Herbarius

There is no option I could vote. I don't have a pet. I never had a pet. But I wouldn't rule out the possibility I would ever get one.

Only listing 2600 games, played on the real hardware, for the last week. Centipede: ~75 min Enduro: ~120 min I really like this one! Starts out easy but gets damn hard very quickly. Also nice day/night transitions. Pac-Man: ~160 min Yeah, what shall I say... if I had Ms.Pac-Man I'd propably play rather that, but I don't own it and also I don't think the 2600 Pac-Man is unplayable. It's disappointing because it's not like the Arcade, but if you take it as what it is, its some nice game on the 2600, good timekiller. However, I like to play that in B/W mode, I don't like the colors. I normally play in game mode 5, switching the difficulty to either Novice or Expert depending on mood.

Ookay, so I quite regularly play emulators, because I like a lot of old games. However, I never owned a Nintendo console or a Sega. Of course I played it with friends, but in my own personal experience I don't really feel the difference, I've got a simple but nice Thrustmaster gamepad which is IMO a worthy replacement for any 16-bit console controller. So NES/SNES/Sega-Games: Emulator. No regrets at all. I also use DOSbox to play old DOS games... Propably there would be very few people to tell they would rather hook up an old 486 PC next to their normal one to play those games... That's a weird case, since I'm playing PC games on a PC - but games for an early 90s PC on a modern PC via Emulation. Lets get to the "real hardware" I actually own. I've got an Atari 2600 and a Commodore 64. Instead of playing the real C64 I actually prefer to use an emulator. Just for the sake of convenience, especially because of the very long LOAD TIMES on the real thing. Of course from time to time I'll play the real one, but I wouldn't consider to have it hooked up to the TV permanently. Contrast to all this stuff I play with the emulator and don't miss anything: the Atari. Emulated I just find it dull, the games don't deliver the proper feeling, they appear crude... yeah, you could say they ARE crude, but on the real hardware that just feels right. On the PC it feels... I can't really tell why, to me the games appear a whole magnitude more primitive on the PC... So for the Atari 2600 I definitely prefer the real hardware, although to try out games I don't own as a cartridge I'll use Stella. However, thats just that: Trying them out. I don't really get the feeling I'm actually "playing the game", I'm just testing it...

Sorry, I don't even know the Colecovision version of Galaxian. I was explicitly referring to the C64 version. I didn't want to say that Atari did that all the time! Just that they might have done it sometimes, e.g. with the C64 Galaxian.

A minute ago the AA homepage showed me this part of trivia: What immediately came to my mind was: Not only Coleco did that. In fact, I think even Atari did it. Do you know the C64 version of Galaxian? Compare it to the Atari-8bit-version... The C64 version looks and sounds like crap, and it doesn't play nearly as well as the Atari 8-bit version. Yeah, Atari made both versions. I think that's very suspicious, as the possibilites of both machines are very comparable, but the C64 version is FAR inferior. Do you agree? Perhaps this thread can be used to collect some more examples of this "marketing trick"... I hope this is the right board, couldn't figure any place where this thread would fit better...

When I was a kid I always liked to play the X-Mas Version of Lemmings on the PC on the Easter weekend... I don't really know why, perhaps some kind of pre-teenage rebellion ^^

I think you all know the arcade game BattleZone and its 2600 conversion. So, I saw the Classic Game Room video of BattleZone and immediately I found the graphics very impressing for a 2600 game. I thought "Wow, I've got to get that game!"... (actually I first thought "Oh, what's that, I wouldn't have thought BattleZone has been released for the VCS too... However, it can't be good, the 2600 isn't really capable of this vector-based 3D perspective... oh, what's that? It's in color? it looks nice? Wow, of course, why didn't I think of that, all they had to do is alter the style of the graphics to get it on the 2600.) So, but now I found out, by surfing on Atarimania, that the PAL version of the game has less colors than the NTSC version. It still looks good, but its just a little bit less impressive. Given that I live in Germany and most likely can only get my hands on the PAL version, its kinda sad, that definitely pushed the priority of River Raid on my whishlist (had been a tie between River Raid and BattleZone before I found out) Now, I wonder why is there this difference between the NTSC and PAL version? Here on AtariAge there is a website which states NTSC games run fine in PAL systems (but not the other way round)... but if that is true, why did they change it? Why didn't they just publish the same version? Is there any technical reason for this change? Is that a singular phenomenon or are other games which have been altered in similar ways when they made their way from NTSC to PAL?

You're from Berlin? AFAIK these Puzzy Games are rare in North America but rather common in Europe... So why would you pay more than 100$ on that?

I voted for Fate of Atlantis, the adventure game. I think this poll suffers from having both Action/Action-Adventure and Classic Adventure type of games mixed. Two seperate polls for each genre would propably deliver clearer results.

I've got 7. No doubles. Plus one non-functional game. That would make me Top Dog, I guess... Ok, to be serious: I imagine it'd be awesome to have hundreds of games like some of you guys.

So, I re-soldered Cross Force, but it didn't help. So the chip is propably dead. Taking into account how troublesome it was just to solder that one game, I'll for now refraing from resoldering everything inside the 2600! However I still openend it, did a little bit of dust cleaning and looked for obvious defects. The metal box in the middle (below the cartridge slot) had to do with this noise on screen. When you put it on the table and pressed on top, it would reduce the noise, if you didn't push and maybe lifted the board from the table (like it's lifted in the original case!) it had strong noise. I just used some tape here and there and now the noise is gone (okay, it's not really "gone" but I've to turn up the TV brightness very high to see it - much higher than comfort level.)

