Atari_afternoon

@ Nick, done! (on behalf of a friend now, we´re sharing the burden )

I was 11.

TMNT, Fall of the Foot Clan & Fortress of Fear, GB Pocket - on the sofa for about an hour in the afternoon today

This is a nice exercise of thoughtful self-reflection....hm...which did I spend most time with back then? ATARI 2600 1. Solaris (no doubt! hand drawn maps etc, long sessions...) 2. Mario Bros. (just wonderful for 2 players then!) 3. hard hard hard. very hard. Jungle Hunt? (the laughter!) Homebrews: 1. Ature. 2. Skeleton Plus. 3. Halo 2600. C 64 1. Friday 13th (still love it on the DS emu!) 2. Teacher Busters (sic ) 3. Maniac Mansion (tried it with all characters. man did I have patience!) GAMEBOY 1. Super Mario 2 (even today again!) 2. Tiny Toons Babs´ Big Break (I was young...) 3. Tetris (how could it be different...) GAMEBOY COLOR 1. Duke Nukem (the best! simply the best!) 2. Shanghai (for me almost perfect, and very often solveable) 3. Super Mario Deluxe (maybe also not too exotic) GAMEBOY ADVANCE 1. Doom (reason why I got one) 2. Advance Wars (total time-spender) 3. Wolfenstein / the two Ecks vs. Sever games - cannot make up my mind here. ATARI LYNX 1. Rampage 2. Xenophobe 3. Rygar Homebrew: 1. Lynxopoly (great for multiple short in-between sessions) 2. Yastuna 2 (Space Shoot and Space Domino rock) 3. Alpine Games (a beauty) PC (back then in the nineties when I was actively interested in PC gaming) 1. Corncob 3D (wonderful!) 2. Frontier Elite II (the same!) 3. Doom SEGA GAME GEAR 1. Tom & Jerry 2. Sonic 1 3. Solitaire NINTENDO DS 1. Mario Kart 2. Call of Duty (World at War) 3. Super Mario 64 (these are in fact all the DS games I have! )

Oh yes there are they were in fact the reason why I got an GBA in the first place! Nice DOOM collection

Nice I made a clock out off a Tomb Raider CD tray!

I did´t notice a thing in Stella. You mean it would only be noticeable on a PAL TV?

Aah no worries - I already ordered and paid 2 months ago However, I agreed to wait until they get it back in stock (tho on the website it was!), so I guess I´ll just have to wait.

@ Nick, you didn´t have it in stock Yikes! Either i´m stupid or the site is down altogether now damn! EDIT Under maintenance. Allright then.

Thank you, Beoran

The car wheels and the introduction screen look great

@ retrogamesuk, I think I know you already (tho for Lynx games deals) @ Blarginatorr, good point. Better safe than sorry. Recently I got what I thought was a good auction close on a GBA SP "Tribal ed." with two GBA Pokemons and two Mario games...only to find out it was model 1! Never mind though, the price was allright and what matters, I didn´t ask! (Grr!) Good thing is, it shows how much I must have used my black "old" GBA SP in the past years, in spite of careful handling: The ebay-shot "new one" has a noticeable brighter backlit screen, so there must have been some "screen light aging" of some sort. I´m really becoming curious as to obtaining a GB light! Mouth watering to get the gb family complete.

I have only an Atari Lynx II atm Atari Junior was thrown away by my dad in the mid-nineties when I wasn´t paying attention No rare games in the AtariAge meaning, yet it was a blow

Just saw those arguments coming up... Gentlemen, BOTH are good! Emulation (glad it´s there for testing, storing, looking for what´s actually worthwhile) and the real thing (without us collectors, much would be lost to history). I think everyone who takes classic gaming seriously will not end with "just" emulators.

I prefer emulation only for the Colecovision, NES and Atari 2600, beause I´m not having them right now any more. In all other cases, emulation has finally led me to buy those damn things in their original format, consoles and cartridges. My fave games I MUST get in cartridge format (most recently, the GB "Faceball 2000"! Bought from half around the globe again because no European seller had a reasonable cart-only offer) under all circumstances LOL. I have found too often that games that play "lame" on PC emulation are a blast on original hardware, because they were made just for them back in time I see emulation great for testing and for allowing us to play incredible rarities and funny or improved hacks

I would not call myself a collector since with handheld gaming, other than with music of a certain style or era, I do not have the ambition of a completist. I´m satisfied with having one gaming table in my living room fully stacked with GB, GBA, DS, Lynx and Gamegear stuff, all being carts only. But then, other than half a dozen recently acquired homebrews for the Lynx, I have no games anyone would consider rare. It´s not an expensive (money-wise) collection, all in all less than 200 cartridges. End of the year I tend to sell some long unused games and swap them for "new" stuff. When you enter my living room, first thing that you might spot are the big bookshelves and the sofa corner. The games section on the table is not very obvious at first because I tend to keep things in little ex-Ferrero Rocher boxes in a tidy manner in one dedicated level on the living room coffee table. As soon as I´ve found out that ALL the aforementioned cartridge sizes fit exactly into those, I´ve always kept them this way. The boxes and manuals of the games, I keep them in a cupboard. I would never throw them away because you get more money when you are finally going to sell them...

