When The400 Mini was first announced, reactions could be divided into roughly two distinct camps: the “OMG finally the Atari 8-bit is getting the recognition it deserves” crew, and the “WTF is an Atari 400” brigade. Those of you who know me well will already know which camp I fall into.

For the sake of the latter group, the Atari 400 (and, by extension, the entire Atari 8-bit line) is well worth exploring, because although in the long term it lost out to platforms such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum in terms of popularity, it was a pioneer in the home computing space and, in fact, the birthplace of a variety of widely beloved games.

The400 Mini is a great place to start exploring exactly where Atari home computers fit into the grand history of home computers and video games. There are a couple of things that, at launch, could do with a bit of tweaking — but there are also a few things you can do with it that you might not expect. So today we’re going to talk about all of those things!

The400 Mini comes to us as a collaborative project between Atari themselves, Retro Games Ltd (makers of TheC64, TheVIC-20 and The A500 Mini) and Plaion (formerly Koch Media, also the folks behind the 2600+). It’s a self-contained little system that runs off USB-C power, connects to a TV or monitor via HDMI, outputs 720p video and has 5 USB ports for connecting controllers and peripherals.

An important thing to understand up-front is that this thing is not intended to be a complete replacement for a real Atari 8-bit computer. It is, first and foremost, a plug-and-play games system that includes 25 classic Atari 8-bit games, and if that’s all you want to use it for, it does a mostly excellent job at that — with one notable exception, which we’ll come to a little later.

However, it does allow you to connect a USB drive containing Atari 8-bit cassette, disk and cartridge images plus the .xex format executable files, meaning you can expand its capabilities well beyond what the 25 built-in games offer. Again, we’ll look at that in a bit more detail a little later.

The plug-and-play experience

Plug in the system and turn it on and, after a short bootup sequence, you’re presented with a carousel of games to choose from. Each game features a short blurb, a control summary that can be accessed by pushing Up on the included joystick, and the ability to rank it as a “favourite” with between zero and four stars. The 25 games can be sorted via various means (including your star ratings) but honestly 25 is a small enough number that just browsing alphabetically will probably be enough for most folks.

Each game has four save slots, allowing you to save the exact state of the game in the middle of a session and return to it later. In a nice touch, these save slots are visually represented like classic Atari cartridges. They can also be “locked” to prevent accidentally overwriting.

It’s not possible to customise the controls for the built-in games, which is a bit of a shame, but the included joystick can be switched to “left-handed” mode during gameplay if you so desire. All this does is rotate the directional inputs through 90 degrees; all the other button mappings remain the same.

Games can be displayed in “4:3” or “Pixel Perfect” mode. I don’t know what whoever designed 4:3 mode was smoking, but it looks horrible, with unevenly scaled pixels and weird artifacts everywhere. Switch to Pixel Perfect and never look back. An optional “CRT filter” can also be applied, which softens the image slightly and adds a subtle scanlines effect. It looks quite nice compared to some attempts at this sort of thing, but it will largely be a matter of taste as to whether or not you want to use it.

Same for the optional bezels which can be added to the black space around the virtual Atari screen. These are all a bit garish and cheesy for my taste, but they do also make the game visuals “pop” a bit, so if you’re not as much of a purist as I am you may want to make use of them.

The included games mostly appear to work absolutely flawlessly, with one unfortunately major exception: classic economic simulation M.U.L.E., which exhibits fairly major graphical glitches when playing on the Standard or Tournament difficulty modes.

Thankfully, with the ability to load your own games onto a USB stick, it’s easy enough to just run M.U.L.E. from an alternative source (this version works perfectly), but the fact the included version is noticeably broken is a bit of a black mark against the “plug and play” experience. Hopefully this will be fixed before long with a firmware update.

The games can be run in either PAL or NTSC mode, and this reflects both the speed differences and the different colour palettes. This is a choice you make when you first start the system, and you cannot change this without doing a factory reset, which will wipe any saves you have made for the built-in games.

