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!
