eegad

Perhaps beating a dead horse, but.... since the new storefront for Legacy has gone live a few weeks ago, has anyone here received any of their old unfulfilled orders? I'm still waiting for my October order.......

Robot Tank - 15 min Battlezone - 15 min Stargate - 15 min Defender - 15 min Super Cobra - 30 min Smurf Castle - 10 min Human Cannonball - 10 min

couple days ago... atlantis - 30 mins keystone kapers - 15 mins battlezone - 15 mins superman - 15 mins (still think this is one of the 2600s best games) wizard of wor - 10 mins sky jinks - 10 mins

I know it wasn't the first, but it was close to the first. I actually had one of the (few?) cart-based consoles that came out before the Atari; It was the RCA Studio II. I got it only because I wanted an Atari that Christmas., but Atari was close to $200....RCA game was on sale at Radio Shack for maybe $75, so I got that instead. Graphics were black&white, sound was only simple beeps, nothing onscreen moved smoothly, and the controllers were 2 numeric keypads. It sucked. Although....at the time, I'll admit I had some fun with it for a while. But the Atari was miles ahead as far as graphics/sound/controllers.

Apologies if it's a stupid question, or has been asked before.... I just picked up a lone cart of Super Cobra for the 2600 and was playing it earlier. It's an okay game....not one of the best or one of the worst. But I made it to the last level (with continues) and then couldn't finish it. There aren't any fuel tanks on that level, so like how can you make it to the end???? Am I missing something??? Or is it just impossible?

It wasn't a horrible game, but it wasn't that great either. As far as graphics on the system, it was pretty good. The underlying goal or idea for the gameplay was good. But it suffered, in my opinion, from 2 big problems. First, the endless falling into pits, often not on purpose. There should have maybe been more of an "enter a cave or climb down a ladder and search around for a phone piece" aspect rather than the endlessly falling and levitating. And secondly, the scientist and FBI agent are either too easy or too hard depending on difficulty settings....play it on hard and its ridiculous. Every time you levitate out of a pit,there's a guy standing on the screen waiting for you. I think the game would have fared much better if it had been a bit more "Adventure-like", moving through a set of rooms and mazes trying to find the phone pieces while avoided the bad guys. As it was made it's a so-so game. It COULD have been a great successor to Adventure if done differently.

Just wondering.....has any progress been made with this? Any chance of getting a public release of the binary (even in an unfinished form) anytime soon? Turbo was one of my favorite arcade games back in the day, and I always wanted it for the 2600 back then. And as a small aside, for anyone living in or around the New Jersey area.... I was playing an actual sit-down arcade Turbo a few days ago. At the Jersey shore, in Seaside Heights, in one of the 2 boardwalk arcades that has a merry-go-round in it, they have a separate arcade area that's called Flashbacks..... Turbo, Asteroids, Q-Bert, Pacman, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Tempest, Centipede, Star Wars, etc.....a whole bunch of the old classics.

Very cool little game. So HAS anyone killed the boss??? I've tried several times now and he seems invincible.

Space Invaders. It was *THE* reason that I just *HAD* to have an Atari for my birthday that year. I remember tearing that box open and sitting there for hours that day playing space invaders.

no, but let me know if you come up with an ingenious fix. my reset switch spring has been busted for years on my heavy 6....i have to manually raise it back up to play a game :-)

What really made the system THE classic game system was a combination of 2 things in my opinion. First, Atari jumped heavily into releasing licensed versions of popular arcade games. That got a LOT of people to buy the system (I wanted an Atari in 1979 I think, but it was "too expensive" according to my parents. I let it go that year. But next year when Space Invaders came out I HAD to have it and I begged and pleaded until I got it.) Other systems coming out in the early 80s (Intellivision, ColecoVision) technically had better graphics and sound, but Atari got the most popular arcade games. And the 2nd reason is pure numbers. Because SO many people bought the system, and then SO many developers started releasing carts for it, no system ever came close to the shear number of games you could find for it. Heck, I just broke out my 2600 last year for the first time in well over a decade....and I've bought a good 20-30 cheap used carts for it since then. Some games I had wanted but never got at the time. Some I'd never even heard of til now. Even 30 years on, you can STILL get and play 'new' games with your old Atari.

spent some time with the 2600 last night.... cosmic ark - 15 min. superman - 30 space attack - 15 space cavern - 10 dark cavern - 10 vanguard - 15 turmoil - 20

i gotta add my vote for 'skeet shoot'. i'd never played or heard of this before. recently i ordered some cheap carts from atari2600.com just to have something 'new' to play with over the summer.......when they arrived, one of them wasn't what i ordered. i got skeet shoot instead of shark attack. 'oh well', i figured....something i'd never even heard of before. after trying to play it, i must agree - it's one of the WORST games made for the 2600. i'll also vote for some of the early games like basic math and outlaw. as far as 'gameplay' goes, earthworld was pretty horrible as well.....just randomly running through rooms, picking up and dropping objects in the hope of triggering a clue.....but at least the graphics effects were good for the time (the title screen sword was amazing way back then :-). i will go against the grain and say that ET wasn't that bad of a game. the problem was that it was built up (advertised) to be such an amazing game, and it was just 'kind of okay'. the worst thing was the frustration of falling back into the holes so often while trying to levitate out.

