almightytodd
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Posts posted by almightytodd
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What is your definition of "inexpensive"? A pair of good quality Atari-compatible joysticks is included with every Flashback 2 system. There are still a ton of these available on ebay (...many are advertised as new in the box) for around twenty bucks plus shipping. Since the FB2 originally sold in stores for about thirty bucks, it's still a good deal.
IMHO, even if you have working original Atari gear, the FB2 is a "must have", as it provides for quick "plug and play" Atari fun and has a few "special" surprises all its own (like the "hidden" paddle-games and the auto-sensing paddle/joystick control option for the arcade-style Pong). The built-in games also include a few prototypes and hacks that are worth trying, such as "Save Mary", "Frog Pond" and a hacked "vector style" version of Asteroids.
The Flashback 2 Owners Manual is available online, with detailed descriptions and instructions.
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All hail SAYTON!
Sayton is the Lord...
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And i'm still hooked on the idea of a small Linux based machine as the next Atari.
Following that line of thinking, I've already made the next Atari computer then...
No, I'm not giving out the parts supplier list.
That's awesome! Tell me more about it! Is it a Linux box running an emulator?
Nathan
I totally agree with this line of thinking. If you don't buy into my idea of "Create a new Atari experience and save the world one child at at time" concept of supporting the OLPC project (...you know, I'm not sure that I even buy into it, the more I think about it...), then figuring out a way to develop a tiny Linux-based system that boots right into Atari 8-bit emulation mode would be the next best thing. I think the most important thing is that it looks like something Atari, and acts like something Atari.
I can totally love my FB2 without having to know about the gruesome details of the hardware (does it have a REAL 6507 CPU? Does it have separate TIA and I/O chips?). All I care is that it is playing the actual game ROMS and displaying them exactly as I remember them. Do the same thing with Intel or AMD chips running Atari emulation and have a USB port that you can plug a jump drive into with ROM files, and everyone who is into this stuff will be happy. Add a Web browser and maybe an IM client (with some kind of cool Atari-look skin) and it becomes a delightful bridge between today and yesterday.
If you're a hardware purist and you demand that any such machine MUST be composed of native 8-bit processing hardware - well, start buying parts and hack a Frankenstein system like that together for yourself. We've seen plenty of examples of where people have done that. But don't expect such a thing to become a viable, marketable product. There just isn't a large enough consumer base to support it. Plus, when you get too authentic, you start competing with the market of the actual classic systems, which are frequently found in the under $100 price range. The FB2 was able to compete with this market because you got the plug-and-play system, 40 built-in games, two joystick controllers, and the comfort of knowing that if you hooked it all up and it didn't work, you could take it back and exchange it the same day... ...and all for 30 bucks.
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First, I think we need to look at a low-cost "game/home computer" like the original Atari is/was. Second, let's curb our "power Atari" needs down to just getting something that is functional, new, and low cost. Something like the 1450XL would still play the 8-bit games, and have some new features built in.I think a game/home computer that sells in the $200 - $400 price range would be about right?
My first thought is that everyone wants internet on it, for mass appeal, but the Atari 8-bit does not have browser capabilities. I think the Falcon 030 did have it. Is that a better starting place in terms of hardware to develop from?
Let me see if I can summarize your requirements:
- low-cost "game/home computer"
- functional, new, low cost
- play 8-bit games
- some new features
- internet on it
- $200 - $400 price range
Is that right? Instead of focusing on the hardware aspects, may I suggest a focus on the experience of interacting with technology in a new way that was the main aspect of what made Atari so appealing? What if we could recapture that idea that we felt in the late 70's, that we were rushing forward into a bright, promising future where everything would be better?
Here is what I propose: Build interest in participating in the "Give one, get one" program of the "One Laptop Per Child" project and adapt the machine as an Atari gaming platform. For $400 dollars, you get one machine, and the satisfaction of knowing that you are providing a needy child in a 3rd world country with an identical machine, filled with the promise of helping him/her to have the hope for a better future.
The operating system is Linux-based, but completely unique in the computer world in its focus on helping children to use it as a learning/exploration device instead of a productivity or entertainment machine. The Atari gaming and computing endeavors could be ported as emulations, providing for the retro experience, while re-awakening that spirit of being on the forefront of something new, something exciting, something meaningful and perhaps life-changing.
