dark-aleph

Calliope is also the name of the musical instrument that played music at traveling circuses. The tune in Shootin' Gallery is the standard "it's a circus" riff, and the screen has classic circus stripes. Calliope seems like a very likely name for a prototype of this game.

The 32 in 1 just refers to the pack-in cart that came with late era PAL consoles. This cart came with all the Juniors sold in Australia from about '87-'92, for example. There's a 2600 Jr. box variant with the 32 in 1 splash, too. So this ROM is the one from that compilation cart. As it was an official Atari product, the ROMs on the 32 in 1 are presumably the same as the original standalone PAL ROMs. I suppose there might be a slight change allowing it to be run from the 32 in 1 menu screen. The colours on PAL Bowling are truly hideous. For all the early PAL releases Atari just changed the NTSC ROM to fit the scanline rquirements without caring how the speed changed, or how the colours turned out. Bowling has the single ugliest palette this procedure threw up.

Maybe it's just NOS. Those shirts were $4 when they were used to promote the home version of Pong 0 2 ⁞ | ⁞ • ⁞ | ⁞ ⁞ (checks...) Yep, $4 in late 1975 = $20 today.

Palm trees are notoriously poor at providing shade. See this article on LA's palm-tree driven shade crisis, or come visit the Gold Coast - Australia's heatstroke capital ☀️? How about "This company has more shade than a drag convention" or "This company is more Shady than Marshall B. Mathers III"? - if you're a kid, it's competing against the five best toys of all time.

The manual doesn't help. In the only picture of the player carrying the sword they're not holding it from the left or the right - they are carrying it from the TOP. Judging by that, it's a skateboard. As a kid I always picked it up from the arrow end, so I though of that as the handle. But I only held that end because it's the most efficient grip to kill with. Nothing to do with the graphics.

Well, why not? There's a coffeepot controller already. The inspiration could be the paddle controllers. As a kid, I didn't realise they were supposed to be pictures of tennis racquets on the paddles. I grew up in a bakery, and so I wondered why the paddles had flour sieves on them (another cooking utensil). I felt like an idiot when I figured it out as an adult, I mean there's even a ball ffs! I can see them being mistaken for waffle irons too. They look a lot like old campfire waffle irons.

It's Ubuntu based, so I took the lid off and had some open sauce. The AtariOS is not OS though, so I couldn't put any on the taco... Had to pass on the beef, too. I kept asking "Where's the beef?" but the only answer I got was "No moos is good moos." In the end it was just crackers and cheese. Like the whole campaign, really.

Technically Plaque Attack and Tooth Protectors take place inside the body, though likely in a way that will provide you with little, uh... satisfaction. The mouth kinda seems like a waiting room for really being inside the body, and it wouldn't surprise me if the entire digestive tract is absent from your fetish. When I play either of these games, I always imagine myself to be inside the mouth, looking out. How do other people see it? I think I see it from the inside becasue then it matches the orientation I'm sitting in as a player, and so I'm protecting my own teeth. If I saw it as looking from the outside of the mouth, it would be the mouth of someone facing me and I'd be a dentist. Not that I've got anything against dentists, it's just that Steve Martin's performance in Little Shop of Horrors makes it hard for me to roleplay that profession! Though there's an inside-of-mouth POV in that, too:

Taco recipe meme: Crypto cash in:

Q: Is it a console or is it not a console? A: A bit of each. It's a con with no soul. Too many people sharing burrito recipes on this thread. Kids of today won't stand for that, they be keeping it real:

He's quite un-consolable.

There's no actual Atari game in there, so no. You can't extract it and play it in an emulator. This is a PC / Mac / Linux game that just mimics a 2600 game. You can play it with an Atari controller though. I've used the shareware program JoyToKey to map my Wico Bat Handle to keyboard presses, with a Stelladaptor to connect the 9-pin joystick adaptor to a USB port. Anytime I come across a PC game that only needs one button I'll switch to this setup, and it's good for a lot of Scratch games too.

It's only a necropost if you weren't here the first time it came around ? and it's still better than starting a new thread for an old topic. It's great to see everyone was giving credit to some outstanding homebrew graphics back in 2011. The five years previous to that had seen an amazing surge in homebrew quality. If you want to feel like you've been on AtariAge for a really long time, I'll point out that Swoops! and Seawolf both came out closer to the last official Atari 2600 release than to the present day ? What homebrew has had the best graphics since 2011? My votes go to Mappy for the perfect fusion of form and function, and Boulderdash for technical excellence.

I think Crossbow looks great. The different colour schemes between locations are effective, there's some subtle gradients and fades, perspective is cleverly mimicked, and they get plenty of mileage out of small tweaks to the player sprite to represent your party. I like the way the falling stalactites sink into the icy floor, how the archers rise from behind the battlements, and how the player crumbles to dust when hit. Were Atari trying to look like Activision in Crossbow? It pulls it off while still seeming like an Atari game.

Nope for these ones! Surely all the smurfs were gay, given the gender imbalance? Smurfette was just in drag.