eegad

The version from the more recent post with multiple tunes.

I don't know how I missed this at the time, but I just stumbled upon it yesterday. Flashed to a maxflash cart and tried it out this morning. All I can say is "Holy Crap!". By the 3rd or 4th level, my jaw had dropped open and I was mumbling "am I really playing a game like this on my ancient Atari 800?!". Feels more like a 90s shmup on Genesis. Totally awesome job on this!

Got Adventure when it first came out. At the time, it blew my mind and I played it a lot. One night over summer vacation a friend was over and we were playing multiple Atari games. After he went home, I decided to stay up and play one more game of Adventure game #3 before going to bed. After entering the black castle, the bat stole something from me and left me the bridge. I was annoyed and just started placing the bridge around and walking across it, trying to exit the black castle without going back along the maze passages. Found myself in a little box area and the "pick up object" sound happened but I wasn't holding anything. as I moved around more, I noticed that I was holding a dot. Thought that was really odd, so I started carrying it all over the place. Noticed that below the yellow castle to the side room, the black line was different. Hmmm. Tried to go through it but couldn't. Then the bat flew in from the left carrying something, and magically I went through and saw the message. Totally cool. I didn't want to turn the Atari off because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to duplicate it. Had fun impressing friends the next week. I think I also wrote to Atari about it and got back a form letter of congratulations for finding a secret message left by the game programmer.

Question about bat eggs : I finally found my first one in game 1 yesterday. I was reading through some old posts in the 5200 board about the game when it released for the 5200, and there it said that on easy levels, only 2 bat eggs existed. to find all 3 bat eggs, you could only do it on higher levels (level 9 and up maybe?). how about in this xe version? are there 3 bat eggs on every level, or only certain levels? if only on some levels, which are they? i'd like to spend some time over the weekend searching for them, but what's the point of scouring level 3 if they don't all appear until level 5 or something. thanks.

Hmmm. Let’s see… - Alternate Reality The City. My all-time favorite 8bit game. Sure, not much to do after mapping it out and visiting every location, but I never got tired of it, and am still continuing my character from 1986 today via an sdrive-max. *Still* have never found a magical flame sword! (I wish I could bundle City and Dungeon together, but if not, I’ll take City) - Caverns of Mars. When I was a kid wanting his first computer, and trying to decide between TRS-80, Apple and Atari, I was over the house of a friend-of-a-friend….he had just gotten an 800 and Caverns of Mars. I fell in love with the silky smooth scrolling. If not for that game I may have not ended up getting a 400. I still play it and think it’s one of the best early games for the 8bits. - Adventure 2600. Since someone here converted it to 8bit a few years back, I’ll bring it to my island. Before Adventure, videogames for me were just a single screen, simple shoot-the-ships or bounce-a-ball-back kind of thing. When I first got Adventure on 2600 it blew my mind. A whole contiguous land existed inside the machine where you could carry objects from one place to another, unlock gates, find secret dots. At the time it was amazing and it’s still my all time favorite 2600 game (which I can now play on my 800xl). - Adventure II xe. A new release and I love it…..but I think the only way I’ll ever have enough time to make it through each game variation is if I’m stranded on an island. - Jumpman. Just one of the best 8bit games that’s always fun to play. I typically don’t care for platformers, but Jumpman is more forgiving….you can land along the edge and he’ll walk up onto the platform rather instantly die. So well done. and 3 more that I still like to play now and then… - Shamus - Pharoahs Curse - Zombies

I do think it was mainly the yellow and green keys that i simply could not tell apart (on a ntsc 800xl, composite video, circa 2000 32" crt tv). Changing the yellow one to orange might help. But I also wonder what it would look like if they only changed between 2 colors rather than 3,and avoid the brightest hue. For the example above, just back and forth between $18 and $1A (or even a touch darker using $16 and $18).

Excellent job - thanks so much for this. I just played it for the first time on my 800xl with 8mbit atarimax cart. Got through games 1 and 2 so far. Love it. My only small constructive critism type of thing would be that, at least to my old eyes, I found it difficult to distinguish the different key colors.... If they didn't "shimmer", and just stayed a solid steady color, it would be much easier I think.

My wife got me an SDrive-Max for Christmas this year. Really nice little device. I wish I could send it back through time to my 1985-self. I've got a technical question - if you look at the contents of the sdrive.atr file, what is the difference between the files SDRIVE.COM, SDRIVEN.COM and SDRIVENH.COM? They all seem to be the "menu" that boots up on drive 0. The reason I ask is because there is one thing about the sdrive menu that annoys me.....the fact that the Option key also acts as an arrow key to navigate through file lists. I load atr's into drive(s)....then I need to hold Option and then Reset in order to reboot with Basic disabled (800xl). But of course when I touch Option, it starts going click-click-click through the file list. Very minor gripe to be sure, but it kinda annoys me. So I want to run the menu through a disassembler / hex editor and NOP out the check for console key presses (and also maybe change the background color to normal Atari blue). I guess I could just hack all 3 files, but I figured I'd ask before I dig in. Thanks for any input.

