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by buescher 1692 days ago
To be pedantic, it needs a 64K machine like the 1982 1200Xl or 1983 800XL so would not run on the (max w/o 3rd party mods) 48K Atari 800 from 1979. But yes, wow!
2 comments

Both the 400 and 800 had upgrades to 64K. The Atari 400 required some soldering and the 800 was simply a plug-in expansion.
Not so. Behind the two ROM cartridge slots there were three slots for RAM expansion, each being 16KB.
That's for the Atari parts using linear addresses. There were numerous third-party memory expansions that used bank switching as in the XL's to get much more. I wrote Point-of-Sale software using 128K banked expansion for an 800.

I also had my 400 upgraded to 48K with a mechanical keyboard.

Yeah, the 16KB cards were from Atari and the banked switched cards were from third parties. Antic Magazine (named for the chip) had a lot of ads in the back for those.
IIRC (and I may not), I upgraded my 400 to 64k, and a "real" keyboard. But I think you could only address 48k of it at once or something hinky.
Yeah, you had ROM space (and potentially cartridge ROM space) eating into your 64K on all the models and had to bank-switch for anything more than 48K IIRC. With a BASIC cartridge in place you'd lose another 8K.

Also I don't recall any of the 400/800 3rd party upgrades being compatible - they used a different bank-switching mechanism - with the later XL/XE models.

"bank switching" sounds familiar, so I'm pretty sure my memory of 64k is correct then. I can't say I understand what it means, but I remember something of that term at the time.
You group your memory into groups of 16k (could be other sizes, 16k is what I recall but it has been years). Then you have a switch that you can program the switches between groups (also called banks). You can only access one at a time, but you can switch between them very fast. It was possible to get up to 5 MB of memory that way, even though you could only use 64K at a time.
Where did you get a real keyboard for the 400. I searched and searched and could not find one. I was so envious of the Timex / Sinclair folks who had a nice replacement.
I can't remember but it was designed for the 400. This was circa 1983.