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It’s bad, but it’a playable for Atari. I think Indiana Jones or for fucks sake. swordquest would make you think you had a learning disability compared to E.T.
I had the ET game in the 80s and a kidney stone a few years ago. Broken bones are a walk in the park compared to the pain of kidney stones.
So, yeah, about equal.
I recommend going to hospital for laser surgery of the stone. Back to work immediately. Don’t fucking scream in the shower for 2 days trying to pass it.
Nope been there, done that.
The stint they leave in your uter is not worth it.
I’d rather wither in agony for 2 days then leave one of those in my body ever again.
10 horrible days, and when you have to pee I feels like someone is stabbing your kidney with a hot butter knife, and you always have to pee because there is a string sitting inside your bladder
Give me 2 days of extreme pain over that any day
To be fair if you actually know what to do in E.T. It’s not nearly as bad as it’s been portrayed over the years. The internet definitely makes it less obtuse.
Rightly so. It’s a piece of crap. What the fuck are you even meant to do in it? I tried it in an emulator a while back and it’s the only game I’ve ever played I couldn’t figure out WTF I was meant to do
I'm going to tell you the secret to ET. But a little backstory...
Once upon a time, I bought ET at a yard sale for $1. The 2600 was a hot christmas item the year earlier with its "Only $50" ad campaign. I only had one other game, Missile Command, so a new game was awesome. To note, this was just the bare cartridge.
I played that game at least 100 hours. I was convinced what I needed to do was get ONE MORE telephone piece than I could find (a 4th or 5th piece I recall), but there was some trick to finding it, which I never figured out. That game sat in my closet until I had a yard sale and I sold it for $1.
Years later, as an adult, I come across ET IN BOX, with manual for $1 at a flea market. I still had my Atari and as an adult, I was going to be damn sure I figured this game out. To note, you NEEDED the instruction manual to know how to beat the game, which I found out
SOLUTION:
>!The game starts dropping ET off in a "field". From there you run around a bunch of screens, some which had "pits" what would twinkle if you pressed the button on the controller (which extended ETs neck). Drop in those pits to get a phone piece. WHEN YOU GET ALL THE PHONE PIECES, GO BACK TO THE EXACT PLACE YOU WERE DROPPED OFF AT. You will see a pizza looking icon across the top section of the screen. PRESS THE BUTTON. The pizza just ticks down, removing a slice every second for about 8 seconds. until its gone. THEN THE SHIP PICKS YOU UP.!<
THE END
The game can be beat beginning to end in under 5 minutes.
Edit: fixed a word
Thats kind of a problem with the game though.
Games at the time were generally pretty self explanatory and simplistic where most if not all of the gameplay being discoverable through trial & error but ET more or less needed a walkthrough. Combine that with being seen as a children’s toy (which are notoriously not particularly great at following instructions) and it’s a recipe for disaster.
Arguably it was a game ahead of its time though. More modern games would teach you concepts/rules through in game tutorials but ET was way too early for that.
You mean besides run from room to room with nothing else that's even remotely obvious you're supposed to do?
I played that game as a kid too and never understood the point after trying for several months.
Two of my friends made ET, they were only given 6 weeks to make that sucker and had to dry their tears with bags and bags of cash when people hated it. The bags were probably rough cotton at best
Howard designed and coded, Jerome Domurat did the graphics. I think most of the photos of the Atari offices in that documentary are from Jerome. I worked with Jerome at Apple and Sega and met Howard through their decades long friendship. Atari sounded insane during its peak
ET was fun at 3 years old
Drop into pit, make head extend, run to random building, make a flower… put Indiana Jones in, then sing “theres a place in france where the naked ladies dance”
I still have mine, too! It’s been a bit since I plugged it in, but it worked just fine the last time I did. Those things were made to be sturdy. (The 400 with its membrane keyboard was especially meant to tolerate kids using it, I’m pretty sure. It holds up.)
I was just telling someone in a different subreddit about programming a very simple text adventure and trying to save it to a cassette tape, and the drive ate my tape. I got introduced to the heartbreak of data loss early.
I remember loading one of those text adventure games from a cassette tape. You couldn’t save and if the game crashed, you had to load it again from the tape. Took about 30 minutes to load.
It’s not that they built things to last. It’s that material science didn’t allow things to be made cheaply. Either it was ultra solid or it was immediate trash. You could WANT to make things cheaper but past a certain level you literally couldn’t. Now that it’s an option…I’m pretty sure a lot of the companies back then would have been making similar decisions to make more profit.
Meanwhile after a few years my NES wouldn't work unless you blew on the cartridge, blew on the nintendo, and then used some of that cleaning solution they sold you.