When Bushnell began experimenting with bringing the Space War experience shared by the few in college computer science programs to the masses as a coin-op machine realized in the Nutting Associates Computer Space game, he started a revolution in sharing the idea that computers could be fun and accessible by all. The OLPC project expands on that idea by saying that it should apply to children all around the world, not just those lucky enough to have been born in the countries at the forefront of new technologies.
I think it's great that we all gather here to share our collective experiences of our memories of those exciting "new" machines of the 1970's and early 80's. Putting our energy (and money) behind a project of this sort could pay off in building more happy memories for ourselves, as well as the good feelings that come as a result of doing something for complete strangers that we will never meet, but who hold the promise for a better future for our children and grandchildren.
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Ah, Radio Shack posted my review!
And they also raised the price (no longer on special).
"Skip this turkey and pick up the far superior Atari Flashback 2."
Well spoken Mr. B. from Sunnyvale, CA - Or should I call you "Nolan"?
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I agree that the FB1 is a POS. But there must be some point at which the cost of ownership is worth it just to say you have it. Isn't there?
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I really enjoyed reading this thread and the 2004 thread that Nukey posted. I realize this is why I enjoy reading the forums here at Atari Age so much. I don't know of any other source of Atari information that brings together quotes from the original Atari staff, combined with looks into the disassembled code, plus experiments with hacking the code to examine the feasibility of alternatives. Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful, well conceived, intelligent discussion!
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If you're not competent enough with technology to support and install emulation applications, then supporting and maintaining 30 year old equipment will likely be rough for you, too - unless you've got deep pockets.Your explanation seems so reasonable and rational... ...perhaps the nick "Paranoid" is less than appropriate?
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I just wish Bushnell would purchase the company before its inevitable crash and burn at the hands of Infogrames. I put a lot of faith in that company, and it hasn't lived up to my expectations.Does he care about Atari? Judging by one or two things I have seen, it seemed like he was pretty much all about making money. I'd rather have some crazy Atari fan billionaire take over who doesn't care if he makes a ton of money from the Atari name who would put out quality products most Atari fans have been waiting for.
I agree. Bushnell has all of his (and other people's) money tied up in his uWink Bistro restaurant. He already lost his big expensive house over it when investors pulled the funding on the project prior to its opening date. He moved his family into an apartment in L.A. a few years ago to make the final push to get the doors open at the first uWink location. For people who know who Bushnell is, he already gets a boost from the Atari name, along with his success with Chuck E. Cheese. And for those who don't know the story, associating uWink with Atari would probably be a mistake, as uWink hopes to be the future of casual gaming, socializing and dining, while Atari is stuck in the past.
As far as a "crazy Atari fan billionaire" - it would be nice if there was a real-life person like the character Jon Lovitz played in "Benchwarmers". Not likely though...
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Hey Bob,
Having new 7800 games to play with is AWESOME! Thanks so much for keeping this platform alive.
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Never switch! It is like cybersex versus a romp with a chick in a cheerleader outfit.WP
That's just frikkin' hilarious! "...a chick in a cheerleader outfit".
How about a chick in bright yellow bell-bottoms?
Seriously though: I think some arcade ports, like Asteroids and Space Invaders "feel" more like the original games when played using a keyboard, because the arcade versions used buttons instead of a joystick. It kinda makes me wish someone would rig up a "reverse Stelladapter" that lets me hook a PC keyboard up to an Atari!
Also, there's something to be said for seeing vintage Atari graphics displayed on an LCD screen. It's like futuristic and retro at the same time...
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The hip-hop song on Part 3 reminds me a lot of "Elephant Talk" by King Crimson...
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Will someone here PLEASE screen-capture this and upload it to YouTube so I can share it with my friends who are mildly interested in the VCS, but not enough to install Stella, and then configure it to play PAL with 2-channel sound? My wussie "celery" CPU machine won't capture the audio and video simultaneously, and the AVI file resulting from a video-only capture is over 30 Meg using the freeware capture software I have. This demo is SO COOL!
