Norbert's Emulators

After more than five years, I programmed something for the Atari 800XL again. I ported my "emulator" of Atari's classic arcade game "Centipede" from the C64 to the Atari 800XL.

The "emulation" of the arcade machine's CPU is done directly by the 6502 processor of the Atari home computer, which just runs the original game program. The arcade machine uses the POKEY chip for sound effects. As the Atari 800XL also has a POKEY built in, the original sound effects are directly played by this chip. The video hardware of the arcade machine is simulated on the Atari 800XL by specific routines in assembly language. In this way, the original game play is (more or less) exactly reproduced, with some major trade-offs, though, which had to be made due to the limited graphics capabilities of the Atari 800XL compared to the arcade machine.

The program can be downloaded as an Atari 800XL "atr" file here: centipede.atr or as an "xex" file here: centiped.xex

You can use this file with an Atari 800XL emulator or put it on a floppy disk or SD card and play it on the real machine.

Here is a video of the emulator in action:

I also made some screenshots of the Atari 800XL version:

Have fun!