Retro Rogue

TRU?

Its on the way. I've been working on a similar book for Atari for about 6 years now. In fact, much of the atari/amiga information in On The Edge was from material I contributed from my book. Brian originally had a lot of the missinformation put out by RJ (since he interviewed RJ at length), so I offered to clear things up for him. I agree wholeheartedly, its a great book and he did a great job.

Apex, that's not true at all. I simply stated they weren't interested in any sort of "Atari Legacy". They're very happy about all the products they released, but from a "business success" perspective. I.E. proud of their accomplishments, etc. But they're not interested in any involvement with the "Church of Atari" or any sort of Atari "scene". To them, Atari was another chapter in a long history of entrepreneurship.

I think that's the problem though - from my talks with Leonard, they don't really care about any sort of "legacy" or being involved with it. It was just business and a past chapter in their family's history.

That's just plain wrong. The FB3 was done and in breadboard/proto stage. Likwise he has not "moved on to a new company", he has started *another* company (Awesome Arcades). Legacy Engineering is still there and active.

I'd say the DP guide creates artificial rarity listings more so than AA, simply because it lists "going prices". AA does not, nor does it suggest a price. AA's influence is up to the discretion of the person who reads "Oh, a 6! Its RARE! I can get a lot of money for it!" and then sets some arbitrary ammount of what they think a rarity means dollar wise.

Ha! Like that ever stopped any companies from banging out a crappy title for the 2600! Besides there were spinoffs...I know there was at least the bionic woman...and there were a few TV made flicks in the mid-late 80's as well. The spinoff also was dead by that time (was around from 1976-1978). Though it would be interesting to do a Six Million Dollar Man game based off that venus lander robot episode, where the Venus lander comes back to earth and wreaks havok and Steve Austin has to do battle with it.

Shouldn't this be in the coin-ops area?

Well yah, that's europe. Much more expensive for the US version.

Mine should be listed as mint by the way. Got it brand new, unused in a music store closeout.

Yes, their logic makes perfect sense. This "engineer" was able to design the Flashback 1, Flashback 2, and the core 2600-on-a-chip, but couldn't handle a couple of dinky plug and play key chains? It was just too complicated to make the same things he did before with less games. Right.

I think I have a new catch phrase for these - "Plug and Suck".

First of all, I seriously doubt that anybody worked hard on these. I just took another quick look at mine, and I've revised and expanded my bitch list accordingly (see my original post). Just to clear things up - while the origins of these may have been with Curt, that doesn't mean the finished product was. I'll just leave it at that (can't go in to any more), but add that knowing Curt he wouldn't have stood for a lot of that. Curt *did* work hard on the original proto.

Add me as well. Have an early stock (mib) Falcon: 1meg ram, no HD. Probably be adding a FPU and CF-IDE adaptor soon.

Umm, yesterday. I'm pm'ing the personal info now then.

Just tried it. This time a request to accept a certificate came up and I accepted. However when I got to the shipping page its still the same problem. Looks exactly like the screen grab I posted. My shipping info is the same as my registered address in your database if you need to use it to test.

No, you can't on mine.

He might be having a different problem. I am actually the developer for the USPS shipping module for the cart system I am using and still working some bugs out. Usually I need to know specifics on where it is shipping to, how much it weighs, and so on so I can look at the code and see what is happening. As for your problem, sounds like you didn't accept the secure certificate so isn't loading the graphics. Corey Heya Corey, Nothing came up for accepting a secure certificate. I added the item to the cart, clicked the checkout button, confirmed the shipping address and then this is all I get for the Shipping Method screen: And then I can't move forward from there.

Been trying to order, but keep getting hung up on the Please select a Shipping Method page. There's no shipping options to pick. Is your site IE specific? I'm using Firefox.

Actually, many vendors had a return policy implemented with the manufacturers. There was a just a limit to what ammount of credit you could get. This was also a problem Nintendo faced when they moved exclusively through the toy industry, which had a similar policy. You have to remember, consoles and their games were sold both in electronics and toy chains. So there was a multitude of sales policies, not just one. That comment had nothing to do with the crash, that was being thrown around by the media as a soundbyte for a number of years - late 70's onward. Sounds to me like someone's quoting a lot from certain books.