Chances are once you’ve picked one you won’t want to change it — I highly recommend PAL if you have a TV that supports 50Hz displays, because most of today’s Atari scene appears to operate out of Europe — but it’s a bit of a shame you can’t switch on the fly. Again, this could potentially be fixed with a firmware update.

So for just plugging in the system and immediately having 25 games to play, it’s mostly excellent, with M.U.L.E.’s issues being the biggest black mark. The game functions as it should, it just doesn’t look right. Here’s hoping this is fixed sooner rather than later.

Loading your own stuff

Running your own software on The400 Mini is a simple matter of loading it onto a USB stick and whacking said stick in one of the USB ports (probably the back one). This causes a “Media Access” entry to appear in the games carousel, allowing you to browse the folders on the USB stick, mount cassette, disk and/or cartridge images, then set them up and boot them as desired.

One thing worth noting is that in order to keep the media access side of things smooth, The400 Mini won’t read everything in a folder if there are too many files. It’s a good idea to keep each folder to 200 files or fewer if possible.

When browsing files, it’s possible to attach up to 3 disk images at once for multi-disk games. For anything that requires more than 3 disks (something like Alternate Reality: The City is a good example, as that comes on two double-sided disks, plus a character disk) you can set up an .m3u playlist with all the disks and run that. Swapping disks mid-game is a simple matter of holding the Home button on the controller and pressing the bottom “ring button”.

Upon selecting something to run, you can either just run it, or you can hit the Menu button on the included joystick to enter the Game Settings page. From here you can choose to run the software on a virtual Atari 400, 800, 800XL or 130XE. The400 Mini also supports Atari 5200 ROMs, so you can set that up here also, including tweaking how the analogue stick is simulated.

Also in the settings page is the option to crop the screen display, so you can chop out unused black space. Unfortunately, the width and height settings don’t go quite high enough to recreate the proportions of a real Atari screen with the full overscan border (336×240), meaning that games and software which uses said border can sometimes appear “cut off” or “too zoomed in”. There is a workaround for this, which I’ll share with you at the end of this article.

Notably missing from the Game Settings page is the ability to customise the amount of RAM the virtual Atari has, meaning anything that needs more than the 128K the 130XE preset offers won’t work. This is hopefully something that will be added in a future firmware update, but bear it in mind if you’re wanting to run particularly ambitious homebrew games or demos. Likewise, there’s no support for dual POKEY chips at this time, so no stereo sound in those games that support it. What you get here is the ability to virtualise four different “stock” Atari 8-bit models plus the 5200, and that’s about it for now.

Finally in the Game Settings page is the ability to customise the controls. The included joystick can also be used to simulate a paddle controller if the game in question requires one, or third-party USB controllers can be used for their analogue functionality, either for, again, simulating paddles, or to recreate the Atari 5200’s analogue joystick.

You can also map the controls on the included joystick to any joystick function or single keystroke; default control mappings provide easy access to the joystick and fire button plus the Start, Select and Option keys, and for most games this is all you will need.

Once you fire up a game from the USB stick, it works just as with the plug-in games. You can even suspend and save-state the games by returning to the carousel with the controller’s Home button. Emulation performance is very good, with excellent sound recreation and solid, smooth graphical performance — though oddly there is a very slight coloured “halo” effect around some visuals that isn’t present on the built-in games. It’s not really a problem (in actual fact, it looks quite nice, almost like a “drop shadow” effect at times), but it is noticeable, particularly on “Graphics 1” text.

So aside from the cropping issue mentioned above, which will hopefully be resolved with a firmware update, this is all very good so far.

Programming and productivity?

Inserting a USB stick into The400 Mini automatically creates an .ATR disk image called THE400_BASIC which boots into Atari BASIC and loads DOS 2.5, allowing you to program in BASIC and save your creations to a virtual disk.