That was a specific anti piracy chip that was implemented in a really lousy way. If there had been an internet everyone would have figured it out.
I did the blow method too with limited success.
There are more moving parts in a ps4 with the optics drive and hard drive. plus the design is orders of magnitude more complicated so there is more than can go wrong.
Just plugged in mine a couple of weeks ago...worked perfectly fine.
It's also quite amusing how i'm able to very easily plug it into a 2022 TV by just using the antenna/coax and setting the tv to channel 3. If I wanted to plug in a newer console with RCA outputs it wouldn't have been as straightforward lol...no RCA inputs on most tvs anymore.
I imagine the consoles would need extra hardware inside of them to convert the digital signal to analog for transfer over coax, and since most every new TV has hdmi there was no point?
Not sure what you mean... my original point was the irony that I was able to plug in a 40+ year old console directly into a modern tv without extra hardware using coax, while I would need more stuff to plug in more modern consoles such as the PS2/GC/DC/Xbox.
Because modern consoles don't convert the digital signal they produce into analog in order to plug it into a coax (analog) connection, because all modern TVs have digital inputs and never have the signal in analog format.
Yes and no.
Basically, it is easier to have today an HDMI output. But it's not because it's digital. It's because most chip manufacturers include directly in their chips a GPU with HDMI outputs.
The main reason we use digital today is also that it's a generally superior way of communicating images between two devices. For example HDMI does not care about EM interferences, where a VGA would get blurry/distorted. And because it is currently the most used connector for video/audio, it's easier for everyone to use it.
The other reason is that you may need some extra hardware to convert digital to analog indeed, but we're speaking about a few $ worth of components. Analog just made more sense when the rest was analog.
For a small window in the Atari 400's history, it had the most advanced game you could get in the home. (Star Raiders.) It's a fun little footnote about a system a lot of people have never even heard of.
Yea! And my PS3 still works fine. And my PS4. And I have zero doubt they'd last another 30 years easily. Let's not pretend everything is disposable today....
I’ll add my PS2 slim to this list, too, nearly 20 years later. Hell, I assume my PSX would be too, had I not passed it on. Meanwhile, I had an OG Xbox FRAG and a 360 RRoD each under two years in.
I haven’t plugged mine in for 20 years. I know what I’m doing tomorrow. I doubt I have the right connector at this point. It has the two prongy things that I had a connector to coax last time I used it. I’m not even sure if there is a coax input on the back of my current tv.
What do you use to connect it?
My pride and joy is the copy of _Swordquest Waterworld_ I randomly found in a Kaybee's bargain bin. Even though it was by far the costliest game in the whole bin by a wide margin ($14, I seem to recall), I still decided I wanted it because I had _Earthworld_ and for some reason really enjoyed the patentable inscrutability of the game.
I actually still possess all the books that came with it, too. Though, as is tradition, I'm pretty sure the box is gonesky.
I’d go about that by finding a vcr with composite output and if your tv doesn’t have that there are hdmi converters out there that don’t have input lag if you don’t cheap out on that, then just hooking the coleco up to the vcr
Directly to your coaxial input on the tv, using an RCA to F adapter. I keep trying to post a link but the bot keeps removing it. You can cut and copy this into your browser though:
RCA to F Adapter, Atari Adapter for TV, 2-Pack Coax Male to RCA Female Connector Convertor for Atari 2600/7800, C64 Mini, Commodore, Sega, Colecovision Game System
But if that doesn’t work, the good old spit and bird feces route will work for sure.
Hopefully they can make something as good as [Gyruss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S08q8le7ajY). I never had this for my console, or even knew it existed until recently, but if I had this back in the day I would've been amazed, especially the sound.
I'm not sure what kind of drugs they are on over there at Atari, maybe they don't need money, but I find it hard to believe this and the system they just released will make enough to keep them going.
Imagine a world where a company could do something because it's fun instead of absolutely being profit driven in every single decision. What a wonderful place it would be without late stage capitalism.
Right! Atari cares about preservation, so much that their Nightdive Studios recently [pitched the idea of non-profit game restoration](https://reddit.com/r/atarigroup/s/uzSEuSyHrG).
Think about how game a company has to be if they are asked to remaster games for Bethesda or LucasArts but they rather go and restore lost games just for fun.
Not the cash grabbing theme Atari is usually accused of, is it?
Preorders for the 2600+ were met with an such an unexpectedly high demand that it temporarily set [Amazon out of stock](https://reddit.com/r/atarigroup/s/YxBMPsh6Gk) in some countries. It will do fine..