Re what caused the industry wide crash: It wasn't any one thing but rather a number of things. With regards to Atari, as Nova mentioned the stock order policy was a large factor. Ray put a lot of eggs in the 2600 basket when he took over (even at the expense of other later systems like the 5200). It paid off initially, but it was a double edged sword - consequently a great deal of the Consumer Division sales figures relied on those 2600 game sales. These sales figures were reported higher than what they were because of Ray's move to make all dealers/vendors order for the following year in advance. However, the way the industry was run at the time, dealers also had the option to return unused stock for credit. Likewise, "newer" third party games were also competing for shelf space against Atari games. Besides eating in to Atari's sales figures, they also canibalized the 2600 game market overall simply by creating a glut of (often terrible) games. There simply was to much competition, and no realy way for consumers to tell what was good or what wasn't without buying the games (at $40 or so a pop). So they didn't. Consequently when the dealers went to cancel orders or return stock, suddenly Atari's sales figures were deflated and put the company in trouble. If they had diversified more early on, instead of later (as they were just starting to do) a hit to the 2600 market might not have hurt the company that bad. But unfortunately it did. However, you must remember - this was an industry wide crash. While Atari was a major part of the industry, the industry itself did not crash simply because of Atari's troubles. Basicly the industry reflected the same problems on a greater scale. By 1984 you had a glut of consoles as well on the US market: Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Intellivision, Odyssey2, Bally Astrocade, Fairchild Channel F, Emerson Arcadia, Vectrex, and Colecovision. Most with a slew of third party games, extra peripherals, etc. etc. that also flooded the market. It was just to much to sustain and it imploded leaving a void of discount bins and something else to pick up in the meantime - The computer gaming market. godzillajoe is actually incorrect, though I could see where he might think that in hindsite or when not aware of the actual situation. Much of the console game publishing industry (which had already flirted with the computer gaming platform on a small scale) was starting to make the switch to the computer platforms during 1983-'84 when the console market troubles started. As most of the newspapers and periodicals were reporting at the time, that was considered to be the next big market after the crash. This was also reflected by a number of the video game magazines that switched over to a computer entertainment format (though this was short lived as well as many soon folded). The computer game industry grew to fill the void, not cause it. There were actually far more consoles in the home at the time of the crash than computers (which were still considered a novelty by many), so that would hardly be reflective of a market killer. If anything, the crash prompted more people to move towards computers because of the view that the "toy" fad was over and that if their kid still wanted to play games then they (the parents) wanted to get their money's worth - homework (as godzillajoe mentioned), finances, word processing, etc. The appearance of the 16 bit gui computers in '84 and '85 also helped make them (and the home computer market) more accessible, further increasing sales and driving the move to computer based gaming. Then the NES was nationally marketed in '86 (as was the Sega Master System and Atari 7800) which prompted some of the game publishers to return to consoles (or in some cases, license out properties to other development companies for those consoles). And its been back to a 2 "platform" publishing market (consoles and computers) ever since.

I think the confusion that Nova and Student Driver are having is with the actual timeline involved. Atari was opposed towards programmers getting credit and indeed their easter eggs - however this was in the late 70's. Once Robinett put his neck on the line to get credit for the work by putting the egg in there and it was discovered by the public, Ray and company realised "hidden" material was a selling point to the games. However they still did not bend on programmer credit issue. The games Nova and SD are mentioning are later games than the period being talked about. Credit was a serious issue with regards to the programmers (besides money) and one of the main reason the original core left to form Activision. You can read Warren's take on the matter here: http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/ROBINETT.HTM Secondly, Nova is wrong with regards to Missile Command. The reason the egg was to have been removed was not because they were opposed to the egg. It was because Rob Fulop had left for Imagic and they did it to get back at him. Here's an interview that explains it: http://www.digitpress.com/archives/interview_fulop.htm and another: http://www.atariage.com/2600/archives/rob_...l?SystemID=2600

Not exactly a prototype, but I thought I'd share this anyways. This is an early release version of Sunrise's Gust Buster that I managed to get a hold of. Sorry for the blurry pic of the cart buttom, but its showing the Sunrise name molded in to the cart.

What hardware store was that?

Well, in the last several years there's been an increase in video game presence at CES. So my guess is that even if E3 goes the way of Comdex there will still be a major venue for it.