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I just started reading Racing the Beam. The 'timeline' at the beginning indicates Adventure being released in 1978. Space Invaders being released in 1980. This has me in a state of confusion. From my own childhood memories.... I wanted an Atari in 1979, but my parents wouldn't get me one. When Space Invaders was released in (late spring?) of 1980 (9th grade for me), I just **HAD** to have an Atari and was unrelenting. They finally caved in and got me an Atari and Space Invaders for my July 1st birthday. Got a few other games that summer also (Breakout, Canyon Bomber, etc). Saw a game called Adventure listed in the cartoony "Atari Catalogs" that came boxed with each game. Sounded way cool. I wanted it. It wasn't released yet. 'Coming Soon'. Came out a few months later....my grandparents bought it for me one weekend. I'd *guess* fall of 1980. BUT..... I just checked Warren Robinett's own website. He himself said it was programmed in 1978. Can anyone restore my sanity on this? Was it programmed in '78, but not released until 2 years later? Was it, somehow, released and then pulled and then re-released at a later date? My aging memory distinctly recalls Adventure coming out AFTER Space Invaders. ?!?!?!???!?! While on the topic...... this site is an AMAZING wealth of Atari info and I love it. But is there anywhere that has the official release/ship dates for all of Atari's games? Surely that info has to exist somewhere. Not necessarily for obscure 3rd party stuff, but for Atari's own-brand games, there must be shipping records either from Atari or distributors, etc.....

One of my 2600's (a 6 switch woody) has a semi-broken Reset switch. It no longer returns to the up position when released....like a spring inside it broke. The unit still works fine - I just have to push Reset down and then manually raise it back up to start a game. Was just wondering if anyone has had this happen to theirs, and if there's perhaps a simple clever fix for it.

Good find! Had a $20 Amazon gift card laying around, so I just used it to order Racing the Beam.

An Atari gaming weekend... Adventure - 1 hour Superman - 30 min. Moon Patrol - 30 min. Dark Cavern - 30 min. Space Attack (or is it Space Battle....mattel) - 1 hour Venture - 15 min. Keystone Kapers - 30 min. Breakout - 15 min. Stargate - 15 min. Commando Raid - 5 min. Riddle of Sphinx - 30 min. Astrosmash - 5 min. I guess that's about it. Nice to just lay on the couch and play Atari all day. (wife's not so happy about it, though! :-)

Had my wife order me a few old 2600 carts for christmas that I never had as a kid. Finally got the chance to sit down and play this weekend, so.... About 3 hours with Riddle of the Sphinx. (still haven't beat game 3) An hour or so with Dark Cavern. An hour with Keystone Kapers.

hmmm. Adventure Superman (because I still play those fairly regularly, even 25+ years later) a third would probably be something like Chopper Command

I still use my original 6 switch model. I only play on occasion....I have everything on emu's on the PC as well, but when I'm in the mood, I prefer to play on the original hardware.

Ditto. Got my first Atari for my birthday JUST to be able to play Space Invaders at home. Still think it's one of the best 20 or so games ever made for the 2600.

I was perusing some old Atari brochures that I found in a box, and saw in the "all new" XL computer line brochure a screenshot and blurb about an educational game called Kingdom. I don't recall ever hearing about it or stumbling across it back in the day, but the screenshot looks like an old strategic text-based game that I used to play in school on the TRS-80, called 'Empire'. Can anyone point me to a source for an .atr or binary load file for Kingdom? I want to check it out and see how close it is to that old Empire game I used to play almost 30 years ago. Thank in advance.

Just reminded me of something.... did anybody else used to use the "scotch tape / yank" method to copy games? When they first started using just one or two bad sectors as copy protection, the easy way around that was to sector copy the disk, and make note of the bad sector. Put a piece of tape on the end of the disk copy so the tape hung out the drive slot, write a quick program to just keep writing any old data to that sector, and then give the tape a quick yank, thus jamming and stopping the disk in mid-write. An error resulted on that sector and the copy worked fine. Copied a handful of games that way. A side question while on the this taboo topic. What was the hardest game you ever personally cracked? Or the most interesting/ingenious protection you ever came across? I'll start. Alternate Reality - City. Hard & ingenious. Funny thing is that I already a bought the game (had it on pre-order many months before it was released). But I wanted a backup copy for myself. I also owed a friend or two for giving me copies of things, so I wanted to pay off the debt. For like an entire week after getting the game, I kept at it. Finally got it, but it was annoying. Multiple fuzzy sectors, multiple load stages, scrambled data (it would load a chunk of data, then a second chunk of data, then EOR byte by byte to another area of ram, which would then unscramble into executable code....definitely "protection from paradise", which was text encoded on the disk somewhere). Anyway, when i finally cracked it, I changed the lyrics of the opening song to something about how hard it was to crack. My friend got a kick out of it anyway, and I was pleased that I figured it out. I also was impressed early on when I figured out how to copy Atari cartridges. Had a program to dump an area of ram to disk. Figured if I added the disk load sector headers to it, you could easily copy a cart. Didn't work. Blew my mind how that could be. Disassembled a cart or two and started tracing through it. Figured maybe there was a bit set somewhere that marked whether a cart was inserted or not. Nope. Found a small loop in the initialization code that wrote some data to memory locations where the cart resided. I was like "What the...? How can you write to that area if it's rom when the cart is in? Ohhhhhh....... if the cart dump is in ram, it wipes out parts of the game code! if it's an actual rom, nothing happens and the game continues running." Definitely an "aha!" moment.