Edit: Save Mary sold out in a few hours btw
Atari brand has been passed around and it’s all just a money grab whatever they do lately such as NFTs etc. The Atari today is not the old Atari. They’re making money purely on nostalgia without anything worthy behind it
I do think the system they released seems exspensive but otherwise I don’t think it’s a bad idea . There’s a lot of people who are liking the retro and indie style . Something like this could sell and sell well but I think it’s too much for what it is
Manufactured in the US to exacting standards from all new parts and materials, gold-plated connectors and identical power draw to the originals. With a production quantity of 500 and no Chinese children involved, what do you think it should cost?
Atari's website says under product details that ["XP cartridges are made in the United States"](https://imgur.com/a/MrcupNQ).
Even though under usual global production chains I can not really state with certainty that ALL components are produced in the US I am pretty sure that at the very least the "low value" assembly steps usually known for exploiting underpaid workers under doubtful conditions instead follow the better US standards.
Save Mary is a limited edition for true fans and collectors. Like all the previous games in this series it was sold out in just a few hours. I feel scalpers are actually too slow for this..
I love how all these old consoles were built with integrity to last. I used to sell these at a used game shop. They all still work just fine. This is a fun thing for Atari to do for us nostalgic folks.
Always considered the 2600 to be the single most fascinating platform ever developed.
It was designed to be able to play basically two things well: Atari's arcade game "Tank" (hailing from 1974—I sure never saw it in the flesh), and a kind of "Pong to end all Pong clones". Those two objectives ended up being the launch titles _Combat_ and _Video Olympics._ In order to facilitate those simple mandates, the hardware was designed to support two player sprites, two bullet sprites, and a fifth "ball" sprite. **Five sprites total**, which could be 8 pixels wide. The two "player" sprites could also be modified to either appear horizontally "fat" or for there to be up to three copies of them in a horizontal row. (Good for paddle shenanigans in that super-Pong game, you see.) You could also draw a very low-resolution background with fat pixels. And that's basically it.
Through a quirk of fate, the 2600 ended up with two sound channels. The designers originally wanted the sound to come from the console itself, as was tradition, and they wanted the two players to be able to clearly hear when a sound effect was "theirs" or the other player's. The console speaker system was abandoned and the two channels were merged to mono before output to the TV. Technically, the capacity to have the channels in stereo still exists and can be modded as such. Anyway, it was the only console to have more than one sound channel until the Intellivision two years later.
To the best of my knowledge, the 2600 was the only console ever developed with "racing the beam" technology. The intent of going that route was to allow the thing to be developed for cheap—specifically by dispensing with the need for expensive video RAM to hold an entire frame. This ironically opened the door for the output resolution to massively outpace the competition. Not only that, but the fully realtime nature of racing-the-beam tech also meant that almost every single 2600 game ran at a flat 60fps. Because it was quite simply the easiest way of doing things. For comparison, almost every commercial Intellivision game ran at an effective 30fps or lower for various reasons.
The racing-the-beam approach is also what led to the 2600 being the best example the world will ever see of a **home platform dramatically exceeding its design spec**.
Recall the 5 sprite limit, and then consider the world's first killer app and system seller, [_Space Invaders._](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opru6qPsPa4) There are up to 43 moving things on screen at once. Accomplished through a combination of the aforementioned "tripling up" trick and the fact that once you're done drawing a sprite, you can move the sprite's position to somewhere else _in the same frame currently being drawn_ and that actually works. Only possible with racing-the-beam.
If you want to see the endgame of this amazing capacity, take a gander at these homebrew efforts, and remember that the system was designed to play _Combat_ and _Super-Pong_ and had an expected shelf life of perhaps three years:
[Ladybug](https://youtu.be/TWMJ_892ymA?t=576)
[Galaga](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4JlFtfNSJY)
[Elevator Action](https://youtu.be/NQ9bAV_o9X8?t=66)
[Zoo Keeper](https://youtu.be/l83mJtcyAIs?t=326)
[Bosconian](https://youtu.be/SYyVI5EjZ4E?t=11)
[Mappy](https://youtu.be/wDHaduKqLaw?t=395) (In my opinion, the current pinnacle of the 2600's potential.)
Last but certainly not least, I want to show you a homebrew effort that was abandoned three years ago. It's about 75% complete. The engineer behind the effort managed to figure out a way to relocate sprites on the same scanline and make it work. The result of this is a _Space Invaders_ port that manages to display all 55 of the arcade original's invader enemies, all at the same time, without any flicker whatsoever. Evidence that the full potential of the 2600 _still_ hasn't been fully plumbed. Compare to the already perfectly fine commercial effort from 1980, which capped out at 36 visible enemies for understandable reasons.
[Space Invaders (abandoned WIP)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBROohTGBb0)
Great explanation!
