
squeeze this into less than 40K of RAM, but it appears totally playable, unfortunately,
it does require a PAL VIC-20, which I don't have. Anyway, back to Atari. it's too bad
they couldn't get this game included on the 400 mini, that would have been cool.
So, are we going to take this apart? You bet we are! One thing I did want to point out is
that I have serial number 101, cool beans! I'm not really expecting any surprises here,
as I suspect it will be similar to the previous systems. And here we go. I take that back,
I am surprised. It has 2 PCBs and I figured it would be one. But I guess that meakes
sense because the two boards don't sit level with each other. It appears this is mostly a USB hub.
And on the main PCH, it looks like you could upgrade it with another RAM chip,
and possible two more USB ports over here. And what do we have under the PCB, some extra weights
so the thing feels more expensive. or perhaps so it doesn't slide around on the table so much.
OK, so what are my final thoughts on the 400 Mini? Well, before we get to that,
I just wanted to take a moment as a reminder for those who may not know yet, for everyone who says
they are missing the restoration videos that I used to do here on my channel, you might want to
consider going over to the TimeRift Arcade channel, because I've been doing a number
of restoration videos on arcade machines over there on that channel. So, same kind of content,
a little bit different product, different channel. I'll put a link down in the description. OK,
so thoughts on the 400 mini? I think it's built really well, it looks really cool, I have really
no complaints about the hardware itself. I think that the included software is what I would pretty
much just call mediocre. it's not that great. But, I've said the same thing about all of the
previous products in the same vein like the C64 mini, the Amiga mini, etc. But, I just don't
think it really matters that much because for me, I'm just going to fill a USB stick full of all of
the best games I want to play on it, stick it in there, and that sort of solves that problem. So,
overall, it's a pretty cool product. So I guess that's it. ANyway, as always, thanks for watching!