I had my Atari 800 up and running again today, testing out my 1050 drive
and such, and decided to toy with the Atari 1030 modem I have sitting here for
it. I had forgotten how interesting an item it is. For those of you that
aren't familiar with it, it's an external 300baud modem that plugs into the
same general I/O ports as the Atari disk drives and such. You turn on the
modem first, then the Atari 8bit, and the 8bit actually boots into a program
called 'Modemlink', which is stored in ROM on the modem. No disks, cartridges
or anything...just the computer and the modem! Modemlink is pretty basic, but
it does autodial. Might be time to fire it up and try it again on one of the
local C-64 BBS's running on the Color64 software still since they support 40
column mode.
That certainly beats the heck out of the compatibility issues I had to deal
with concerning terminal programs and BBS's on the PC with early 1200 and 2400
baud modems. Not to mention there's no setup.
Jeff jeffh(a)unix.aardvarkol.com
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Sent from an Amiga 3000..the computer for the creative mind!
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Collector of classic home computers:
Amiga 1000, Apple II+, Atari 800, 800XL, Mega-ST/2 and XE System,
Coleco ADAM, Commodore 128D, 16, Plus/4 and VIC-20, IBM 5155,
Kaypro 2X, Mattel Aquarius, Osborne Executive, Radofin Aquarius,
Sinclair ZX-81, TI-99/4A, Timex-Sinclair 1000, TRS-80 Color
Computer-3, Model 4, and Model 4P, plus Odyssey2, Atari Superpong
and 2600VCS game consoles.