I just hit the 7 month mark too! Order Details - Nov 14, 2008 1:09 PM EST Google order # 409644195112946 Almost 8 months here. Order #326743315128110 , Oct 26, 2008. According to the Legacy Engineering main page, a new order system will go live June 30 and at that time, supposedly, any remaining open orders will be addressed. I'll keep my fingers crossed (but won't hold my breath). - Ray Wilmott

Well I don't know if they were talking about the following, but... When AR first came out, I spent a fair amount of time trying to crack it and copy it. Yes, I did purchase it, but I wanted to crack it to use as trade for games from other people. I also used to like the challenge of trying to crack copy protection schemes. Anyway, no I never did manage to crack the game. It started out promising when I found the usual checking for flawed sectors in the initial loading program, which is what most software at the time used. But after removing that code, the copy still wouldn't work and I found that the program started doing a lot more funky stuff after the initial flawed-sector checks. Like loading in a chunk of data into one part of memory; then loading a second chunk elsewhere; and then performing operations on those 2 chunks and storing them in a third location (ie - 'exclusive OR'-ing (EOR) byte 1 of chunk 1, with byte 1 of chunk 2 and storing it in the third memory location....then moving onto byte 2, etc). Looking at the chunks of data #1 and #2 was just gibberish. But the resulting third chunk of data was excutable code. Thus, you couldn't disassemble what was stored on the disk directly and read through the programming code......what was on disk was gibberish.....executable code was CREATED in ram at run-time. And AR did this in multiple layers. I unscrambled a few manually, but gave up after that. Somewhere much further down the line, it was again checking for those flawed (fuzzy) sectors, but it was way too much of a hassle to keep unscrambling all that data to find out where (and then also dealing with checksum issues, which it also checked for!) But it was interesting, seeing what was going on in there, and I assume that's the "data folding" that they were talking about in the above quote.

Ditto. Heard about the Google checkout screwup. I ordered Oct 29. Emailed the [email protected] address 2 weeks ago. Got no reply. Emailed the [email protected] address a few days ago. Also no reply. Y'know, I feel bad complaining. While I've never dealt with him before, he is obviously held in high regards in the community. Knowing that he runs atarimuseum, and did the work on Flashback and such, I gotta admire and respect the guy. I also feel for him regarding his recent surgery and wish him well on the recuperation process that goes with it. But an email reply would be appreciated at this point. Even a standard form-letter reply of "Please excuse the delay as I try to get caught up and back on track. Hope to get your order out within the next 30 days" would make me happy. Ray Wilmott

wish i could say the same. i ordered in october....saw the message on the site a week ago....sent an email with my receipt number.... .....and haven't gotten any sort of reply or acknowledgement. :-(

I have not received mine yet, either..... Ordered mine in mid October, but still haven't received them. I tried emailing Legacy last week but have gotten no reply. :-( Has anybody who ordered October or earlier received any???

a 'snow day' yesterday, so of course atari was played a while. superman - 15 min. moon patrol - 10 min. centipede - 10 min. dark cavern - 10 min. wizard of wor - 10 min.

I always thought it was undeserving of so much scorn. I wouldn't list in my top 10 2600 games (or even top 20), but I thought it was a pretty decent game overall. The only thing that used to annoy me was sometimes falling back into a pit while trying to exit it.

I've long been curious about something on the 2600, and have heard some snippets of explanation here and there through the years, but was wondering if someone on here could explain it more clearly or fully. My question has to do with flickering graphics on the 2600 (or really what I'm curious about is why some game DON'T flicker). I understand that the 2600 only has 2 'players' and 2 'missiles' and 1 'ball' for use as sprites. Thus, for a simple game like Breakout or Combat, you have enough sprites to use for each object, and therefore no flickering. And so it makes sense that if you try to put a lot of moving objects on screen at once, you run out of sprites and need a work-around. I also am aware that the CPU is very time constrained on the 2600 because it needs to draw the screen line by line, so there are issues of timing and only being able to draw so much on screen each frame. Okay....so maybe to draw 10 asteroids floating around the screen, you draw an asteroid sprite, then reposition and draw a 2nd one, and then you're out of time for that frame. So you draw 2 each frame for 5 frames to draw all 10, and that causes them all to 'flicker'. I get the overall concept behind why objects in 2600 games flicker so much. What I've always really wanted to know though is how some games AVOID flickering. Activision's 'Spider Fighter' comes to mind. Multiple, multi-colored sprites moving very quickly all over the screen with no flickering. How is that done? Note - I'm somewhat technically inclined, but not a programmer, so I'm not looking for code fragments or examples. That just goes over my head. Can anyone just explain the technique in somewhat simple terms?? Much thanks in advance for any input.

I picked up a Solaris cart a while back. It will not play on either of my 2600's (one a heavy sixer, one a 6 switch woody). The picture rolls endlessly on the tv and is unplayable - you can hear the sounds and see that the graphics are moving/changing, but the picture just will not steady itself. Now, I have heard that if you try to play a PAL format cart on an NTSC console/tv, this is the type of outcome that you might expect. And so I assumed that somehow I just came into possession of the PAL cart. The thing is, I was just checking the game database here on AtariAge and from what is shows, carts with a b&w photo on front are NTSC version and carts with a color photo on the cart are PAL. My cart has a b&w photo, so it *SHOULD* be NTSC, correct? Any ideas - is the cart fried somehow, or is it a 'rare' version of the PAL cart??

and another atari afternoon... spider fighter - 30 min. chopper command - 30 min. superman - 15 min. megamania - 15 min. battlezone - 15 min.

Cosmic Ark - 30 min. Atlantis - 15 min. Moon Patrol - 15 min. Superman - 15 min. Smurf Castle - 15 min.

yes, and i was just looking at the box and cart for adventure that i have. the cart itself says copyright 1978 on it. the box and instruction booklet both say copyright 1980. so i guess warren did write the game in '78, but for whatever reason, atari sat on it a while before actually releasing it.