Atari_Education_System_working

Atari Education System (back to the main Atari page)

Section 1: A Note from Thom Cherryhomes (May 19, 2015)
I would love to work with you to get the Atari Educational System, and its cassettes in a form that can be used by others on the web. There will be some unique technical aspects that will need to be worked through (right now, the only emulator that can properly deal with the Dorsett cassettes is Altirra, an emulator running under Windows. I would probably need to do some moderate gymnastics to get it working on another emulator.), but I think it is surmountable...

 I'm actually amazed that Atari's engineers had the foresight to allow recorded audio tracks onto cassettes, and that these audio tracks could be synchronized with a variety of techniques... (e.g. synchronous transmission of text in the case of the Atari Edu system, or by providing explicit mark/space tones at specific spots for programs to detect.)   What the Atari community has as of this moment, are the majority of the cassettes, (there are roughly 3 or 4 tapes missing, but they are being tracked down), and the interpreter cartridge. My work focused on documenting the functional and technical aspects of how the cartridge and the cassettes worked, and as part of verifying my knowledge on this subject, I wrote an encoder to write NEW tapes. Written in C, and have used it to make new content.  Now that the "digging" is complete, and the encoder is finished, I am writing a complete mini book on the workings of the Educational System, and will hand it over to Joe if he wants to use all or part of it in his upcoming book on Candy and Colleen. All of the information I have recovered is, in my opinion, knowledge for the public good, and is therefore public domain, including my encoder, and I will release it as soon as i finish writing this "book."  Again, thank you so much for reaching out to me, and yes, I would love to work on this. Computers in Education is a topic that I do love, and as I also love the Atari 400/800, I want to make sure its place in history is exceptionally noted.

Section 2
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