Mega800 — Alpha V1.0 is now available

First public Alpha of the Atari 800/XL/XE core for MEGA65, with ATR disk support, XEX loading, XL/XE and 400/800 modes, PAL/NTSC, expanded RAM, VBXE, joystick support and Atari/MEGA65 keyboard mappings.

⚠️ The Atari system ROMs are NOT supplied with the release.

Minimum ROM files required to be placed in /atari800/ on your SD card:

**boot0.rom Atari XL/XE OS 16 Kilobytes
boot1.rom Atari BASIC 8 Kilobytes
boot2.rom Atari 400/800 OS 10 Kilobytes
pal.act Adobe Color Table 768 bytes
a8cfg Config file 54 bytes [ optional ]
**

Atari OS and Basic ROMs should be fairly easy to find online, unfortunately I cannot provide these in the release.

Hint:
Atari 800 ROM - ATARIOSB.ROM or ATARIOSA.ROM -> rename to boot2.rom
Atari BASIC - ATARIBAS.ROM -> rename to boot1.rom
Atari XL/XE - ATARIXL.ROM -> rename to boot0.rom

An Atari diagnostic OS ROM replacement I developed is included, which can be loaded from the OSD for testing the base 64KB of RAM.

Cartridge, PBI and 4MB Axlon support is not available in this Alpha release.

Full instructions, setup, controls: https://github.com/sho3string/Mega800/blob/master/README.md
Direct Download: https://github.com/sho3string/Mega800/releases/download/A8_Alpha1_Release/MEGA800_Alpha_1.zip

Testing and compatibility reports are very welcome.

Hey folks! Commodore Users Europe are arranging "Retrocomputing Guided Study Groups", starting today.

The aim was to help out complete newbies who were feeling at a loss on where to start coming to grips with programming BASIC and getting things done.

I found myself putting my hand up to offer leading the "BASIC 65" session, which is starting in under two hours.

Date: 26/09/2026
Time: 11.00 CEST

I'm totally unprepared so will wing it and see how it goes. Maybe I can aim small to begin with, small steps to help newbie users, like:

• getting the rom
  
• preparing the xemu emulator
  
• exploring the BASIC environment a little with experimentation ideas

Will aim for the users to do most of the typing, I'll just suggest what to type, answer any q's that come up, that sorta thing.

If you're interested to jump in:

• give me a private ping on discord and I'll forward the Zoom link to you

Let's see how it goes... 🤞

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders for the MEGA65 is now available!

MEGASPUTM is a re-implementation of the SCUMM v2 engine, developed together with M3wP, specifically configured and tested to run the original Amiga game files of Zak McKracken on a MEGA65. The engine supports the original English or German version of the game.

To play, you will need the two ADF files from the Amiga version. You can also play the Ultimate SID version and enable SID sound effects! Just provide the two D64 images of the English C64 version.

Step-by-step setup instructions can be found in the readme.txt file included in the ZIP archive.

Download: https://files.mega65.org?id=5175f2a1-b8ed-4706-8d5c-bd965f94504a
User Guide: <https://codeberg.org/kibo/megasputm/src/branch/main-zak/userguide/UserGuide.md>
Source code: <https://codeberg.org/kibo/megasputm/src/branch/main-zak>