I don't know about that October source code date, but I can tell you this for a fact: I got my first computer, an Atari 400, for my birthday in early July 1982. The deal was my parents paid for the computer itself; I was with them when they bought it and I used my saved up allowance money to buy a 410 recorder and pacman cartridge at the same time. So, at least here in New Jersey, I can tell you that 8bit pacman was available in July 1982.

Playing games is split between a heavy and light sixer.... One is set up, the other packed away in a box, and I swap them once a year or so. Whenever I see a new homebrew, hack or proto available, I download it and check it out briefly with Altirra on my pc.... If I like it, it gets added to my Harmony cart and then played on real hardware.

Excellent idea. Missile command, asteroids, defender would be my requests off the top of my head.... I could never remember which game number was the one I preferred.

Played this a handful of times yesterday and really like it. A shame it never got finished (then again, I haven't managed to defeat the boss at the end of the first level, so for me it's as good as being finished).

I don't know how I didn't see this at the time, but just stumbled upon it today. THANK YOU! Just loaded it onto my sdrive-max and it works great. Any chance of getting a single atr of the City as well?

Got an s-drive max for Christmas, and have been playing around with Alternate Reality these past few days. I *know* that I had Dungeon all mapped out with all locations labelled way back when, but for the life of me I can only find my old map for the City, not the Dungeon. Spent a bit of time googling for Dungeon maps. Best I could find are : https://monochromeeffect.org/AlternateReality/reference.html http://www.eobet.com/alternate-reality/ Those are helpful, but does anyone have a map that is fully labelled with names of all bars, inns, shops, guilds, etc.?

Oh yeah, I forgot it worked with paddles! Yep, then I definitely like it better on 2600 than Intellivision.

I'll second that vote for Astro Blaster... That was one of my faves in the arcades back in the day. Have long been hoping for an 8bit or 2600 version. Astro Blaster is my 2nd most wished for game on 8bit, right behind Phoenix, which I pumped a whole lot of quarters into in the early 80s.

I've always thought MNetwork did a good job of porting Intellivision games to the 2600. But I don't know that I'd say I like any of them better on 2600 than the original Intellivision version. Certainly I prefer the feel of a joystick in my hand while playing Astroblast, Space Attack/Battle, Dark Cavern/Night Stalker, Star Strike or yes, Frog Bog/Flies. But for games like Sea Battle or Baseball, the directional pad on Intellivision worked better.... And the keypad with overlays certainly made Baseball, Space Attack & Sea Battle work nicer on Intellivision. I guess if pressed, I'd say given the choice on any of the games, the two that I'd maybe choose to play 2600 version over Intellivision would be Astroblast and Dark Cavern. For the rest I'd probably take the Intellision version just because of the improved graphics/sound (including Frog Bog - it just looks and sounds better on Intellivision, even if I did used to fall off the lilly pad way too often with the directional pad).

Phoenix has been THE most-wanted Atari 8bit game for me for decades. Played that so much in the 80s arcades. Galaga also ranks highly on my someday-wish-list. Would dearly love to see either finally come about.

Was the xex or atr of the game ever made available? If so, where can I find it?

What's the deal with the B/W switch- No fish, just assorted garbage to catch? Is there a garbage lunker? 😊

I also liked Air Sea Battle in the Atari's early days. First 2600 game I ever played actually, at a friends house. It would have been a much better pack-in game than Combat (because at least there are 1 player games in it). Another one of those early day games from Atari, I also used to like Starship at the time and played it quite a bit - it was one of the first games I ever got when I finally got my own 2600 (along with Human Cannonball and Sky Diver).

Wow, surprised at how many people mention activision (yes, derivative, but often better than the similar games by atari and others) and coleco (hey, i think their arcade game versions are at least as good quality as atari's.... Donkey kong and venture I liked back in the day) . As for mystique, well, while I might agree with many critisisms, I don't think they were sold in regular stores... As I recall they were sold through mail order outlets and ads in Playboy, so a specialty market. My vote for worst company? Apollo. I would personally vote Skeet Shoot as worst game ever. But most of their others were pretty bad as well. Oops, forgot about Mythicon.... I revise my vote for Firefly as worst game.

For the past few years I've been trying to find a retro gaming handheld that will play early mame games (pacman, donkey kong, etc....don't care about any games later than 1984/1985), and also 2600 games. Sounds like your device fits the bill. The thing is though, I don't want to have to build a device. Nor do I want to install and setup the OS / interface. What I've been hoping to someday find is a ready-to-go device that I can open the box, either connect via usb to pc and drag roms onto it (or put roms on an sd card and just plug it in), and then be able to play. Do you know of anyone making one like this? Googling retro handhelds turns up various devices but most of them either seem geared towards nes, snes, genesis, playstation, etc. Or finding out any real info about the device (english instructions) is impossible. I just want early arcade and 2600 in a works-out-of-the-box device (minus roms of course.... Though in the case of mame I'd want to know what version of roms the device needs).

Just wanted to say nice job on the game. Finally got around to trying it out and spent about an hour playing it several times. Only managed to get the lunker once on something like my 4th game.

...for the person who mentioned the similarity of cover art between Boston-Don't Look Back and 2600 Space Invaders - you just made me feel totally stupid for never noticing that before, since I owned both back in the day and saw them on a daily basis. 🙂