My first computer was also an Atari 130XE. Lately, I've been reviewing some of my favorite games for it at http://blog.mwolson.org/tech/. Alas, I naively threw it away when its disk drive broke 8 years ago, so I'm stuck with using emulators. The GP2X gives a fairly good experience with many emulated Atari games, due to its joypad.
That Atari Basic manual was indeed nice. I can recall typing in the "Kinetic" demo and playing around with it. I misplaced my copy of that manual as well, and have been searching off-and-on for a copy of it.
I recall there being some sort of "autorun.sys"-based menu system that allowed people to chose which games to play off of a disk. Occasionally it flaked out, and certain assembly games had to be loaded from the built-in DOS variant.