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Follow-up question.... What do you think a fair price would be for the cart, box, pack-in materials, plus the 'limited edition' t-shirt that the Atari Club offered with the game at the time? Or how 'bout the set of 3 t-shirts with all 3 games, boxes, etc. ?

Just looking for some input as to which Atari 8-bit games you feel do the best job of showing off the machines graphics capabilities. I've been playing some of my favorite old games lately, and am looking for some suggestions for some great games I may have missed (like I know there were a lot of euro games released very late in the 8bits life cycle, that I probably never even knew existed).

Thanks, that was exactly the type of thing I was thinking of, but no longer recalled how to pull off.

Long long ago....way back in the 1980's....I was pretty proficient/knowledgeable with the 8bit Atari's. But through the years, the memories have faded. I was wondering how to do something today and have no clue how to do so anymore. I have three 800xl's. Two are stock 64k machines. One has a 256k Rambo upgrade. WITHOUT connecting a disk drive and running some utility program, or booting into SpartaDos and trying to set up a ramdisk, how can I determine which is the 256k machine? (also, obviously, without cracking the case open!) What I mean is, there must be some way to just boot into AtariBasic and PEEK some location to determine the amount of ram in the machine. OR, maybe POKE a particular value into some location that will attempt to trigger an extended bank memory swap, and then test some way to see if it worked? Or maybe some OS USR call?????? (I dug out the Atari's this week and have been playing a few cart games, but didn't dig out the disk drives and was wondering which machine had the upgrade, and couldn't think of how to tell!)

Anybody know if anybody ever made a joystick hack version of crossbow? (so you can play it without a lightgun)

awesome! looks like this will be my next atari-related purchase.

Not much, it was pretty worthless. I guess at the time, before most people had any type of computer access or any intro into programming at school, some could have found it interesting to learn some VERY rudimentary basics of what programming was like. But I think that when you turned the 2600 on, 'basic programming' only gave you something like 64 free bytes of ram to create a program in.....which is pretty much useless. And access to graphics was limited to moving 2 blocks around the screen. I did make a simple game of 'pong handball' with it, but that's about the most you could do.

Interesting question. 10-15 years ago, while hanging out drinking with a friend, the topic came up that if you won 100 million dollars in the lottery, what sorts of things would you do. After the main round of things I'd want to buy, and trips to take, and amounts to give away to family and friends, I had a few 'out there' thoughts. One of them was that I would love to track down some of the original programmers of Alternate Reality (Phil Price and Gary Gilbertson) as well as some people out there who are still 'into' messing with the old Atari 8-bits, and hire them to FINISH the game. Forget the multiple installments. Just make a 1 game expansion that would let you take your old character and exit the city/dungeon, and be able to finish the game and return your character back home. Combine a shortened 'wilderness', 'revelation', etc expansions into one and let me finally finish it. If I had 100 million, I'd happily be willing to hand over 1 million for that priviledge. "Hey Phil, how'd you like to make a couple extra hundred thousand???"

i think they did a decent job at the time with space invaders, missile command, pole position, dig dug, phoenix, wizard of wor, vanguard, venture, battlezone, jungle hunt. but the one that stands out for me as a 'how did they do that on a 2600' is millipede. that was impressive considering the limitations.

a rainy saturday with the 2600.... crackpots - 15 mins no escape - 20 mins megamania - 15 mins mountain king - 120 mins (and finally beat it!)

Yeah, ditto. Way back in the mid 80s, I actually sold off a bunch a carts I had for like $3-$5 each. I had dumps of them on disk and figured 'what do I need the cart for anymore'. Well fast-forward 20+ years and I find myself wanting to dig-out and play some old Atari games....but not wanting to really bother with those old floppies and large 1050s. I'd rather have instantly-booting cart games! Jumpman Jr.....Mountain King....Krazy Shootout.....why did I ever sell them??? I've yet to find a cheap source for 8bit games. Places like Best Electronics have them, and you can stumble across them on ebay......but they're always like $20+ per game.

Perfect! Just what I'd been hoping for!

oooo.....I just stumbled upon this for the first time; I hadn't heard about these before now. Do you still have any left?????

The text file game manuals on here are a great resource. But does anyone have all of them ZIP'd up together somewhere that can be downloaded??

Sorry if it's been asked and I just couldn't find it, but I was wondering where I can find a list of all games that were released on cartridge fr the atari 8-bits? The game search/list here is fantastic for 2600 games (and 5200, 7800), but I haven't yet come across a list of all the carts that were released for the 8bit computers. And in a related question, does anyone have a good source they can recommend for buying old 8bit carts? I find atari2600.com to be a great source for the 2600......and ebay is also quite good for finding 2600 carts that I'm looking for.....but ebay is pretty weak for finding good selection (and price) for 8bit carts, and other than Best Electronics, I don't know of much else. Thanks for any info.

I wanted an Atari in '79, but didn't get one. When Space Invaders came out in 1980, I just *HAD* to have it and pestered my parents endlessly until they finally relented for my birthday that summer.

