Acorn Atom (atom)

for Batocera and Retrobat

The Acorn Atom is a home computer made by Acorn Computers Ltd from 1980 to 1982, when it was replaced by the BBC Micro. The Micro began life as an upgrade to the Atom, originally known as the Proton.

The Atom was a progression of the MOS Technology 6502-based machines that the company had been making from 1979. The Atom was a cut-down Acorn System 3 without a disk drive but with an integral keyboard and cassette tape interface, sold in either kit or complete form. In 1980 it was priced between £120 in kit form, £170 (equivalent to £745 in 2020) ready assembled, to over £200 for the fully expanded version with 12 KB of RAM and the floating-point extension ROM.

It had an MC6847 Video Display Generator (VDG) video chip, allowing for both text and graphics modes. It could be connected to a TV or modified to output to a video monitor. Basic video memory was 1 KB but could be expanded to 6 KB. Since the MC6847 could only output at 60 Hz, meaning that the video could not be resolved on a large proportion of European TV sets, a 50 Hz PAL colour card was later made available. Six video modes were available, with resolutions from 64×64 in 4 colours, up to 256×192 in monochrome. At the time, 256×192 was considered to be high resolution.

The package includes:

14 games (~16 MB)

Go to download   

NOTE: 
This system is already included in our base builds for either RetroBat, Batocera or both.
It is being made available to support future "Barebones" editions of the builds that come without any ROMs.
If you already use one of the following, then you DO NOT need to download this.

-RetroBat v6 Base Edition 300 GB [RGS]
-Batocera v40 Base Edition 500 GB [RGS]

If "Barebones" editions of our builds are now available, please download as needed.

How to install:
Drag and drop the "atom" folder to the "roms" directory