thanks all!
You can actually do some live coding (fuck off supercollider) on the atari. Look up for the atari basic reference manual, over the internet are millions of examples (pokey maybe? ). Do you have a reference of what you want to do with it? (to give you some pointers on your direction.)
yeah, i picked one up and found basic is surprisingly decent for making noise, it's a ROM built into the computer so it's right there are soon as it turns on!
there are a ton of books! any specific examples to check out would be cool.
i have to pick up the sio2sd before i can load programs. or save any i write! mostly writing really short algorithmic doo doo for x 1-200, etc and sampling it. not sure it's worth it to do assembly.
the bass and noise on this thing is good. i guess the noise/random generation on pokey is kinda sophisticated. wanna learn more about it.