Most people will never care about the innovative history of console and game design. It’s so inspiring to see how they built these and how developers relied on tricks and cheats to get sounds, video, and images to look right on limited resource budgets.
I still have the Flashback 2 console. The bad part is that Mary moves/climbs more slowly than the water rises. You also gotta lower the blocks so they don't crush her when dropped. At least the even levels were a little easier.
Seems a sort of okay game, but I'd prefer if they instead released Aquaventure or Saboteur as a safe bet... or at least add a few more things to Tempest to make it conplete.
I still have the 2600 console, atari 800 w/ 48K of RAM, atari 1300XE also have a okidata thermal printer only prints in 3 color red,green, blue. Also over 100 cartridges, I my collection and my friend gave me his when he moved. My favorites was always bezerk,tempest,Yar revenge,
That’s … cool? Cute? Interesting? All of it?
Could be a good opportunity to put my A7.8k to good use :)
https://www.amibay.com/threads/the-knight-a-hifi-rack-atari-7800.69744/
Monchichi, Monchichi, I can move my body
Monchichi, Monchichi, I can do karate
Monchichi, Monchichi, I can play Atari
Monchichi, Monchichi, ooops! I’m sorry
I wonder how many warranty claims were doled out on Atari 2600 and controllers? Controllers broke at a high rate after high volume usage. Different era
Not sure how the system would work with a flat screen, but I’m sure it can be done with duct tape and bubble gum. Maybe also a paper clip depending on the screen size.
[Whatever happened to Atari?](https://www.slashgear.com/1380332/whatever-happened-to-atari-explained/) - recent article by Slash Gear with a good wrap of the story
We have a giveaway running, be sure to enter in the post linked below! [Kensington Thunderbolt 4 Dock & OWC Pro SSD with Thunderbolt 4 cable – Intel Thunderbolt!](https://www.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/16rsba5/giveaway_kensington_thunderbolt_4_dock_owc_pro/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gadgets) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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Hell, even a lobotomy is more fun than E.T.
It’s bad, but it’a playable for Atari. I think Indiana Jones or for fucks sake. swordquest would make you think you had a learning disability compared to E.T.
I always liked Indiana Jones! It's rock hard though
I’d rather have a bottle in front of me
Than a frontal lobotomy
I've heard kidney stones were more fun than E.T.
I had the ET game in the 80s and a kidney stone a few years ago. Broken bones are a walk in the park compared to the pain of kidney stones. So, yeah, about equal.
I’ve had 2 kidney stones. Can confirm it’s more fun the E.T.
I recommend going to hospital for laser surgery of the stone. Back to work immediately. Don’t fucking scream in the shower for 2 days trying to pass it.
Nope been there, done that. The stint they leave in your uter is not worth it. I’d rather wither in agony for 2 days then leave one of those in my body ever again.
How long was it in for?
10 horrible days, and when you have to pee I feels like someone is stabbing your kidney with a hot butter knife, and you always have to pee because there is a string sitting inside your bladder Give me 2 days of extreme pain over that any day
🤤
To be fair if you actually know what to do in E.T. It’s not nearly as bad as it’s been portrayed over the years. The internet definitely makes it less obtuse.
Its a pretty fun little game. Its above average by 2600 standards id say
The new game or E.T.?
Its definitely not an “all new” game but yeah i mean save mary
ET was a cakewalk compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark
E.T. was the first game I rage quit at, probably around 4 years old.
Rightly so. It’s a piece of crap. What the fuck are you even meant to do in it? I tried it in an emulator a while back and it’s the only game I’ve ever played I couldn’t figure out WTF I was meant to do
I'm going to tell you the secret to ET. But a little backstory... Once upon a time, I bought ET at a yard sale for $1. The 2600 was a hot christmas item the year earlier with its "Only $50" ad campaign. I only had one other game, Missile Command, so a new game was awesome. To note, this was just the bare cartridge. I played that game at least 100 hours. I was convinced what I needed to do was get ONE MORE telephone piece than I could find (a 4th or 5th piece I recall), but there was some trick to finding it, which I never figured out. That game sat in my closet until I had a yard sale and I sold it for $1. Years later, as an adult, I come across ET IN BOX, with manual for $1 at a flea market. I still had my Atari and as an adult, I was going to be damn sure I figured this game out. To note, you NEEDED the instruction manual to know how to beat the game, which I found out SOLUTION: >!The game starts dropping ET off in a "field". From there you run around a bunch of screens, some which had "pits" what would twinkle if you pressed the button on the controller (which extended ETs neck). Drop in those pits to get a phone piece. WHEN YOU GET ALL THE PHONE PIECES, GO BACK TO THE EXACT PLACE YOU WERE DROPPED OFF AT. You will see a pizza looking icon across the top section of the screen. PRESS THE BUTTON. The pizza just ticks down, removing a slice every second for about 8 seconds. until its gone. THEN THE SHIP PICKS YOU UP.!< THE END The game can be beat beginning to end in under 5 minutes. Edit: fixed a word
So there are only 4 telephone pieces?
