ATASCII

The last computer to use the ATASCII character set is the Atari XEGS, which was released in 1987 and discontinued in 1992.

[1] When entering text, the Atari keyboard handler converts these signals into ATASCII.

[2] This can be used as a new font for text, to support an additional character set, or for tile graphics in a video game or other application.

[5] Later XL and XE models required the user to update a register in RAM (e.g., via a POKE command in BASIC).

For example, ┌, ┬, and ┐ are the graphics characters found on the top left Q, W, and E keys, and appear 64 code points before those uppercase letters in ATASCII.

The following table shows the lower half of ATASCII international character set.

[15] The differences between character representation can cause problems during modem communication between Ataris and other computers.

Cursor movement commands (and even carriage returns and line feeds) from computers not using ATASCII will be nonsense on an Atari, and vice versa.

[16] The control codes in ATASCII are transmissible to other computers such as BBSs, and crude animations are possible.

These animations, also known as "break movies", often take the form of short cartoons, and were a popular feature of Atari BBSs in their heyday.

[17] Because cursor control operations are represented with a single character (as opposed to multi-byte sequences that were common in other schemes, like ANSI or VT100), it is quite easy to make these animations.

They can be created by a short BASIC program that captures keyboard commands, echoes them to the screen and saves them to a file.

The simple capture programs didn't have editing features, so ATASCII movies frequently had errors that were corrected by repositioning the cursor and printing over the mistake.