Mirage

Yeah, my wife still thinks I'm just sweet to always offer to get the mail so she doesn't have to (it's at the other end of the condo complex). I always throw in taking out the trash, too (I'll get the mail and take out the trash, don't worry about it!) to throw her off the scent. I just don't know how long she's going to stay unwise to me. Actually, chances are, she knows exactly what's going on and is just keeping quiet about it until an opportune time for her to bring it up! Like I always say: It's easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission, but it's by far better to just avoid the subject altogether!

Uh oh... I've been pre-approved to buy the ~$100 of stuff from the store I want this year. If there's gonna be several more new titles, I may have to put in another expenditure request!

I'll see if I can get it to do it again, and if so, if maybe I can get at a corner of the object like you said. I don't do anything unusual that I know of, just shoot the enemy, and then the health pack will sort of scoot away a little bit until it's firmly in the center area of the playfield. It seems like it only happened on the screen(s?) where there was that center island thing.

Sorry if this has already been brought up, but... playing the current bin (adv211.bin), sometimes when you shoot an enemy and the health pack appears, it will move into the walls so it can't be grabbed. Each time I saw it happen, it happened to move into the walls in the center of the room, not at the edges. Don't know if it ever moves into the edges. Also, and this is extremely minor probably, but, in the maze, sometimes it appears, when you're moving from screen-to-screen as though there is a way you can go down, but you can't, because as you approach, it moves to the next screen. Not sure if this is significant, but I noticed it and was slightly confusing. I should really read the manual. I swear I d/l'ed it... will scroll back to find it if it was posted. ---- EDIT: Found the manual, read it, can test better now. Looks great though! That death animation is just awesome!

yeah, that's correct, i mod'ed a rally x screen shot to explore how it would look. seemed like that was the closest to what I am imagining. my web site is http://www.thinkcontext.com in there you'll find a bunch of art work, interviews, reviews, etc. based around the trans am... That's great! I showed my friend the inflatable T/A and said he could make one of those instead of a real one. Easier to store!

Ahhh, true, it could probably come pretty close. I don't think the colors would be that pure, but I could be wrong about that too.

Yeah, I thought that mockup looked more like an NES game, or maybe 7800. Certainly not 2600! Aye, good point. I wonder if the original poster would consider a C64 game instead? Granted, it sounds like he's looking for late '70s rather than early '80s, so probably not. Nothing late '70s can really do graphics like that. I wonder if it would be possible on a 2600 to just turn the "smoked" areas of the road white instead of an actual graphic?

I only keep sealed games that I get that I already have carts of. If I don't already have that cart, the box is carefully opened (leaving the plastic wrap intact), so I can enjoy the game and other materials. I picked up sealed doubles of a lot of late 2600 & 7800 games (that probably most people have) and keep them sealed, just cuz, why not. There's no logic or rationale behind it, for me.

I have the CX-80. I bought in new in box a few years ago, and I know I've seen them recently somewhere NIB (atari2600.com maybe?). Anyway, I like mine a lot. It's built solid, and works great. I had the CX-22 back in the day, and from what I remember, it was good too, though I haven't touched or seen one in over 20 years now, so I can't really say. I got my CX-80 for $10 or $15, and I think the price I saw recently was $15 or pretty close to it. BTW, works well with Centipede, Millipede as well.

Ah that really bugs me when people use "ocd" as someone who is into collecting, cleaning or whatever. Ahh!! I could go on a rant, but I choose not too. Ocd is screwed up and if the media choose to focus on it-they pick the least threatening, the cleaning side of it. There is a world beyond that and it is much more sinister. Anyway, shush me.. Thanks for saying that... I keep everything both at work and home extremely tidy and clean. Some people sorta snicker at me sometimes. But what's wrong with being clean?!?! Who is sicker? Some of them with their disaster-area workspaces or me?

He may have made some mistakes, no doubt about that, but the guy is still a legend, and I sure hope no one would be serious about treating him with disrespect. He did some amazing things at Commodore and deserves respect regardless.

Looks like a graphics-modified Rally-X. Wasn't there a Rally-X demo/game in progress? To the poster: do you have a weblink for this project? I have a friend who is extremely into T/A's and would be interested in learning more about this project (I'm interested myself), totally apart from the Atari aspect.

EDIT: IT WORKS -- When I drop it on Krok Commander, it defaults to "F4" BS mode. This way it doesn't work. Switch it to "F4 (Superchip)" mode, and it works fine! Now to play!!!! --------------------------------------------------- The below is what happened when it was in "F4" mode ---------------------------------------------------- Has anyone else yet tested this with a Krok Cart? For me, it doesn't work. Title screen is fine [edit: title screen also has the walls all over, like the playscreen], game selection is fine, but then when game starts, the entire screen is filled with the "walls", and you can make the guy do a jet-pack effect, sorta, and change direction, but not move. (Basically, he's stuck in the walls, with rapid fire since the bullets hit the walls). All game variations do this. Funny thing is, I felt like an idiot, cuz I couldn't figure out what to do... I assumed this was correct! I loaded it onto the Krok Cart twice, same each time. BTW, this could be very important -- I have a Krok Cart v1.0 which could be why it's incompatible. I think I may have seen something about some 32k roms not working with it? Maybe I'm remembering wrong. Anyway, if someone could try it with a newer version Krok Cart that'd probably be good.

