I thought I was done with the ColecoVision, and had actually worked on a few Atari 7800 captures when I remembered I hadn't done any of the ColecoVision's unreleased prototypes. So, I quickly knocked out screencaps of Mattel's Burger Time and Bump 'n' Jump, and AtariSoft's Dig Dug and Pac-Man, and then collected the audio files onto a USB thumb drive to clean them up.
That was about six months ago. I can be slow sometimes.
I finally have those audio clips prepped and up
My roommate decided his boss would enjoy an upgrade to his office computer to start the new month. I decided to chip in and help. Do you think he'll like it? Happy April 1st, everyone!
Those Reef Store dreams are just getting spiteful now. And hilarious. Last night I had that familiar dream, where I'm in a thrift store and suddenly I spy something familiar: Atari 8-bit graphics on a TV! In the dream I recognized the game as Choplifter, but looking back now I think it was actually Super Cobra. Anyway, I wander over to the TV and sure enough, on the shelf below there are twi Atari Flashbacks and something I recognize as an Atari 5200 modded to look like a giant Atari 2600!
An idea for a Pac-Man upgrade literally came to me in a dream a couple of nights ago. I actually remember most of the dream, but I'll spare everyone the details, except to say it began at a game convention where I realized I hadn't yet set up the systems I'd brought, and ended with me on a running track trying to escape the men in black. My dreams tend to be rather disjointed. Anyway, the idea. Arcade Pac-Man has been fully conquered. We know exactly how the ghost AI operates, and since th
Last year's health issues interfered with a lot of plans, not the least of which was adding more content to the Games of Atari website. I'm happy to say after months of inactivity, I'm ready to add content again. I now have a ColecoVision modded for S-video, and the pictures are coming in quite nicely: Plenty of original titles and lots of modern homebrews are waiting to be catalogued. When I'm done that Q*Bert entry will be one step closer to looking like the Parker Brothers ad tha
Last year was the first time I participated in my church's Halloween Trunk or Treat celebration, which I wrote about here. I wasn't sure I would be up for it this year, but thankfully my little health drama calmed down enough that I could give it a go. I didn't have time to dream up a new theme, so I stuck with "Ghosts of Games Past" again. My set-up was a tad simpler this time. I still had an Atari 2600 and NES for people to play, but my trunk wasn't quite as decked out with plushies and ot
I decided not to do all the XE/XL conversions out there, and focus only on the ones that I legitimately own for the 8-bit line. With the addition of some new entries for games like Atlantis, Crystal Castles and Up 'n' Down, I can now declare all Atari 5200 capture complete, at least until I get some more 5200 and/or 8-bit games! I recently learned the ColecoVision actually has enough native capabilities to support component video. My video capture rig doesn't support component, but I figure
All of the games I physically own for the Atari 5200 now have captures on Games of Atari, including all third-party cartridges. I'm especially happy at how the entries for Q*Bert, Frogger and Popeye are turning out. They're really starting to look like those old Parker Brothers ads that first got me interested in how games look on different systems, all those years ago! There are more recent 5200 efforts I've documented as well, including hacks like Pac-Man Plus, homebrews like Beef Drop and
Every Atari-published cartridge I own for the Atari 5200 now has a spot in the Games of Atari website. This means Countermeasure and Rescue on Fractalus finally have live entries, Kangaroo, Vanguard and Qix are no longer flying on solo shots, and of course the entry for Pac-Man just keeps getting bigger. I hope to have the Atari 5200 captures finished completely by the year's end, but that's going to be a tall order. The 5200 had some rather impressive third-party support for despite having
Well that didn't take long. All "games of Atari" I own for the Intellivision have now been captured and added to the website. This includes several Mattel's classics with their original names like Astrosmash, Space Battle and Frog Bog, and also several recent homebrews like Ms. Pac-Man, Copter Command and Boulder Dash. I also threw in a couple of Mattel's clones: Space Armada, Space Invaders in not-so-clever disguise, and Snafu, one of many variations on Surround. Of course the Intellivision
At long last, I am working on the website again. Earlier this year I commissioned another round of work from the most excellent Electronic Sentimentalities, getting an Intellivision modded for composite and an Atari 5200 modded for S-video. I've had them back for over a month now, but, you know, other commitments. Distractions. Shiny! However, with tonight's addition of screen caps for Armor Battle, I have finally started on the Intellivision collection. Maybe with a little luck and persev
I had a goal for 2014: to create screen captures and audio clips for every physical Atari 2600 cartridge in my collection. Sadly, I didn't achieve that goal. I missed it by a single day. I plead extenuating circumstances. In the week before Christmas, my collection suddenly increased by three: Stay Frosty 2, Three.s and Stella's Stocking, which of course is five different games by itself! But now those seven games, along with the rest of my collection, are all captured, cleaned up, archived
I've posted entries for the Atari 2600 Coleco games I own... all eight of them. As I mentioned before, I had a good head start, since four games were already taken care of thanks to the Atari red-label rereleases. As for the other four games, entries for Carnival, Mr. Do! and Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle are now live, and a review of Atari 2600 Zaxxon is also now up.
