My Arabic Atari 65XE - Najm

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My father bought me an Arabic Atari 65XE Najm in 1992. It came with 2 cartridges: a game called Wizard of Wor and a super cartridge with 4 games: River Raid, Pac Man, Missle Command, and Frogger. I knew where the Atari dealer was in Jordan, so I went over one day, saw the potential of this computer, and learned that joysticks are needed in order to play games and that the keyboard was not enough. Since the device comes with built-in Atari BASIC, I spent a lot of time writing code and learning how to program from a book my neighbor lent me (they had an 800XL). I realized that I needed a disk drive to store my BASIC programs after spending so many hours every day typing them. My dad bought one for me and the dealer was kind enough to give me more games and software along with my DOS diskette. That drive was the XF551 with the capability to flip the 5.25" diskette on the other side!

After sometime I decided to learn Atari Assembler so I bought the Assembler cartridge. The dealer gave me the Atari PILOT Primer manual along with that, but I never had the PILOT programming language.

The Arabic support of the Atari 65XE Najm was a bit disappointing to me in the beginning! The special graphic characters Ctrl+A and all that did not work. I prepared a list of questions that I wanted to ask the Atari dealer as to why these keys do not work. Some of the games will show Arabic characters that I never understood. The scores were in Hindi numbers and I was very unhappy. To make things worse, River Raid used the letter O instead of Arabic number zero in reporting the score, so the Arabic setup showed a mix of O's and Hindi numbers. This was nothing but annoying. One day, my younger brother was pressing the keys randomly and bruteforcefully I should say when the Arabic numbers were shown. I was very happy. When I restarted the device, all the joy disappeared.

One day and at anger at a game, in which it ended at a very advanced level for me, I pressed the keyboard everywhere at once, and I saw that the numbers change to Arabic! The Arabic letters were gone and proper graphic symbols showed up. I realized that something in the lower left side of the keyboard pressed simultaneously with the upper right side will be the answer. I tried patiently one by one and I figured out the Shift+Help sequence will do the toggle.

A neighbor of mine had the Atari 800XL computer and a wonderful Atari BASIC book. He had a subset of the games that I had, so it was very easy to negotiate him lending me the book in exchange of River Raid cartridge. I learned a lot of things from that book including the GTIA chip which was in my 65XE.

Alas, good does not last forever, my Atari Najm 65XE one day decided to remain silent forever. Sometime in 1997, I woke up and tried to power up my Atari when the screen was noisy black with a fading sound of the keystrokes. Seems something wrong with the video. It never worked after that, and I moved to the realm of Intel 80286 then. A lot of unanswered questions were hovering in my head: how to write a self loading BASIC program, how to operate the Atari Assembler, what is the USR() function used for, how to use XIO, how to create complex graphics modes where both text and graphics modes can be shown together. I wanted so badly to see the AUTO screen in PILOT as well! These unanswered questions came back to me sooner than I expected!

Just last week, I decided to put sincere effort into finding all the software and emulators that would mimic Atari. I found an Atari 130XE emulator, which is not the Atari 65 XE Najm by any means. There is no Arabic for sure. I came across all the software and manuals I need. I have more than 300 MB worth of info and applications for the Atari 130XE. In these manuals, answers to all my questions lie. The only problem is that my other manuals from the 1990s are in Jordan, but that should not be a problem I hope.