ATW800/2

The ATW800/2 is a 'revive' project of the Original Atari Transputer Workstation 800 (ATW800) designed by Perihelion while built and sold by Atari.

It was a Transputer system running the Helios operating system which used an Mega-ST1 as host. The powerful graphics chip (“Blossom“) was connected to the Transputer which ran X11 on it to display graphics in 1280 by 960 pixels (16 colors) or 1024 by 786 pixels in 256 colors, making the most out of its 1MB VRAM. As said the Atari part was mainly just I/O: Harddisk, keyboard, mouse, serial and parallel interface. No access to Blossom and after booting, there was no way to run Atari software from/in Helios.

In contrast the ATW800/2 is a expansion card to be plugged directly into an Atari Mega-ST or Mega-STe and TT. Therefore it is available in two versions:

• "Megabus" available inside the Mega-ST
• VME bus used in the Mega-STe and TT.

For more information and background visit the dedicated ATW800/2 website.