Nah, that makes no difference really...it all comes down to the rares. With something like River Patrol that goes for $1000, the mark-up today is so high what's the difference whether you paid $40 or $4? Also, with rare exceptions (the bfstats 'Lochjaw incident'), you wouldn't have found most of the big money items in bargain bins anyway, it was mostly common junk. Point taken about $40 vs $5, but how many $1000 games are there nowadays? As far as I know, there's only a handful that are even in the $100's. I don't know... it's really hard to say other than that I think either way, it would come down to a lot of luck in either case which way it came out. I remember there being a some rares in those bargain bins back in the day -- I didn't think of them as rares at the time of course! But the hardest-to-find-today items, no, those wouldn't have been in bins... mostly mail-order stuff, as I alluded to. Fun question to ponder though. Either way, I know I have tons more carts now than I did back then!

I think it would depend on if you mean the day they came out or just whenever they were available new. If you waited to buy them in the $1 clearance bins after the crash, you may be way ahead having bought them all new back then. Otherwise, my guess would be you'd be ahead buying them all now -- assuming you could find ALL of them, which is really the problem nowadays.

I really need to get rid of all my doubles (the ones that aren't label variations). There really just is hardly any point in having 19 Combats and 9 Pac-Mans, or even 5 Pitfalls for that matter. I totally understand the compulsion to just keep them all though. After I see what I have, what I really *should* do is create little starter bundles to get others going.

Unfortunately, I got rid of my entire original collection (with boxes) in about '86-'87 at a garage sale. I didn't have anything ultra-rare, but I had Mission-X, Gremlins, Crazy Climber and a few others like that. (Today my collection is much larger, but it's amazing how much good stuff I did have back then, without even trying or knowing it!) I remember I got tons of games in '83-'84 as the videogame market started to slow down and the signs of the crash began (of course, I didn't see it as that, I just saw it as "cheaper games!"). I do remember though, that once I had moved on to the C64 and my interest in the 2600 waned, there were tons of games in discount bins everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. Not only KayBee, Toys R Us, K-Mart, LaBelle's, etc, but Walgreens, Woolco, overstock stores, even supermarkets. Just. Everywhere. For like a buck or two. I vaguely remember going through them a lot, being still vaguely interested, but being in junior high by then and not having much money, I chose to spend it on other things. I'm sure there were tons of rarities for a buck in bins for a couple years there. The thing about the rarities is that back then, they weren't necessarily all that hard to find (but no one was really looking for them). It was just the distribution of them that was so much worse (or less typical) than the commons. For example, Atari and most Activision & Imagic titles were available anywhere... K-Mart, electronics stores, department stores... whereas what we consider to be rare today were usually in less normal outlets like grocery stores, drug stores, etc. Or mail order of course. If you, for some reason, were looking for a particular game back then, you could have found it without too much trouble in most cases. But the commons are common today because most consumers bought most of their games where they made the most sense to buy them. That, and marketing. Everyone kid wanted Berzerk and Pac-Man. Hardly anyone wanted (or knew about) Eli's Ladder, etc. Ahhhhhhhhhh... memories. And to have a time machine to go back to 1984, if just for a day...

I was wondering the same thing...was hoping there was an option on the AtariAge list, but I could never find it. I wouldn't mind just having the release years without the month/day. I don't really expect (or care about) exact day of release. Though, if someone had that list, that'd be cool too. Just year at minimum, but spring/summer/fall/winter would be nice.

Dang, I leave the computer for 5 minutes... that'll teach me! EDIT: Oh, I see it's been up for over a week. That'll teach me to not pay more attention then!

Do you mean a scan of the original art, or a scan of the box/manual itself? As an aside, I would LOVE to get hi-res scans from any old Atari original art (prints much better than even a high quality scan of a printed piece like a box or manual). As soon as I get motivated to get my scanner hooked up, I'm going to get the highest quality scans I can off of manual/box art. Unfortunately, I have no original artwork at all.

Cool, that's a good start, thanks!

I figured it wouldn't be easy. But was hoping someone had already done it. Maybe the best I can hope for is to put them by year, then best-guess the actual release date. Before I do that, I'll wait and see if someone has already been as obsessive-compulsive as I am.

Does anyone know where there may be a listing of release dates of all Atari-branded 2600 carts? I started to do this by CX number, but then realized that those are not in release order. I even found a forum posting from 2002 that verifies this. I've searched the forums and can't find anything. Basically, I just want a list, starting with Combat, showing the order of release. Thanks!

I played a bunch tonight on the Krok Cart, and a few of them I really didn't see the point of (other than as someone trying to figure out how to do various things in bB), but some of them really show promise, if they were fleshed out a little. "Because It's There" was an interesting idea, and could use polishing, but is a great start. Combat DX looks pretty great. I didn't have anyone to play it with, so only flipped through the variations, but it looks pretty nice. I'd like to see it finished. Jumper could use a little touching up, but is nice. Melbourne Tatty was a clever concept. I'd like to see this tweaked as well. My overall impression was that, yes, good stuff can be programmed with it. I'm looking forward to seeing more!

Ummmm.... where do you work?!? Alliance Spacesystems in Pasadena, CA. We're hiring like mad. Wanna make stuff that goes to Mars? Really just wanted to work somewhere where I could play 2600 on a big screen Not really keen on living in Cali!