Previously on Dragon Tails (said using full Hollywood actor voice);

1. I had a mate called Panda
2. His Parents were of the 70s Executive Class
3. He had an Atari 800 48K, and I didn't
4. One day he got a game that wouldn't work

So there we were left with brand new games for use with a computer Panda didn't quite have. Normally that would be the end of the story and we'd get back to playing the other multitude of games that he already had. But no, this was his perfect opportunity to explain to the parents the need for a newer one. How he wangled it I'll never know, but in less than a month (may have been six mind ) a new box was sitting on the desk.

The Atari 130XE was hardly worthy of being called a superior product. But for a few extra Gfx Modes that no one would ever use and a bit of extra memory it was really just an Atari 800 in a nicer case. So much for those heady days of constant change eh ?? Still what did we care, it had 128Kb of Memory, and you could use 64K of it as a RAM Disk, wow !! Thus we got to play Koronis Rift and The Elidon(sp??) and many other 64K only Atari Games.

Probably my greatest memory of this time was Xmas Holidays '85. As was normally the way I would get up at the silly time of 8-9am and get over to his for a days computing. Being the lazy git that he was this usually meant his Mum letting me into his room, him still in bed, and me powering up all the tech. and getting on with it. Eventually he'd get up and 2 Player Games would start. These particular Xmas holiday were better for 2 reasons though. Firstly there was the luxury of having 2 Atari 8 Bit Computers in the same room, one on the colour Portable and the other on a B&W. What this meant was we could both play at the same time. Duelling games of Gyruss were a great event with each of us trying to get to the planets in the quickest time, fantastic The other reason was that for some reason his Uncle had left his Bang&Olufson 28inch Colour TV in Panda's bedroom !! So as well as both of us being able to game away all day, we could also watch TV at the same time. Our favourite Tv of that time was Monster Truck Racing, who remembers Big Foot, The Grave Digger and USA-1 ?? I also distinctly remember watching a rather funny film about a Family in California(??) moving to a remote part of the country to get away from the daily Rat Race. I can't remember the name of it but as is usual with a good comedy all sorts of stupid stuff happened and they ended up moving back from whence they came. If you know of a film that matches this vague description I'd love to hear from you.

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I'll move the Story on nearly 12months as this point to November 1986
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Now was my chance to become a standard bearer for the Atari Computer Corporation. I could finally afford to buy one for myself and after weighing up the pros and cons I jumped in and ordered an Atari 130XE and 1050 Disk Drive from Silca Shop in Slough (I think??). Funny how you remember stuff like this but I can confirm that the 130XE was £99.99 and the 1050 £129.99. So I sent my order and cheque in the middle of that month and patiently waited. It wasn't long before I got a reply, though not quite what I expected. What I got was a single A5 envelope with a Silica Shop logo on the front. I opened it to find my cheque fall out with a nicely worded letter explaining to me that it was expected that I was to sign said cheque before they'd actually cash it, oops . In my obvious excitement I have failed to notice such a silly error, although to be fair when I was 16 I wasn't exactly in the habit of writing many cheques !!! Hehe, so It was that I signed the flipping thing and stuck it back in the post. More waiting.......

A large brown box finally arrived at our house about 10 days before Mr. Claus was due in town. Finally I had matched the Panda's computing power and could look forward to wonderful hours playing Donkey Kong, Spy Hunter, Track and Field etc. in my own bedroom. Oh the joys of Floppy Disks rather than Cassettes, the multi-coloured graphics (no more Black and White Games for me, a la Dragon 32), 4 Channel Pokey Sound and decent Digital Joysticks. For the next 9-10 months I had equality, and all was well in Ely's Computer Land.

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Once again we bounce further forward in time to October 1987
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Whilst I was enjoying the glow of Atari ownership the Panda was on an even greater mission. The release of the 'NEW' Atari Personal Computer had happened sometime earlier in the year (or maybe the previous) and un-be known to me Panda was hatching a plan to get one. The initial problem was that the first Atari STs to come out didn't have a TV Modulator in them, thus unless you wanted to stump up and buy a Monitor as well you couldn't have one plugged into a Telly. Thinking about it now, I wonder why he didn't already have a monitor really seeing how much other stuff he had. Anyway, this problem was soon a distant memory as Atari, in an amazing move of logic and market-ability (can't be the real Atari surely ) released the Atari ST-M.

So with the ST now able to use a normal TV nothing stood in his way. There may have been a Public School Exam to pass or something that would have swung the balance but I may be wrong. Suffice to say one day I got to his house (Joystick in Hand ready for some 2 Player Gauntlet) to find this new 'big' computer set up in front of the 14" Portable. This was my first time seeing one for real and also my first time using a mouse. Heh, I laugh now whenever I see my Mum try and use one, but back then I was as Ham-Fisted. It wasn't the movement that was the tricky bit but the Double Button Clicking, and given that the 1st Atari ST mouse wasn't the world best engineered human interface device it wasn't easy to start with.

Still even though he'd got this beast of a Machine there was little to do on it, other than TOS Operating Disks (now 3.5inch Floppies in HARD Plastics cases, nice) and I think Neochrome (Paint Package) that was all he had for software. One thing that was quite handy about getting the ST-M was that it meant buying an External 3.5inch Floppy Drive. To start with this meant a XFD314, this was a Single Sided Double Density 360K per disk device, this was fine but then they released an XFD354. The simple difference was that the 354 was 'Double' Sided, but unlike on our 8-Bit Atari Disk Drives you didn't need to turn the disk upside down to make use of this other side, blimey, so basically it was still 1 Disk but could hold twice as much This advantage of having to buy External Drive would become apparent as Atari dropped the ball when releasing the ST-FM machine. To make the thing relatively affordable they only included the Single Sided Drive, something which would cripple all ST games from then on given that all games had to work on this, the cheapest version of the range. Eventually they rectified the problem but it was too late by then. So all 1 Disk Amiga games had to come on 2 for the Atari ST, and that was just silly

Anyway having gone off at a tangent let's back to the story or rather is natural conclusion. Late December, after Xmas but before the New Year a visit round to the Panda's would make me jealous for the last time. He'd finally got games worthy of the name for this thing. One was Leaderboard, which wasn't that special as it was basically the 8Bit version with better Gfx. The other though was StarGlider and when he loaded it up and it sang 'StarGlider, from Rainbird' to me, my jaw dropped to the floor in amazement. So For the second time I was 'In love with my mates computer'.

The End.

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