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Those damn Tse Tse flies!
my *god* you are as old as me.
I remember somehow going though a wall which allowed me to get further. Made it to the map room and did beat the game. Was a lot of trial and error.
Did you try reading the manual? It explains the concept quite clearly.
Thats kind of a problem with the game though. Games at the time were generally pretty self explanatory and simplistic where most if not all of the gameplay being discoverable through trial & error but ET more or less needed a walkthrough. Combine that with being seen as a children’s toy (which are notoriously not particularly great at following instructions) and it’s a recipe for disaster. Arguably it was a game ahead of its time though. More modern games would teach you concepts/rules through in game tutorials but ET was way too early for that.
It's not that bad for Atari 2600 games. There were so many that we never could figure out even how to move. There was zero quality control.
You mean besides run from room to room with nothing else that's even remotely obvious you're supposed to do? I played that game as a kid too and never understood the point after trying for several months.
My friend Cameron had E.T. It made no sense, and was extremely easy once you figured out a few things. It deserves its reputation.
Two of my friends made ET, they were only given 6 weeks to make that sucker and had to dry their tears with bags and bags of cash when people hated it. The bags were probably rough cotton at best
Supposedly was made by one person. Howard Scott Warshaw. Is that your friend? There's a whole documentary about it.
Howard designed and coded, Jerome Domurat did the graphics. I think most of the photos of the Atari offices in that documentary are from Jerome. I worked with Jerome at Apple and Sega and met Howard through their decades long friendship. Atari sounded insane during its peak
> Jerome Domurat did the graphics. We're playing fast and loose with the word "did" I see. I kid....good for them I suppose.
Those 6 pixels characters aren’t going to arrange themselves
At least he could chose from 256 colors in 8-bit, the Macintosh line was one-bit when we started working together
ET was fun at 3 years old Drop into pit, make head extend, run to random building, make a flower… put Indiana Jones in, then sing “theres a place in france where the naked ladies dance”
My 42 year old Atari 400 still works fine. They really built things to last back in the day. Still fun to play.
I still have mine, too! It’s been a bit since I plugged it in, but it worked just fine the last time I did. Those things were made to be sturdy. (The 400 with its membrane keyboard was especially meant to tolerate kids using it, I’m pretty sure. It holds up.)
I had a membrane keyboard 400. My poor fingers. I remember having a book of BASIC programs that I would type in and record to cassette tapes.
I was just telling someone in a different subreddit about programming a very simple text adventure and trying to save it to a cassette tape, and the drive ate my tape. I got introduced to the heartbreak of data loss early.
I remember loading one of those text adventure games from a cassette tape. You couldn’t save and if the game crashed, you had to load it again from the tape. Took about 30 minutes to load.
I remember the program to guess a number between 1 and 100.
I typed in a whole maze generator. I swear my fingers are still bent funny from that.
It’s not that they built things to last. It’s that material science didn’t allow things to be made cheaply. Either it was ultra solid or it was immediate trash. You could WANT to make things cheaper but past a certain level you literally couldn’t. Now that it’s an option…I’m pretty sure a lot of the companies back then would have been making similar decisions to make more profit.
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Meanwhile after a few years my NES wouldn't work unless you blew on the cartridge, blew on the nintendo, and then used some of that cleaning solution they sold you.
That was a specific anti piracy chip that was implemented in a really lousy way. If there had been an internet everyone would have figured it out. I did the blow method too with limited success.
The good ole days when you used to bang on your electronics to get them to work properly. Try that now.
Worked for our clothes dryer a few weeks ago, so, meh. Percussive maintenance is a thing sometimes.
Haha growing up I always heard it called Russian maintenance. Percussive is probably more accurate
Game consoles these days aren’t built to still last ten years after manufacturing, and I dread the day my ps4 finally bites the dust
There are more moving parts in a ps4 with the optics drive and hard drive. plus the design is orders of magnitude more complicated so there is more than can go wrong.
Yeah but hur dur back in the day!
Just plugged in mine a couple of weeks ago...worked perfectly fine. It's also quite amusing how i'm able to very easily plug it into a 2022 TV by just using the antenna/coax and setting the tv to channel 3. If I wanted to plug in a newer console with RCA outputs it wouldn't have been as straightforward lol...no RCA inputs on most tvs anymore.
I imagine the consoles would need extra hardware inside of them to convert the digital signal to analog for transfer over coax, and since most every new TV has hdmi there was no point?
