Atari's 800XL Returns as a Full-Size Recreation, Shipping April 2027

Atari announced THE 800XL on 8 October, a full-size recreation of its best-selling 8-bit home computer with a mechanical keyboard, a working cartridge slot, HDMI output and 25 built-in games. It was designed by Retro Games Ltd, the British company behind THE400 Mini, and is manufactured and distributed by PLAION REPLAI. Pre-orders are open now at $219.99, £199.99, €219.99 and AU$349.99, and shipping begins on 23 April 2027.

What is in the box

The announcement describes a machine that keeps the original's shape and adds modern connections. The keyboard is full size and mechanically switched, with 57 keys according to the product page. Atari BASIC is built in. The cartridge slot takes most Atari 400, 800, XL and XE cartridges: a cartridge is inserted, then picked from a cartridge icon on the machine's game carousel.

Video goes out over HDMI in either PAL (50Hz) or NTSC (60Hz), with an authentic 4:3 mode, a pixel-perfect mode and optional CRT filters. Atari's own product page adds a choice of 12 display frames. There are four USB-A ports for extra controllers and USB storage, and power arrives over USB-C. Retro Games' product page lists the contents as the computer, the joystick, a USB-C power cable, an HDMI cable and a quick guide, and notes that the 3 amp power adapter it needs is not included.

The joystick is THECXSTICK, Retro Games' recreation of Atari's original stick. It keeps the single fire button and adds seven more buttons built into the base, along with self-centring axes and a mode for left- or right-handed play.

The 25 games, and the rest of the library

The built-in games are Airball, Asteroids, Basketball, BattleZone, Berzerk, Boulder Dash, Bristles, Capture the Flag, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Elektraglide, Encounter, Flip and Flop, Henry's House, Hover Bovver, Lee, M.U.L.E., Millipede, Miner 2049er, Missile Command, O'Riley's Mine, The Seven Cities of Gold, Star Raiders II, Wavy Navy and Yoomp!. Eight are licensed Atari first-party games and 17 are licensed from third parties. Two more, Castle Crisis and Super Breakout, are hidden on the carousel and unlock when an analog controller is connected.

Beyond those, the machine loads software from USB flash drives as cartridge, disk and cassette images. It runs software for the Atari 400, 800, XL and XE computers, and games made for the Atari 5200 console.

Each game gets four save slots, and play can be rewound. A switch to what Retro Games calls Classic Mode makes the machine behave like the original computer, where programs can be written, saved and run in BASIC.

Three people spoke for the companies involved. Matt Burnett, VP of Strategic Operations at Atari, said the 800XL "gave an entire generation the opportunity to discover what they could do with a computer, while offering an incredible catalog of games and software." Stuart Chiplin, COO at Retro Games Ltd, said the team "wanted to capture not just how the original looked, but what made it such a compelling computer". Namer Merli, Senior Product Marketing Manager at PLAION REPLAI, said: "In 1983, apparently the future came in brown, cream and burnt orange … and it looked fantastic."

The original 800XL

Atari announced the 800XL at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in 1983, alongside the smaller 600XL, as the replacement for both the Atari 800 and the short-lived 1200XL. It went on sale in North America and Britain in late November 1983 at $299 in the United States and £249 in the UK. It had 64KB of memory and, like the rest of the XL range, Atari BASIC built in. Production delays meant only 60 percent of pre-ordered units reached North American buyers by Christmas, and the whole 1983 run of roughly 400,000 600XL and 800XL machines sold out by the end of the year.

Its main rival was the Commodore 64, which had arrived in August 1982. The 800XL had a long second life in Europe. From 1985 it was exported to the Eastern Bloc, where it became the leading home computer in the second half of the decade and overtook the ZX Spectrum in Poland. In West Germany, demand was strong enough that Atari restarted 800XL production in July 1988, three years after the XE models arrived. Atari officially dropped support for the 8-bit line in 1992.

Retro Games' other machines

THE 800XL is Retro Games' second Atari computer. THE400 Mini, a smaller-than-original recreation of the 1979 Atari 400, launched worldwide on 28 March 2024. The company has since released The Spectrum, which reached shops on 22 November 2024, and announced THEA1200, a full-sized recreation of an early-1990s home computer, complete with its Workbench desktop, 25 built-in games and four save slots per game, which its announcement says launches on 4 December 2026.

The 800XL follows the same full-size approach as THEA1200 rather than the scaled-down form of THE400 Mini, and shares its carousel of 25 built-in games and its four save slots per game.

Other ways to play Atari 8-bit software

The library is well served by emulation. Altirra, an emulator published on virtualdub.org that shares code with VirtualDub, covers the Atari 400 and 800, 1200XL, 600XL and 800XL, 130XE, XEGS and the 5200. It aims at cycle-exact emulation of the documented hardware and ships its own rewritten OS and BASIC ROMs, so it runs software without the original Atari ROMs. The current version is 4.40.

On FPGA, the MiSTer project has an Atari 800XL, 65XE and 130XE core, ported from Mark Watson's Atari 800XL core, which also covers the 5200. Unlike Altirra, it needs the user to supply the system ROM files. Readers new to MiSTer can start with the FPGA explainer.

What THE 800XL offers over both is the physical machine: a full-size keyboard, a joystick in the original style and a slot for original cartridges, without a PC or an FPGA board.

What is not known yet

The announcement does not say how the machine runs Atari software internally, beyond noting that the internal hardware and software are Retro Games' own. There is no compatibility list for the cartridge slot, which supports "most" cartridges, and no mention of a port for the original disk drives, cassette recorders or other peripherals.

Two details also differ between the official sources. The press release says gameplay can be rewound by up to 30 seconds; Atari's product page says up to 40. And while the press release gives the UK price as £199.99, Atari's UK store listed the machine at £189.00 when checked on 12 October. Atari's page gives the shipping date only as late April 2027; the press release gives 23 April.