In order to program in BASIC, you can use the on-screen keyboard if you’re a masochist, or you can connect a USB keyboard and just type stuff in. This mostly works excellently, aside from the fact I couldn’t find a mapping for the “inverse video” key at all. You can work around this by either pressing the “Atari” key on the on-screen keyboard any time you want inverse video, or mapping the “Atari” key to a button on the included joystick. Not ideal, but it works. The USB keyboard can also, of course, be used to play games that require keyboard input beyond what it’s possible to map to the included controller.

One minor niggle I have is that the keyboard doesn’t “click” properly on every keystroke; sometimes there’s just a faint “pop” sound instead of the usual sound from the sound chip. This is a relatively minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but it does detract slightly from the authenticity.

You’re not just limited to using BASIC. You can, in fact, load pretty much any productivity application you’d care to mention from disk, cassette or cartridge image, and in the latter case it’s even possible to have a virtual disk inserted alongside a virtual cartridge, meaning it’s possible to, say, use the Assembler/Editor or Action! programming language cartridges and save your work to disk. You will need to prepare the blank disk image beforehand and put it on your USB stick, though; there’s no facility to create new disk images on The400 Mini itself.

Speaking of disk access, The400 Mini defaults to fast loading, which means programs load and save much quicker than on real hardware, but a side-effect of this is that you miss out on the Atari’s lovely I/O sounds. It would be nice to see the option for “realistic” media access times and I/O sounds in a future firmware update; there’s also the possibility that some programs simply won’t run with fast disk access, as a few AtariAge users have found so far, but these tend to be modern demoscene and homebrew releases rather than anything from back in the day.

One thing you can’t do (to my knowledge) is connect other peripherals such as a printer to The400 Mini. That means that you absolutely can use The400 Mini as a distraction-free word processor with a copy of AtariWriter or something, but if you want to print your stuff out you’ll need to get the files onto a PC. This is easy enough with software that can extract files from .ATR disk images, but it’s something you may want to bear in mind if you have any desire to use this thing as a “computer” rather than a “games machine”. Frankly, the fact you can do any of this at all is quite impressive and surprising; remember, this is a plug-and-play games console at heart.

Summing things up, and some interim fixes

The400 Mini is off to a great start. There’s a couple of issues that obviously crept in during development such as the broken M.U.L.E. image and the not-quite-right cropping settings, but for a plug-and-play system, the flexibility of this thing is actually rather pleasing. You may bemoan the lack of working keyboard, but really; are you honestly saying you wouldn’t find typing on a half-size recreation of the Atari 400’s already notoriously awful membrane keyboard a horrible experience?

Some AtariAge users have reported issues with their included joysticks, but this seems to relate to variations in manufacturing, and most of these problems seem to be resolvable by loosening the screws in the base.

As an interim fix for the cropping issue — at least until Retro Games increases the upper limits in the Game Settings menu — here’s what you can do. Firstly, select the game you’re having cropping issues with and make some form of tweak to its Game Settings, such as changing the Atari model or remapping the controls. This will create a .cfg file on the USB stick alongside the disk/cassette/cartridge image.

Now put the USB stick in your PC and browse to the folder where the game (and the new .cfg file) are stored. Open the .cfg file in a text editor and change the following lines to read thus:

display_start_line = 0;
display_height = 240;
display_width = 336;

Then pop the USB stick back in The400 Mini and start the game. Do NOT enter the Game Settings menu, as this will override the manual changes you made to the .cfg file. Doing this also seems to break the “suspend and save state” functionality for the game in question, so it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s enough for arcade-style games or demos where you probably won’t want or need to save your state.

Retro Games Ltd have been pretty good with putting out firmware updates for their previous products that fix problems and introduce new features, so I have confidence that they will do the same with The400 Mini; it’s just a question of when at this point. The product as it stands is a nice bit of kit that just needs a bit of spit and polish to perfect it; once the issues I’ve described in this piece are resolved, I would unreservedly recommend it to anyone interested in exploring the Atari 8-bit for themselves.

For now, meanwhile, I still recommend it, just with those couple of caveats I’ve mentioned above. More than anything, it’s a delight to see the computers that I spent my formative years using get some time in the spotlight — and I sincerely hope this product lets more people learn about what wonderful machines they are.

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