I'm continuing my way through the 2600's third party library, and at the moment I'm juggling games from Activision, Im
I just got through uploading screencaps of Atari 2600 KLAX, and with that I have finished with every Atari 2600 game published by Atari for the website. And since Atari was in the habit of rereleasing everybody else's games in the late '80s, this means I also have a head-start on several third parties, specifically Activision, Coleco, Parker Brothers and Commavid.
A few red-label games remain yet accounted for, including Fatal Run. I do have BMX Airmaster, but only the original TNT release
Another landmark passed! All Atari-published silver-label 2600 games in my collection now have screenshots and audio clips on the Games of Atari website. This isn't every silver label out there, but it is most of them. Swordquest: Waterworld and Quadrun are among the missing. So is Gravitar, but I will take care of that one during the red-label captures, now in progress.
Along with the new captures, several games now have additional articles and reviews, including Raiders of the Lost Ark
Who knew Retrogate was based out of Ukraine?
Okay, anybody who actually bothers to read the fine print, particularly the terms and conditions, can see where they operate, but then there's people like me, who shop for Everdrive cartridges, find them sold out at more local places, discover Retrograte and immediately click the "buy" button. Then, a couple of weeks later, a package shows up with Ukranian postage and an unpronounceable return address. Of course, it's only unpronounceable to an
Slowly but surely I'm getting some more writing done for this web project. I've put together a draft for the history of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Needless to say, this game has a bit more history than most, so if anyone's willing, I'd like to get some opinions and fact-checks before posting.. Have a read, and thanks!
EDIT: The updated, completed article is available for public consumption!
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The Myth, the Legend, The Extra-Terrestrial
It's the stuff of Shakespearean trage
The latest batch of reviews for the Games of Atari website has been six months in the making, and now it is finally complete! I decided to combine reviews of the Atari 2600 versions of Pac-Man, Defender, Missile Command, and Asteroids, plus sequels, into a single article that also touches on various chapters of the console's history. The result is a little bigger than I anticipated, and took a little longer than I had planned, but now it's done and available for reading here, or here, or here,
With screenshots and a new review for Q*Bert, the last game in my VIC-20 collection is now a part of the Games of Atari website. There are still plenty of Atari-related games I don't yet own, for the VIC-20 and for other 8-bit computers, so if you'd like to help me build the site, sell me stuff! Trading is good too.
Meanwhile I'm continuing to build the Atari 2600 entries. Progress has slowed down a bit, partly because my modded 2600 gave up the ghost and is now off for repairs. I'm usin
The Games of Atari website continues to come along. Just about every Apple II, Commodore 64, Commodore VIC-20 and Atari 8-bit game in my collection has been added to the site. But my collections aren't complete, and so a few games still don't have entries for these systems. Help me fill the holes in these collections!
I'm willing to buy, and I'm willing to trade. I'm looking for cartridges and original disks; boxed is nice, but loose is also fine. For stuff I have available to trade, se
I've been on a tear lately, picking up all sorts of new hardware for working on the Games of Atari website. And every new grab has a story all its own.
During a recent archaeological excavation (and by that I mean "cleaning the garage") I unearthed a Macintosh LC I had been given by some church friends a long while back. This Mac was especially nice to have, because it included the Apple-IIe-on-a-card and all the peripheral cables originally bundled with it. At the time I was thrilled at
Today I uploaded a history and several home reviews for Q*bert, and with that I have gone through my entire collection of commercially-released Atari 8-bit computer cartridges. The site continues to look more and more like an actual web site. With this milestone, several entries now have articles, including Dig Dug, Defender and Robotron 2084 (and Q*bert of course), and several other entries are now live, including Missile Command and Space Invaders.
Next up is a small handful of homebrew
Several years back, I started work on a web project I had been kicking around in my head for several years before that. I had an idea for a video game history website, one focused on Atari, and all the companies, consoles and games that were somehow involved with the granddaddy of the industry. I started pretty strongly, but after a while I let it gather dust as I became distracted by other shiny things. This lasted for yet another few years, but now I've returned to it, and have been adding
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