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Talkin' 'bout the 2600 is f*ckin' GREAT! Happy 30th Anniversary VCS!!!
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I have an original Sunnyvale heavy sixer, two 7800's and a FB2. The VCS is missing a power supply right now and the power-on buttons on both 7800's are flakey, so I mostly emulate for games outside of the list in the FB2. But I love using the keyboard for games like Asteroids and Space Invaders where the arcade versions used buttons instead of the joystick. Plus, the new Tricade 30th Anniversary demo KICKS ASS!
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Wow, this thread is making me wonder if it would be worth it to go through the hassle of setting up the MESS emulator, chasing down an 800 BIOS, and tracking down a copy of the SR ROM to see for myself. Should I?
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It's going to be a few months before we know what the next Atari Flashback is going to be...Wait a second!? The next Atari Flashback? There's going to be a next Flashback? I thought from this thread, we had established that Atari is down for the count... ...and as far as anyone knows, there won't be any more nostalgic retro-Atari systems coming out. Does anyone here have any factual information to the contrary? Or is this thread simply wishful thinking?
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I have one of the Jakks Atari joystick plug-n-plays and a FB2. I regret not getting one of the double-paddle sets when they were available at Toys R Us. It just seems that at the time, the price was around what I paid for my FB2, and I couldn't justify the expense for only 10 or 15 games.
The thing is, a lot of the charm of the original VCS was the fact that it was oriented towards a shared experience. Think about it; the original pack-in game for the VCS was Combat, which required two players. The Video Olympics cart has only two games (both variations of "Pong") for single-player only. This is also true of Surround.
It seems like most of the console systems since have focused on the solitary player experience; starting with Coleco Vision. Although some of the original NES titles had two-player games, many of those consisted of two players taking turns, which meant a lot of time spent sitting and watching the other player play.
Apparently, Nintendo has caught on to the gap in the shared-play experience with the Wii, which allows for more joint play action. Then there's Game Wave, which has potential for the small group experience, but it appears that for many of the games, the separate remotes just act as a "first answer" button in a TV game show type game, more than controllers for on-screen action.
SpiceWare's Medieval Mayhem gives the best of both worlds, with up to three AI opponents for a decent 4-player game experience for one to four players. It's a shame that Atari seemed to all but abandon four-player paddle games towards the end of the lifespan of the 2600, and they never offered such games on either the 5200 or 7800. If they'd been able to work out a multiplexed four joystick control scheme for the 7800, and ported Gauntlet or even made a four-player Dark Chambers, they might have had something to set 7800 games apart from NES.
The potential for four-player games on the 7800 could have been awesome, without the need to even come up with radically different game ideas: Four-player Combat, four-player Surround (...I seem to recall a coin-op arcade game that did that), four-player Pac Man, four-player Asteroids, four-player Rampage (...that would be COOL!) two-on-two basketball, soccer, hockey... ...come to think of it, the N64 and Game Cube had four-player games like Mario Kart, didn't they?
Well, I agree with the general sentiment in this thread, that the classic arcade plug-n-play titles seem to be fading out. That's a shame, because while I can get a lot of the same kind of fun out of emulation on the computer, for multi-player fun, I'm left with the FB2, or one of my classic systems - if I get get it/keep it working.
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I'd like to add another vote for Space Invaders.
I think the genius of the port, is that rather than try to make it "just like" the arcade version, it's like they said, "How can we take the concept of this game, and adapt it to what the VCS is capable of"? They reduced the number of columns, which was the right thing to do; both because of the limitations of the VCS hardware, but also because of the not-so-obvious change in screen orientation from the arcade portrait format, to the home TV landscape format.
Then, they added colors and a ton of cool game variations including simultaneous two-player action - features that went beyond the arcade experience.
But I really got excited about the Atari Space Invaders experience when I found Nukey Shay's awesome Space Invaders Deluxe hack. It's so much more than a mere hack! It's an entirely new Space Invaders experience! I find that I actually enjoy playing it using the computer keyboard (which better replicates the arcade machine's buttons) more than using a joystick.