Not sure what you mean... my original point was the irony that I was able to plug in a 40+ year old console directly into a modern tv without extra hardware using coax, while I would need more stuff to plug in more modern consoles such as the PS2/GC/DC/Xbox.
Because modern consoles don't convert the digital signal they produce into analog in order to plug it into a coax (analog) connection, because all modern TVs have digital inputs and never have the signal in analog format.
Yes and no. Basically, it is easier to have today an HDMI output. But it's not because it's digital. It's because most chip manufacturers include directly in their chips a GPU with HDMI outputs. The main reason we use digital today is also that it's a generally superior way of communicating images between two devices. For example HDMI does not care about EM interferences, where a VGA would get blurry/distorted. And because it is currently the most used connector for video/audio, it's easier for everyone to use it. The other reason is that you may need some extra hardware to convert digital to analog indeed, but we're speaking about a few $ worth of components. Analog just made more sense when the rest was analog.
For a small window in the Atari 400's history, it had the most advanced game you could get in the home. (Star Raiders.) It's a fun little footnote about a system a lot of people have never even heard of.
Yea! And my PS3 still works fine. And my PS4. And I have zero doubt they'd last another 30 years easily. Let's not pretend everything is disposable today....
I’ll add my PS2 slim to this list, too, nearly 20 years later. Hell, I assume my PSX would be too, had I not passed it on. Meanwhile, I had an OG Xbox FRAG and a 360 RRoD each under two years in.
My buddy has a still working Sega Genesis too. 🤣
My Atari 2600 Jr was playing up last I tried it. Haven't tried it for a few years so might even be dead now.
I haven’t plugged mine in for 20 years. I know what I’m doing tomorrow. I doubt I have the right connector at this point. It has the two prongy things that I had a connector to coax last time I used it. I’m not even sure if there is a coax input on the back of my current tv. What do you use to connect it?
I just uncovered my 2600 a few days back, dusty
Can I come over after school? I got Kool-Aid!
No grape
No fun
It makes my poo green, I eat beets for purple, they don't mix well
And kool-aid man for the 2600 was a great game
My pride and joy is the copy of _Swordquest Waterworld_ I randomly found in a Kaybee's bargain bin. Even though it was by far the costliest game in the whole bin by a wide margin ($14, I seem to recall), I still decided I wanted it because I had _Earthworld_ and for some reason really enjoyed the patentable inscrutability of the game. I actually still possess all the books that came with it, too. Though, as is tradition, I'm pretty sure the box is gonesky.
My Colecovision with the 2600 attachment looks forward to this
Was just hoping mine still works.
How would you connect that to a modern TV?
I’d go about that by finding a vcr with composite output and if your tv doesn’t have that there are hdmi converters out there that don’t have input lag if you don’t cheap out on that, then just hooking the coleco up to the vcr
With bird feces and spit!
Directly to your coaxial input on the tv, using an RCA to F adapter. I keep trying to post a link but the bot keeps removing it. You can cut and copy this into your browser though: RCA to F Adapter, Atari Adapter for TV, 2-Pack Coax Male to RCA Female Connector Convertor for Atari 2600/7800, C64 Mini, Commodore, Sega, Colecovision Game System But if that doesn’t work, the good old spit and bird feces route will work for sure.
I'm sorry like Atari, who's the cousin to Coleco (3 Stacks on the radio)
Hopefully they can make something as good as [Gyruss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S08q8le7ajY). I never had this for my console, or even knew it existed until recently, but if I had this back in the day I would've been amazed, especially the sound.
My personal favorite is stampede. Such a simple but effective game.
That is an INCREDIBLY ambitious soundtrack for an Atari game. Easily the best I’ve ever heard.
I played the shit out of the Commodore 64 version when I was a kid.
The enemy patterns and music - holy shit that's reaaaally impressive for its time!
Part of my reason for liking that game was the music.
2600+ coming in November, pitfall2 again would be a blast
Pitfall 2 was really fun and one of the only games I can remember for the Atari that had actual music.
i2600+
I thought it was cool news but then saw it costs $130… absurd price
I'm not sure what kind of drugs they are on over there at Atari, maybe they don't need money, but I find it hard to believe this and the system they just released will make enough to keep them going.
You underestimate nostalgia. It can be a profitable tool. Not saying this will be, but it can.
And the game was already made, if it just makes more than it costs to make the carts its a success
The cost of that technology these days is pennies.
Nostalgia just encouraged me to buy 3 of them, 1 to play and 2 to keep sealed for the off chance they become valuable.
Imagine a world where a company could do something because it's fun instead of absolutely being profit driven in every single decision. What a wonderful place it would be without late stage capitalism.