I just noticed something today that I hadn't before, after receiving a package of some 2600 carts that I got on ebay. I bought a small lot of carts....only wanted a few of them, the others in the lot were things I already had one or more of (space invaders, asteroids, pacman, etc). I've bought a few cart lots this way over the past year as I got back into playing my 2600 and wanted some new games to play. But up til now, I never bothered to even try the duplicate copies of games that I got....I just tossed them in a box and put them to the side. Today, I quickly inserted the new batch of duplicate carts into my 2600 and turned the system on for a few seconds each, just to check that they worked. And I was like "huh?!?" when it came to Asteroids. Same label as the one I've had since 1981.....the picture label with blue lettering on the end. But on *this* cart, you get a copyright title screen. Mine has none. Which has me wondering.....how many games have different rom versions with the same label? I know you can find the different label variations of games here on AtariAge.....but I'm wondering how many differences there are in the roms of the games themselves....is there a list of these somewhere?????

okay, this is just my 2 cents tossed into the discussion of what i personally would LOVE to see. i remember reading about AR in Antic before it was released. i placed an order from some catalog immediately, and then waited 6 months to get it. played the city til i exhausted it. waited 3 years (or whatever) for the dungeon, and then played that for at least a year before finally 'winning' by getting past the aliens/robots on the lower level. so.... i would love to see the game pretty faithfully recreated/ported to pc. the demo release looks very promising. ultimately what i'd want from this project is : - ability to import my old ar character. i have the .atr file of my city and dungeon character disks, which i play around with on an emulator maybe once a year. so to be able to import that rather than start over is a biggie. - ability to travel back and forth between city/dungeon (and other areas?). - unlock areas like the arena and palace. they don't have to be massive undertakings. maybe just the ability to fight creatures and earn money when entering the arena (ie- only one or a few 'rooms' necessary, some menu options, some random battles), and some small sideline quest at the palace would be nice (run an errand for the king, maybe pay your taxes, maybe report crimes....just something to do there). ability to join guilds and do a few small quests/jobs would be most welcome. - and most importantly, the ability to FINALLY, after 25 years, FINISH the game. like maybe when you defeat the lowest level in the dungeon you get a key that unlocks the 'wilderness', so you can exit the city. have some area of forest and plains out there to traverse, ecountering random creatures and trying to discover a hidden area that you can enter and be able to be transported back to earth. that's a just a random thought off the top of my head. there's info here on atariage in some old AR posts, as well as a website devoted to the game out there on the web, that contains 15-20 year old text files from philip price talking about what he had planned for the storyline and expansion packs. just take that basic idea and condense it to something manageable, and lets all FINALLY be able to bring our poor abducted characters back home again!

space jockey - 20 min frostbite - 30 min superman - 20 min venture - 15 min chopper command - 15 min

yes, i didn't really mean just an attract mode....i meant a game that you could 'start', and either it would take over and play itself if left untouched, or you could actually select 'zero' players and have the computer play against itself, keeping score. 'frogs n flies' is the only game i knew of that could do that. i'll have to check warlords over the weekend....i don't recall being able to let the computer play all 4 players, but if it can, then it qualifies. as for video life, i'll check it on an emulator, but unfortunately i don't have the actual cart (rarity 10) to play on my 2600.

I was reminded today of an interesting little feature that I always liked about the game Frogs and Flies - the fact that the game plays by itself if you don't touch the joystick. Just hit reset and sit back..... both player frogs will start jumping and trying to catch flies by themselves. Which got me wondering..... are there any other 2600 games that can play themselves??

have had 2 die over time... Atari - Super Breakout Activision - Enduro

This is amazingly cool. Demo looks like a good start on it! The first question that comes to mind is : do you plan on allowing players to import their old city / dungeon characters? would LOVE to bring my old character from 20+ years ago into this new version (with additional features like the jobs). Best of luck with this!

i was playing a few games this afternoon and decided to finally take a look at my broken reset switch spring problem. opened up the case and could see the busted spring piece hanging out of the game reset switch. pulled it out with tweezer and tossed it. got an idea. the cable that runs to the tv is underneath the reset/select switches. got a rubber band. looped it around cable where it exits the case (bend it around the cable and pull one side through the loop of the other, thus 'attaching' it). pulled the loose end up around the circuit board edge and looped it around reset switch. seemed to work fine. put the case back together and it seems to work perfectly. :-) 2 disclaimers... first, you need to find a rubber band that's the right length....not one too thick with too much tension.....not too short so that it's too tight. just a fairly thin rubber band, maybe 3 inches long when laying flat on a table. second, it's obviously a shorter-term fix. i'm sure the rubber band will go bad with time and need to be replaced in a year or two or three. but it works great right now, and it's sure easy to just replace it with another one down the road.

I've been wanting to make a 'checklist' for myself of all carts released in the US for the 2600. I know I can use the game index search function here to create an alphabetical listing of North American NTSC carts. But that also contains tons of duplicates (same game with different label variations, etc). So I thought I'd ask before spending the time to cut-and-paste and edit-down a list myself..... does anyone here have a game checklist file they could share? Ideally something like a basic excel spreadsheet, or even alphabetized plain text doc, that just lists game title and company that made it? I just want to be able to print out on a few pages a listing of all games so I can cross them off with a highlighter as I add to my collection. Thanks in advance for any help.