Ah screen lists, yes you have really fine control on the display. They really designed the 400 and the 800 well. Its like they knew people would want to have as much control of the hardware as possible. I can't think of another system like that.
The ANTIC I think still has a lot of features that are just being discovered because of the extra memory available for the higher definition screens now. Just being able to place your screen data anywhere you want in memory, tell ANTIC how you want it to build the screen line by line, down to the individual clock. That is just nuts. People apparently have spent years just on ANTIC looking at how to get new displays.
Your right about the UK Atari scene back in the day there were atari user groups but it was an unusual machine to have kind of on the same level as finding someone had a Dragon 32 or an oric. They were machines that someone else usually bought you. It was hard to find software for these computers unless you lived in a big city. I remember growing up in rural England there was no chance of finding Atari 8 bit stuff. You had to go to a major city. (For a Polish equivalent, think of growing up in the villages outside of Lodz.
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In my group of friends, there was one kid that had an apple ii (his dad really), another had a bbc micro (because his parents were teachers), the rest had either spectrum or commodore 64. I didn't know anyone that had a dragon or oric/atari 8 bit. these were machines you read about in the magazines like input.
But I remember even in a rural village in England you could walk into any newsagent and there would be microcomputer magazines, usually with cover tapes. Some newsagents even sold tapes with commercial software.
In the big cities and town you had places like WHsmiths that had whole sections - this is where you could buy your acorn/bbc/atari software. But it was tiny compared to the spectrum/commodore corners.
For my parents I think that was why they went for the 3+ in the end was because they knew it was compatible with the earlier software we had for the 48k. You could at that time get software cheap at carboot / markets. But towards the end of the 80s it was great all these people were getting rid of their 8 bit computers. That is how i got my hands on a BBC micro
But to my shame my first machine was a vic 20. I think that sour my thinking towards commodore.
After that we had an acorn electron (a crippled bbc micro) then my folks broke down and got a spectrum 48k)
We had an atari 2600. They were really popular in the UK back in the day. That was more my mothers hobby she was addicted to centipede and pacman.