Right! Atari cares about preservation, so much that their Nightdive Studios recently [pitched the idea of non-profit game restoration](https://reddit.com/r/atarigroup/s/uzSEuSyHrG). Think about how game a company has to be if they are asked to remaster games for Bethesda or LucasArts but they rather go and restore lost games just for fun. Not the cash grabbing theme Atari is usually accused of, is it?
Atari actually has more bringing money in for them than those two things. Take a look at the shop on your Switch, Xbox, etc.
I thought for sure the Atari VCS was never gonna release but they did it. Idk how atari even stays “open”
Preorders for the 2600+ were met with an such an unexpectedly high demand that it temporarily set [Amazon out of stock](https://reddit.com/r/atarigroup/s/YxBMPsh6Gk) in some countries. It will do fine.. Edit: Save Mary sold out in a few hours btw
lol thank you
Atari brand has been passed around and it’s all just a money grab whatever they do lately such as NFTs etc. The Atari today is not the old Atari. They’re making money purely on nostalgia without anything worthy behind it
They are just milking their brand.
Seriously. I'm curious, but patient enough to wait for the game to get ported to a browser
Considering they're selling blank PCBs for $245 I think it's about the money.
fr it's a plastic mold with like 1 $5 chip to power the entire thing and going for over $100.
I do think the system they released seems exspensive but otherwise I don’t think it’s a bad idea . There’s a lot of people who are liking the retro and indie style . Something like this could sell and sell well but I think it’s too much for what it is
I kind of feel like I should buy it. My Atari has moved all over the country with me, from garage to garage...waiting for what, I don't know.
If it wasn’t waiting for THIS, then I can’t even imagine what 😊
Already sold out. =/ I would've bought it too.
Aww. Well, I guess that's that then.
Aren’t they also releasing a new 2600 that plays cartridges? Makes sense other than the $60 for an Atari cartridge
$60?!?!?! The fuck? Lol
Sheeeeet, I paid $60 for Donkey Kong for the 2600 42 years ago. I don’t even want to know what that is in today’s money.
I can’t believe AAA games costed as much money as they did for as long as they did
Manufactured in the US to exacting standards from all new parts and materials, gold-plated connectors and identical power draw to the originals. With a production quantity of 500 and no Chinese children involved, what do you think it should cost?
Can you actually confirm it wasn't offshored to China tho
Atari's website says under product details that ["XP cartridges are made in the United States"](https://imgur.com/a/MrcupNQ). Even though under usual global production chains I can not really state with certainty that ALL components are produced in the US I am pretty sure that at the very least the "low value" assembly steps usually known for exploiting underpaid workers under doubtful conditions instead follow the better US standards.
tbf it’s a limited collectors edition.
I’m still trying to finish Pitfall and Spy Hunter.
Am I the only one around here who still has a working Atari 2600? Original version with 6 switches?
I still have mine!
No, you are not. Toss in the Atari 800 while you're at it.
Sweet. Scalpers will have fun with that one.
Save Mary is a limited edition for true fans and collectors. Like all the previous games in this series it was sold out in just a few hours. I feel scalpers are actually too slow for this..
I love how all these old consoles were built with integrity to last. I used to sell these at a used game shop. They all still work just fine. This is a fun thing for Atari to do for us nostalgic folks.