I also like the keyboard experience when playing the Franklin Cruz Asteroids hack, although that one is fun on the Atari Flash Back 2 as well. Curiously, Crystal Castles seems to play better with the joystick. I know the arcade version of that game used a trackball, but I never played it enough times to really get to love the track ball, so I don't really miss it. The same goes for Missile Command. I also like the single missile launch site of the VCS version better than the three launch sites in the arcade version. I know that having three sites to keep track of adds to the challenge, but I find the futile task of surviving wave after wave of nuclear missile attacks enough of a challenge as it is... ...knowing that I'll eventually fail, and leave that imaginary video screen world to face total nuclear annihilation.
But getting back to Space Invaders... ...yes, that's the arcade port that really got me excited about our family's heavy sixer again...
Oh, and I want to agree with Blackjack too about the arcade experience -- yes, there was more to the experience than just the ways that the games differed from what was available at home. It was a social experience, and an opportunity to be wowed, not just by a new game, but by seeing a player who had figured out some new tactic - like the bottom row immunity trick with Space Invaders, or the single-asteroid-and-wait-to-ambush-the-flying-saucer tactic for Asteroids.
Oh, and there might be girls there too. Girls -- mmmmmmm.......
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Atari 2600 Crystal Castles has several melodies that would lend themselves well to ring tones, including a snippet of the Nutcracker Suite. "Mountain King" contains music from Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King", which would make a decent ring tone. Oh, and by the way - not that I've mentioned it; if anyone here is a Wiki-editor, you might notice that a reference to this game is absent from the "Uses in Popular Culture" section of this Wikipedia entry. Someone should do something about that...
I'd also like to put in a thumbs-up for music from SpiceWare's Medieval Mayhem. It totally rocks!
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I heard that "Donkey Kong" was a Japanese mis-translation attempt at "Monkey Kong" (...all your base are belong to us...). Can anyone corroborate?
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I think the Flashback 2 did great in the saturated "plug into the TV" market...To me, this made the last incarnation of Atari a true one.
They had hardware...
Thank you Atari. It was fun to have you back, even if for a while.
I second that emotion
It was a fun little ride, while it lasted...
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I find it interesting how this thread devolved from "Oh what a sad state of affairs is the TI-99/4A community" to "Cool! I'm gonna do a video mod!"
I used to have one of these computers - it may still lie hidden in a box somewhere... I remember adapting a Pascal bubble-sort routine to TI BASIC after learning about it in one of my early computer science classes - just to see if I could do it. I think I had one, maybe two game cartridges to plug into the thing, but I had no joysticks, so it wasn't a whole lot of fun to play with. I got a copy of the MESS software and set it up to run the startup screen for the TI-99/4A, but I couldn't find any software for it. I would imagine that since Texas Instruments continues to be a viable, on-going enterprise, the application of their copyrights is a bit more strict than what happened with Atari.
It was a charming little machine. It's a shame that it seems its potential was never fully realized. I think one problem with it was that to add a floppy drive to it to turn it into a "real" system was more complicated and costly than the initial purchase of the base unit. It seems to me that taking an Atari 800, Apple II or even a Radio Shack CoCo from a base unit to a full system with a floppy drive was a more viable alternative. And Atari and Apple seemed to have a lot more momentum in market share and available software. Then, of course, Commodore hit the home computer scene - first with the VIC20, and then with the C-64.
Still, look at how good this "TI Invaders" screen shot looks, compared with similar offerings from other machines at the time. It's a shame that even Bill Cosby couldn't get America to buy this machine...
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homebrews: "Fall Down" and "Star Fire"
in Atari 2600
Posted
...and while you're exploring great homebrew games, you can try out Darrell's awesome game "Medieval Mayhem" online at his website here, using the JStella embedded Java VCS emulator.
(You're far too humble Darrell, it's quite simply THE BEST PADDLE-CONTROLLER GAME EVER MADE FOR THE VCS!)
The computer opponents allow for a fun and challenging game. The menu options let you choose not only how many human/computer players there are, but also how they are positioned. The sounds (stereo!), graphics, music, and game play are all superb. It's just a great game all-around. It's hard to believe that it runs on a 2600, even taking into account that it's a bank-switched 32K ROM game.
This thread discusses the joys of mixing the game with beer, plus it goes off on a tangent about how to restore paddle controllers to their original glory:
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=115638