atari800 is a GNU GPL licensed Atari 8-bit emulator that runs on many operating systems. It was written by David Firth and the Atari800 Development Team. As of this writing (March 24th, 2025), atari800 is available for Fedora Linux 41 from the official repositories.
You can simply do:
I know next to nothing about Atari 800 and the related Atari 8-bit computers, but the emulator seems to run just fine. I tested it by loading Blue Max disk image and by playing the game.
However, due to some fucking lame copyright issues, atari800 does not ship with original Atari system ROMs. So grab my RPM package:
To install the required atari800 system ROMs, become root and issue command:
I have a following simple shell wrapper for running atari800 in ~/bin/a800:
To run the emulator and automatically load Blue Max game, drop root privileges and issue command:
Be patient. You need to wait for a while until the game has been loaded from the virtual disk drive.
atari800 recognized my Logitech RumblePad 2 USB controller without problems. I could use it like Atari joystick, cool!
On a real Atari 8-bit computer, you would press the START key to start Blue Max. But PCs do not have such a key! No worries, here is the atari800 emulator's keyboard mapping table:
| Atari key | PC key |
|---|---|
| OPTION | F2 |
| SELECT | F3 |
| START | F4 |
So to start Blue Max under atari800 emulation, just press F4 on your PC keyboard.
If you do not have a USB controller, atari800 has "keyboard joystick" mapped to Atari joystick port 0:
| Atari joystick port 0 | PC key |
|---|---|
| LEFT | Numpad 4 |
| RIGHT | Numpad 6 |
| DOWN | Numpad 5 |
| UP | Numpad 8 |
| BUTTON | Right CTRL |
GAMING TIP: In Blue Max, you can drop bombs by pointing joystick DOWN ja pressing BUTTON.
Have fun!
Best regards,
Kalevi Kolttonen <kalevi@kolttonen.fi>