Thanks. That seems to do the trick. I'd never heard of mypicodos before, but it works for editing those .atr's

An Alternate Reality City related question.... How many people have found the magical Flamesword, which I believe is the ultimate weapon in the game? I played this game SO much back in the day, and have also played it once or twice a year via emulators these past 10 years. But I never found the flamesword. Is it only from a particular creature at a particular location? I once heard that "green dragons" (I think) were the only creatures to yield flameswords. But I've killed many of those through the years (my God.....for like 20 years I've been playing this game now!!!!) and still no flameswords. :-(

uhhhhh..... I tried that. Unless there's some trick I'm missing, it doesn't work. Trying to "D" delete the file resulted in a "file not found" error.

Hmmmm. Interesting question. I pirated a lot of 8-bit games back in the day. I also bought 8-10 each year as well. My best guess at answering the question as to the first one would be Caverns of Mars. If I recall, my friend (who talked me into buying an Atari 400 after he got his parents to buy him an 800) let me borrow his Caverns cassette and I used my stereo's dual dubbing tape deck to copy it.

Does anyone know how to edit the "Yogi's MegaGames" archives? They are contained in the huge atari-8bit game archive/torrent that's floating around the net. Works great with the AtariWinPlus emulator. But I can't figure out how to make changes to the "disks". Basically there's a small "loader disk" that you put in drive 1. Then you put any of the 20 or so "megagame" disks (.atr format) in drive 2. When you boot up, you get a menu loader that allows you to choose from the 50 or so games on that disk. Very nice. What I want to do is customize one of those megagames disks to just contain all my own personal favorites. Problem is that these "disks" don't seem to be edit-able from any normal DOS. I didn't expect AtariDos to be able to do anything with them. So I tried MyDos, thinking it might. It didn't. Then I tried Sparta. Figured that would surely work. But it didn't. Oh, you can get a directly of the disk. And you can unlock the files. But if you try to delete a named file, you get either a "file not found" or "not sparta format" error. Any ideas on how to delete, and then write files to these .atr game archives? (and forgive me if I'm being stupid here. It's been a LONG time since I've done anything with DOS and disks on the Atari.....I'm way out of practice :-)

thanks for the link. i think i just found an early christmas present to myself.

Thanks to all for the responses. Can you tell me which features are not in the trial version? Just trying to decide if I'd use/need the full version. Basically I see myself using the SIO2PC just to play all the old Atari game .atr files (which I already have downloaded on my PC hard drive)....and also to hook a 1050 into the mix and copy over some text files and old BASIC programs I made long ago. I really don't see myself using the modem/printer features, or doing anything more advanced like utilizing large hard drive images, etc.

Apologies for any questions that almost certainly have been asked before, but... I was reading a few posts referencing SIO2PC and APE, and I read a bit on the atarimax site and was just wondering if I understand this correctly.... and also was wondering how many of you here use this device and are happy/unhappy with it. My assumption is that the SIO2PC connects via USB cable to a PC, and the other end uses a standard SIO cable to connect to an Atari 8-bit. To run software on the Atari, you run the APE software, tell it to "load" a disk image (.atr file), and then you turn on the Atari and it boots from that disk image. Is this correct? Are there many (any) compatibility issues? Does it emulate a single disk drive or multiple drives (ie - can I set it to boot off, say DOS in a virtual "drive 1" and also access other disk images in a virtual drive 2, 3, etc)? Am I correct in assuming that you can daisy-chain real disk drives into the mix so that you can copy files between an .atr file on the pc and a disk in a 1050 drive? Anything I should watch out for or be aware of before I order an SIO2PC? Anyone want to throw out any positive or negative comments about it? Much thanks for any input.

adventure, millipede, chopper command, enduro, pitfall, superman, atlantis, river raid, missile command

Chopper Command (30 minutes) Enduro (20 minutes) Atlantis (15 minutes) Adventure (15 minutes) Battlezone (5 minutes)

Just as an add-on question.... I know I read somewhere a while back that a handful of games were incompatible with the heavy sixers. Which games are they? And why? (what did Atari change in later models that caused them to not work on heavies?)

But you're only talking about while actually using it in "trakball mode", right? If the trakballs switch is set to "joystick mode" it should work if I connect the +5 V line, correct? I don't really care about being able to use it in a native trakball mode. From what I see on the 2600 and Atari 800xl, games like centipede, missile command, crystal castles, etc work fine with the trakball in joystick mode. I'd be happy to get a similar situation with MAME games like centipede, tempest, major havoc, etc.

I've got a light 6-er and a woodgrain 4 switch at my house, but I was thinking last week while over my parents house that I thought I still had another Atari packed away with some of my other old junk in one of their closets. So I dug around a bit and found my other (first) old Atari. And yes, it was a heavy sixer. So to add to the list... It's an Atari, Sunnyvale, NO cut-out for channel select switch on bottom, S/N is 94041H btw.... I hooked it up and played with it last night and noticed one thing - the video quality is noticeably "cleaner" than my light-6 or 4-switch.

Thanks for the input. That sounds like it probably is the problem since I'd think the sensors & circuit for the ball movement need power. And yes, my home-wired hack into a cheap PC keyboard only connected the 5 wires found in a plain old joystick.

A Trak Ball in joystick mode should produce exactly the same output as a joystick. Are you 100% sure, you haven't disabled that mode? Actually someone else figured out the problem for me I think. My hack of a joystick port into a PC keyboard only has connected the 5 pins used by a joystick. But the trakball also needs another +5 volt pin to power the sensors and circuit in it. Oh well, maybe some rainy weekend I'll fix that.