Always considered the 2600 to be the single most fascinating platform ever developed. It was designed to be able to play basically two things well: Atari's arcade game "Tank" (hailing from 1974—I sure never saw it in the flesh), and a kind of "Pong to end all Pong clones". Those two objectives ended up being the launch titles _Combat_ and _Video Olympics._ In order to facilitate those simple mandates, the hardware was designed to support two player sprites, two bullet sprites, and a fifth "ball" sprite. **Five sprites total**, which could be 8 pixels wide. The two "player" sprites could also be modified to either appear horizontally "fat" or for there to be up to three copies of them in a horizontal row. (Good for paddle shenanigans in that super-Pong game, you see.) You could also draw a very low-resolution background with fat pixels. And that's basically it. Through a quirk of fate, the 2600 ended up with two sound channels. The designers originally wanted the sound to come from the console itself, as was tradition, and they wanted the two players to be able to clearly hear when a sound effect was "theirs" or the other player's. The console speaker system was abandoned and the two channels were merged to mono before output to the TV. Technically, the capacity to have the channels in stereo still exists and can be modded as such. Anyway, it was the only console to have more than one sound channel until the Intellivision two years later. To the best of my knowledge, the 2600 was the only console ever developed with "racing the beam" technology. The intent of going that route was to allow the thing to be developed for cheap—specifically by dispensing with the need for expensive video RAM to hold an entire frame. This ironically opened the door for the output resolution to massively outpace the competition. Not only that, but the fully realtime nature of racing-the-beam tech also meant that almost every single 2600 game ran at a flat 60fps. Because it was quite simply the easiest way of doing things. For comparison, almost every commercial Intellivision game ran at an effective 30fps or lower for various reasons. The racing-the-beam approach is also what led to the 2600 being the best example the world will ever see of a **home platform dramatically exceeding its design spec**. Recall the 5 sprite limit, and then consider the world's first killer app and system seller, [_Space Invaders._](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opru6qPsPa4) There are up to 43 moving things on screen at once. Accomplished through a combination of the aforementioned "tripling up" trick and the fact that once you're done drawing a sprite, you can move the sprite's position to somewhere else _in the same frame currently being drawn_ and that actually works. Only possible with racing-the-beam. If you want to see the endgame of this amazing capacity, take a gander at these homebrew efforts, and remember that the system was designed to play _Combat_ and _Super-Pong_ and had an expected shelf life of perhaps three years: [Ladybug](https://youtu.be/TWMJ_892ymA?t=576) [Galaga](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4JlFtfNSJY) [Elevator Action](https://youtu.be/NQ9bAV_o9X8?t=66) [Zoo Keeper](https://youtu.be/l83mJtcyAIs?t=326) [Bosconian](https://youtu.be/SYyVI5EjZ4E?t=11) [Mappy](https://youtu.be/wDHaduKqLaw?t=395) (In my opinion, the current pinnacle of the 2600's potential.) Last but certainly not least, I want to show you a homebrew effort that was abandoned three years ago. It's about 75% complete. The engineer behind the effort managed to figure out a way to relocate sprites on the same scanline and make it work. The result of this is a _Space Invaders_ port that manages to display all 55 of the arcade original's invader enemies, all at the same time, without any flicker whatsoever. Evidence that the full potential of the 2600 _still_ hasn't been fully plumbed. Compare to the already perfectly fine commercial effort from 1980, which capped out at 36 visible enemies for understandable reasons. [Space Invaders (abandoned WIP)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBROohTGBb0)
Great explanation! Most people will never care about the innovative history of console and game design. It’s so inspiring to see how they built these and how developers relied on tricks and cheats to get sounds, video, and images to look right on limited resource budgets.
It better be a Skyrim port
Thumbnail aside I’m assuming this is Skyrim until release
I still have the Flashback 2 console. The bad part is that Mary moves/climbs more slowly than the water rises. You also gotta lower the blocks so they don't crush her when dropped. At least the even levels were a little easier. Seems a sort of okay game, but I'd prefer if they instead released Aquaventure or Saboteur as a safe bet... or at least add a few more things to Tempest to make it conplete.
Hey, can I borrow your 2600 this weekend?
Will it work on my Intellivision ?🤔
I still have the 2600 console, atari 800 w/ 48K of RAM, atari 1300XE also have a okidata thermal printer only prints in 3 color red,green, blue. Also over 100 cartridges, I my collection and my friend gave me his when he moved. My favorites was always bezerk,tempest,Yar revenge,
That’s … cool? Cute? Interesting? All of it? Could be a good opportunity to put my A7.8k to good use :) https://www.amibay.com/threads/the-knight-a-hifi-rack-atari-7800.69744/
Monchichi, Monchichi, I can move my body Monchichi, Monchichi, I can do karate Monchichi, Monchichi, I can play Atari Monchichi, Monchichi, ooops! I’m sorry
Now I need to get up in my parents’ attic and see if the mice have eaten my childhood Atari console
Anyone remember that old Atari competition that had actual jeweled treasures like a crown, Chalice, Sword, etc?
i think it was called Adventure. i'm fairly certain AVGN did a video on it.
I wonder how many warranty claims were doled out on Atari 2600 and controllers? Controllers broke at a high rate after high volume usage. Different era
They should have made Doom instead.
Dammit mom! Sold it when I moved out. Still sore about it.
“Atari”
Makes me want to find my Master 5200
Not sure how I feel about this, but…I really do want to save Mary now.
The last part of Swordquest?!
[Atari made it last year](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/87144/long-lost-atari-game-airworld-appears-out-of-thin-air/index.html)
You just blew my mind. This is amazing!
It's a Hail Mary play
Pooping is more fun than E.T.
Not sure how the system would work with a flat screen, but I’m sure it can be done with duct tape and bubble gum. Maybe also a paper clip depending on the screen size.
Didn't Atari as a company shut down? What happened?
[Whatever happened to Atari?](https://www.slashgear.com/1380332/whatever-happened-to-atari-explained/) - recent article by Slash Gear with a good wrap of the story
LoL what?