I must say I like and play the GB Color most and the classic GB now least. The GB Pocket is well worth owning, I like its ergonomics but to my understanding it has (for a Gameboy) huge battery drain - almost like LYnx niveau . But its screen is next to fantastic! Tons better than the original GB. Somehow I always MUST play Super Mario 2 on the GB Pocket, tetris on the classic and Duke Nukem on the GB Color, it doesn´t feel "authentic" otherwise I also second what the others say about using the GBA SP for original GB games for indoors, best choice! (but the GBA SP headphone jack is unusable for 3.5 mm jacks unless you have that adaptor. This is not an issue with the normal GBA and all GBs I know) You also remind me that a GB light is the only GB in the family missing in my GB type collection...I´ve always found it too expensive/too hard to obtain in Germany. Same thing with the second version GBA SP. Oh well, the next winter will surely come...

The DS phat fell off my 70 cm high table on a thick carpet - and off broke one joint So I got a DS lite - no other choice for me since I still play GBA games a lot (their ego shooters are great and play better on the DS screen than on the small GB Micro). NO problems at all with the DS lite so far. I usually take good care of my consoles and the DS phat in fact was the only one I´ve ever broken (seriously! I still have and operate my 20 (?) y o classic Gameboy!). For me the DS lite is the most versatile little machine! (even though the Lynx is cooler :-p)

Stella DS and Coleco it is most of the time for me; true I#´ve never seen anupdate since I first found them (and after Mario Kart, Stella DS has been what I have almsot exclusively used the DS for). So, I´m satisfied with Stella DS, ColecovisionDS (which runs great!), Lameboy (same!) and NESds, and Frodo (C64) (for some games). Too bad about the problems with PokeyDS, the SNES emu and the DOS emulation programmes

No problem, Beoran thanks for your understanding. And all the best for your PC game project! I like the above cartridge layout. I have bought a few homebrews for the Atari Lynx and THIS, if any, would be the 2600 one I´d like at one time:) Imagine this had been on the GBA AtariAnniversiary, which includes hald a dozen homebrew titles! Maybe you can make this be part of a future collection?! Atari compilations for other systems are often a great (re)introduction, and it would bring you more recognition.

It´s a fine offer I think you´ll enjoy Asteroids, Night Driver and the wonderfully trashy Basketball! Space Invaders, Missile Command and Adventure are simply classics; these are all games I am sure about and which I´d consider "good" and "valuable for a long time".

1. Midnight Magic (Christmas 85 or 86) 2. Ms. Pac-Man 3. Mario Bros. (birthday gift from my sister). Great for two people! 4. Jungle Hunt (Easter I think. I loughed so much about my friend mimicking the rope jumper´s gestures while falling down!) 5. Donkey Kong (saved lots of money, 40 DM, equalling MONTHS of pocket money!) for it and it was so...ummm...yet it´s not a bad game) 6. Defender. I liked it. Also a biorthday gift. 7. Space Invaders. Bought for 7 DM from a friend. 8. Landung in der Normandie. Bought for 8 DM from the same friend. 9. Bobby geht nach Hause. Bought from the combined 20 DM all my friends gave me, in the form of a handwritten Atari cartridge gift coupon. They were not satisfied with my choice LOL 10. Demon Attack. This was the first of a 20 cartridge bag my dad got from a co-worker, so from here on I don´t remember the exact long-time saving buying details. 11. Solaris. Wooooonderful! Did handdrawn maps, never finished it though. 12. Moon Patrol. Might have been my last one I bought new. 30 DMs from a mailorder. 13 + Now the content of the aforementioned bag sets in. They were all less dear to me than the long anticipated other ones.

Interesting original post. I have great childhood memories around the 2600. Many afternoons spent with an hour Atari first, soccer later; with friends and without. Great feeling coming home from school, turning music up loud and playing Atari. Nowadays, after a 20 year long gap, I still enjoy playing those old games, with a difference, it´s only Stella and StellaDS now. Truth is, I have played StellaDS Atari´s more on my DS than genuine DS games. How can Mario Kart and Call of Duty lose against the 2600? Maybe it´s because I expect nothing else from a gaming diversion than...diversion. Total diversion. 15 minutes of high power entertainment, enough for a coffee break. No rules, no character setups, no multiple options, no keyboard settings etc. This has been my gaming ideal ever since More arcade gaming than, say, RPGs. Fast shooting action and less Chess This "Great feeling coming home from school, turning music up loud and playing Atari." still works for me with Stella DS or the AtariAnniversiary GBA cartridge. If you see the technical side of video games, graphics, layouts etc, and less the "fun for 15 minutes" aspect, if you want to immerse into a real looking fictional world, then the 2600 might not be much more than a frustrating or at most, "interesting" gaming experience how it must have been in the Eighties for you. The "You need original hardware!" is a must for me only when the Atari Lynx is concerned. 2600 games (and GameGear games) nowadays play easiest on a DS for me. The 2600 and joysticks do not arouse that "cool gadget!" feeling for me

Same here! We played Donkey Kong at a friend´s birthday party on his C64 and from then on I was saving the 40 DM needed for Donkey Kong on the 2600. Man, was I disappointed. And my then sister´s boyfriend, who was an arcade visitor, says it´s nothing like the original and two stages missing. Nevertheless, i played it a lot LOL it was just my 5th game then. Strange how I have never forgotten the order of newly-bought/gifted 2600 games.