So, I made some kind of whishlist of Atari 2600 games I would want to acquire maybe over the course of the rest of the year... I've put both Pitfall! and Pitfall! II on the list, but as the list got pretty large I decided: one of them had to go. (Maybe I'll get the other one later, but one has to have priority.) Yes I could now try both with Stella and decide which I liked better. I'll propably do that anyway. But I also want to ask your opinion: What do you think, is Pitfall! II the better game, because it improves on the original? Or is the first one the better game, because it's the "true" Pitfall... Please vote. Please also post comments to complement your vote. E.g. what you liked in the games, what may have ruined one of them for you but not the other... Another thing: I always found Pitfall! to be a very hard game. How's the difficulty in Pitfall! II, is it easier? harder? more or less the same? I've added a poll for that too, comments on this topic are welcome...

How small do you actually plan it to be? More like a handheld console or more like a laptop?

Okay, I tried it. It won't work either this way, but it obviously behaves differently. Instead of having vertical colored bars most of the times and occasionally the scrolling horizontal weird bars it's now - "playing" just the board - the other way 'round: Most of the time its the weird horizontal bars and only occasionally the vertical stripes. Its just a plain black chip without a window and without a logo, but with these writings: SA 203P E 2332 1 1 8 3 There's no funky stuff, just that one chip on the small circuit board, connecting it to the connectors. On the back of the circuit board it says "SPECTRAVIDEO" (What's that all about, why does the label say "Spectravision" and everything else (back of the cartridge, circuit board) "Spectravideo"). Also one of the soldered joints on the back of the board doesn't look so good, so it really could help. I'll see to get an opportunity to fix it.

Thanks for you replys, I already thought resoldering everything could help, but I didn't want to do anything without asking more experienced Atari owners. However, I don't really understand what you mean by this: "insertion tools"? In the game Cross Force or in the 2600 itself? Why should I put it into the 2600's case and where? Also, I'm not sure about the green cartridge slot... In the web I found this picture: On the picture, you can very clearly see its green! However, if I look into my cartridge slot (I've the same Vader design as in the photo), its very hard to tell... If you look closely you can see they're are in fact green, but its not like in the picture, much less distinctive. However, provided I have that green cartridge slot, how do I get it replaced? Wouldn't it be cheaper to try getting a completely new 2600 on ebay? Also, I think there is no problem in just using the console and hoping for the best, replacing the cartridge slot only when it broke down? Or is there a risk of damaging my games or other parts of the 2600? Concerning Cross Force: Yes, thank you. I already opened the case, because I noticed its the only game where the board would "wobble around" inside. I tried to fix it in position using some insulating tape, but wasn't really succesful. I don't think its the reason why the game won't work, but perhaps its an additional problem? Any suggestions?

I actually mean those:

It propably was. One evolutionary step before Pac-Man.

I think that naming a game Spitfire Attack and you see 5 Me-109 and not a single Spitfire is a little bit uncommon! Not that uncommon but a little bit....... The 2 planes far in the background could be Spitfires...

...so I had this Atari 2600 up on my cupboard for nearly 10 years. I was born in the mid-eighties, so I'm not from the Atari age, however I'm a retro-games geek I got the 2600 like 10 years ago, I already was interested in retro-games then, some friends of my parents saw me tampering with an Commodore 64 and so they just gave me their old Atari 2600 for free, some games included. But back then I figure this was too primitive even for my standards or I just had a bad day or something like that, as I've put the console in a plastic bag (to protect from dust) and onto my cupboard the same day... (perhaps it wasn't so good that one of the carts was Pac-Man) However, a few days ago I unpacked it again and I'd like to play it every once in a while and perhaps even collect some more games! First I discovered the AC adaptor was broken, but luckily I could replace that. So now the system works. It's a 4-switch model, PAL version (I'm from Germany). However, while it works quite fine, it isn't really in top condition. There are some issues which are bothering me. 1. The picture has some blurry "artefacts" (looks kinda like bad JPEG compression). Also, there's some grey/white "grain", especially on black backgrounds. I first thought it's the TV, but no matter how much I tune, it won't get better. However I discovered if I apply pressure on right handed side of the top of the console, it reduces these effects (they do not completely vanish.) 2. You better not tuch the power cord at the back of the console or the cartridge while playing - because the game may freeze, go to black screen or reset. 3. The Game Select switch is worn out, sometimes I have to push it repeatedly in order to switch to the next mode. I thought about opening the case and try to fix these issues to "rejuvenate" the 2600. Can you give me any advise on that? There are also two other questions propably not related to the system itself: The only game the color/bw switch seems to work on is Pac-Man. Most games are in color even if I set it to B/W. Is this normal? I figure there might be just a few games supporting B/W? Also, one game, Cross Force, appears to be dead. It just displays a picture of colored vertical bars, accompanied by a beeping or buzzing sound. If I turn the Atari off and then back on, I'll get a different sound and/or picture. Sometimes there's no sound at all, sometimes it's just sound, but a black screen. On rare occasions it has horizontal or diagonal lines scrolling very fast. I already cleaned the contacts, but it didn't help. Do you think there's still some hope?