Benjamin J Heckendorn, webmaster of benheck.com, has built the world’s first portable Atari 800. This guy has built portable game systems out of an old Nintendo and even a Neo Geo. But nothing has made him as proud as his “Holy Grail” of portable gaming systems — the Atari 800 XE Laptop.

Just what can you expect out of this laptop Ben made from an old Atari XE Game System?

• 8″ TFT active matrix display
• Compact Flash “hard disk drive” utilizing MyDOS 4.53 for maximum drive size of 16 megabytes. Card is removable for swapping.
• Built-in NiMH battery pack and charger (uses external plug like a normal laptop) Also battery is removable from base as with most laptops.
• Full (Atari 800) sized keyboard
• Built-in Player 1 & 2 controls, plus joystick ports. Built-in joypads great for playing Robotron 2084!
• Brushed aluminum and wood grain everywhere! A weird combo style, sure, but I like it!
• Cursor control knob – Allows you to move the cursor around the screen without pressing control+arrow keys. That’s awesome if you’re an old-school Atari programmer “from the day”
• Slim (compared to an original SIO port) DB25 printer-style port for connecting to disk drives, printers or PC’s using an SIO2PC cable.

You can head over to his site to read the full guide on how he did it as soon as someone sponsors him for some hosting. Apparently one article on slashdot.org is enough to take care of that monthly bandwidth. Our server is up the challenge at least.