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Toki Prototype For 7800 Discovered!


Willard

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As per the title, a complete beta of Toki has been found for the Atari 7800.

This announcement is a bit overdue, as it was found several years ago by BuddyBuddies (another AA member) and I on the same test department hard drives as our Lynx discoveries.

It appears to be PAL format and Information on the title screens indicate that it is "Toki Beta 2, Copyright 1993 Atari Corp" which would've made it an usually late release.

Although I've been interested in the 7800 for a little while and have a decent collection of games, we're not very familiar with the 7800 scene so we're starting from scratch in regard to exploring the possibilties of releasing Toki. We are going to try to get the game to the right people and hope to have more information with regard to what can be done with this soon.

For more information on Toki for the 7800, as well as the other titles we discovered on the test department hard drive, please visit our website HERE (where I've already gone through the trouble of organizing the information!).

Other stuff we found on the hard drive include what appears to be some of the latest stuff Atari was working on for the 7800 and Lynx, including Klax (7800), Toki (7800), Hotdog (Lynx), Road Riot 4WD (Lynx), Poker (Lynx), Relief Pitcher (Lynx) as well as an as-of-yet unannounced title.

Below are some screens. Here is the toki specific page of our site.

 

post-3404-0-18696900-1422488972_thumb.jpg

Edited by CPUWIZ
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Toki falls under the "Rumored Atari 7800 Releases":

Rumored Atari 7800 Releases

ATARI
Elevator Action                   CX78??
Gauntlet                          CX78??
Gremlins                          CX78??
Road Riot 4WD                     CX78??
Steel Talons                      CX78??
Tempest                           CX78??
The Eidilon                       CX78??
Toki                              CX78??

This hopefully lends to others of having a chance of being found (if at all developed) in the above list as well.
Pretty cool if anything more comes of it; however, Toki itself is a pretty amazing find. Thanks for sharing, Willard.

 

Two questions, if able to answer:

 

1. Does the beta have sound?

2. How large is the binary?

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Toki falls under the "Rumored Atari 7800 Releases":

Rumored Atari 7800 Releases

ATARI
Elevator Action                   CX78??
Gauntlet                          CX78??
Gremlins                          CX78??
Road Riot 4WD                     CX78??
Steel Talons                      CX78??
Tempest                           CX78??
The Eidilon                       CX78??
Toki                              CX78??

This hopefully lends to others of having a chance of being found (if at all developed) in the above list as well.

Pretty cool if anything more comes of it; however, Toki itself is a pretty amazing find. Thanks for sharing, Willard.

 

Two questions, if able to answer:

 

1. Does the beta have sound?

2. How large is the binary?

 

Questions will soon be answered. ;)

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I seem to remember being the second highest bidder on the ebay auction for those Atari test systems. Assuming it is the same one I am thinking of.

 

Are you planning on doing a cart release then?

 

Mitch

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Wow! I never expected this would be found. This is what I have on my site about it:

 

 

Port of the 1989 TAD Corp. Coin-op. According to internal memos this game was very close to being complete, but was cancelled due to the death of the 7800.

 

Too bad I sold my 7800. I guess there's always emulators. :)

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Do you mean the ebay auction? I think it was like 4 or 5 years ago. I don't remember the exact date.

 

We bought several test department and development computers on ebay. Some of them were duds with nothing more than test reports on them. As we bought all the computers that were sold around that time we won some and we lost some but overall it was worthwhile as we found some great stuff and were able to prevent it from becoming lost or ending up in a private collectoin.

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Are you planning on doing a cart release then?

 

Too bad I sold my 7800. I guess there's always emulators. :)

 

We will explore the best way to release this when we see what can be done with it. We would like to see it on cart as that's our personal preference, especially since this game is practically complete and pretty impressive for the system (in scale, at least), so it would sit well next to other retail games. But we also understand there are other means to play it.

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Like I said we are not sure what can be done with the game until more analysis is done in regard to how feasible it is to get onto cart. But a cart release plus an eventual ROM would be reasonable imo.

 

I did a small comparison of toki a few day ago out of curiosity just to see how the versions stack up. Graphically it's interesting how Atari omitted certain details (likely due to hardware limitations) but also tried to add a little more detail in other ways to make up for it. In regard to level design and game play they did a pretty impressive job getting the arcade game on the 7800 with few compromises.

 

post-3404-0-59260700-1422500520_thumb.jpg

 

post-3404-0-01208800-1422501454_thumb.jpg

Edited by Willard
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The Digital Press Collector's Guide I have actually explains why Toki has a 1993 date. Atari had Internal Documents in May of 1993 concerning Atari 7800 game development according to Digital Press Collector's guide. According to an internal document dated 5/12/93 claimed Atari Management decided to stop 7800 development at this time.

 

Toki was one of 5 Atari 7800 games that still was in development in 1993 or was on 1 out 2 May 1993 internal Documents for the Atari 7800. The other 4 are Pit Fighter, Rampart, Road Riot 4WD and Steel Talons.

 

Digital Press claimed there according to an Internal Document dated 5/14/93 Toki was very close to being finalized. The Guide also mentioned Atari's total cost for this game was 9,000 lbs.

 

The 5/14/93 date mentioned for Toki is one of importance. The internal document on that date also mentioned Pit Fighter, Rampart, and Road Riot 4WD based on the Digital Press Collector's Guide I have. Pit Fighter on that Document date was in very early development when the developer agreed to cancel Pit Fighter.

 

Rampart was very close to being finalized and Atari got away with paying $50,000 of $60,000 when the developer agreed to cancel the project without payment of the outstanding balance. Road Riot 4WD was ready to be released on the Internal Document dated 5/14/93.

 

Steel Talons was mentioned on an Internal Atari document 5/12/93 states that: "Atari management has made the decision to stop 7800 development at this time." The document goes on to explain that Steel Talons is virtually complete. The total cost paid to produce, not release was 25,000 lbs.

Edited by 8th lutz
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