Tin_Lunchbox

No hate, but this is not really a good April Fools joke because it's basically believable and possible. April Fools is about the challenge of making somebody believe something truly absurd. The pictures are I think entirely Victoria's Secret models. Don't know if Heather and Candice can replace Artworx stars Suzi and Melissa. I just looked at the atarionline.pl webpage, didn't try to run anything. Don't know what mode those are but when vertically scrolling the page, they strangely shimmer on my laptop. Interesting effect. An non-profiting homebrewer might be able to get away with lifting pics of Angels, but the trick would be to find them in the progressive stages of undressed. I saw where Stardust4ever mentioned the 2600/Video Arcade. RevEng did a terrific "strip blackjack" for it, 21 Blue, with very impressive graphics. It's downloadable from the 2600/Video Arcade forum somewhere.

It is absolutely insane to overheat a GTIA chip to make a new graphics mode. I fear for the GTIA's survival. However it is accurate that the pictures posted by Bryan here http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/136706-internal-antic-and-gtia-schematics/page__st__100#entry1677517 show a very impressive result.

It'd be so fine if one of our geniuses got this on to a flashcart. Apparently, Phillp Price' anti-copying magic is still potent after all these years though. The disk-swapping and long load waits never much helped the game, and it would be nice to reduce them which would probably be the case with a flashcart. I've got Ultima IV on flashcart, so that one was evidently feasible to transfer over, albeit no doubt with much effort.

The animation is terribly choppy, but the game seems to have a lot of style. It looks good!

It wasn't scrolling but we did have a version the head-chopping Barbarian duel game.

Great pictures and cute one of you and the beagle. Classic official Atari memory inserts there, oh those were expensive.

Hmmm, I guess I am not remembering it correctly.

I remember the original stand-up arcade machine. It was this large garish affair, smelled like new plastic and window cleaner, if I recall correctly it had this big plastic-molded joystick. The graphics were just amazing at the time. The gameplay succeeded very well in the arcade machine. All the home versions are basically echoes, some good in their own right, the 2600/Video Arcade effort astounding in a solid attempt to capture a 3D isometric game that's its hardware could not ever be reasonably be expected to do. But no home version (I've watched online video of the others) really captures the Congo Bongo arcade machine experience. Gorf and Tron were other arcade machines that were just awesome to stand at and gawk at the lavish cabinet and lights and hold on for dear life to an oversized plastic joystick. In the case of Gorf though, several of those home ports are entirely successful, including the 2600/Video Arcade version and the Atari 8bit version, and that's something I don't say about Congo Bongo ports.

Spamh8r, well, you can go for nostalgia with Star Raiders and Rescue on Fractalus and something from Synapse and what-have-you etc. or you can feature the retro-developed stuff of the last decade. Yoomp! is an obvious call as someone else said, and you get the soundtrack with that as well. You can go for "amazing" with the recent Asteroids arcade emulator (I think you can run it on that 1200 XL?) and then there's Castle Crisis and Pac-Man Arcade and so forth, a LOT to choose from. MULE is rocking but is it "gee whiz" enough for people walking by and watching for just a couple minutes? Dunno. You could schedule a MULE session (or a Castle Crisis session) on the hour each hour or something like that.

Late to this conversation, but welcome back SoulBuster, and if you have original software or other creations from that box packed away for decades I hope you upload those somewhere for posterity. Disks degrade and get lost and so forth and a lot of stuff gets lost forever. I still recall doing some great (for me) artwork with BBK Artist, and then some BASIC programs too, and those somehow just got lost forever. (There are others that survived.)

Funny!

You have evidence or a solid source that Deep Blue's support team tweaked its play while a game was in progress?

I remember that. Kasparov felt that he was playing not really a computer designed to play the best possible game of chess, but rather a computer designed to beat Kasparov, in other words to recognize Kasparov's various personal stratagems and defenses and pre-programmedly react to those. It's hard for me to say whether that would be "cheating." I guess if they're coding Deep Blue's subroutines with remarks like "IDENTIFY, DEFEAT KASP. GAMBIT 06" I would be critical of that.

Portion of text clipped. Funny!

I must add "Thank you Mr. Kehrer and all concerned."

I'd noticed Dark Mage before. No disrespect intended really but a text adventure on the 2600/Video Arcade? Seems a bit silly. I mean there's just the low-res characters (though it seems they could go higher-res than Dark Mage, Activision's numerals did). But the main flaw is no keyboard. It'd be tedious to cycle through letters with the joystick or paddle to spell stuff. I guess Dark Mage lets you cycle through words instead? But then Fellowship of the Ring I hadn't heard of. Anyone tried that? Above image from Dark Mage.

I was checking Atarimania.com this morning for one thing or other and chanced upon the arcade Asteroids emulator in what seems at first glance to be finished form. OMG! http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-asteroids-emulator_s20091.html I tried it in Altirra, no joy but it's probably just some setting. I don't have time to fiddle with that right now. But I tried it in A800 and whoopee! Runs right off the bat! It has sounds! Merry Christmas early, and thanks Santa!

I played this a lot as well. It's not so much a pinball simulation as a Pong-type game with a pinball motif. Although indeed there are interesting gravitational aspects to the ball mechanics. As someone else said, Video Pinball does have something of an hypnotic aspect to it, particularly if you play in a darkened room.

Sprybug, well you have had enough people tell you "amazing," but I must say having just watched one of the videos "wow." I remember the arcade stand-up version of this from scary long time ago, but I remember it well enough to know that you are doing a solid conversion given the 2600's hardware limits. It seems to me that you have focused on smooth play, and that's a smart priority. You asked for suggestions. Well, this port is obviously something you want to complete, but after that you could re-use and modify the engine for an original side-scrolling jumper, one where you'd be able to use every possible strength of the hardware without the goal of imitating some other system's game.

I recall coming across a Tarot reading simulator with the most nicely done cards you could imagine, and I do think they were Rider deck, but that was nearly two decades ago. I really think that was for Atari 8bit but it could just possibly have been for another system. Perhaps that is English Software's Tarot I recall. It's somewhat different but Gypsy (http://www.atarimani...ypsy_12152.html) is also very good and might amuse you until the program you're seeking is made available. Gypsy seems to me to borrow a lot from the character generation process in Ultima IV.

Atari Age is a great environment for retro enthusiasts, and it promotes creativity I think, but it does run marketing cookies, so I'd suppose it's a profit-making entity. And it does this from the content its users generate, for example that amazing series of Video Chess games you generated, Golden; oh wait you're saying "give them away on Atari Age," not *to* Atari Age, sorry. You can try to sell the extra carts on EBay, but sellers incur some costs there. I have no relation to ECrater and am not marketing it but I list some stuff there and it doesn't cost anything. I list them and toss 'em and other stuff in a trunk and forget about it all until once-in-an-age I get an email saying that someone has sent me Paypal money, and then I hustle out and mail the stuff. With EBay you get the eyeballs and or more likely to get a buyer quickly. With ECrater you just chill out and wait, and you might be waiting a long time. Want a third choice? You can start a shop at Amazon.

CristaliaMi, assuming the heavy sixer works to your satisfaction, you can sell off your other 2600. IIRC a lot of the weight of the heavy sixer was due to the shielding that protects one from electro-magnetic radiation. Atari was able to lighten the shielding somehow, but I think it was also finding cheaper ways to manufacture all the other parts in the unit, which tended to make it lighter. Sometimes I've thought that the original units and parts were better and the changes were cost-cutting and made subsequent 2600s not just cheaper but lower quality. However I wouldn't actually know that and I could be wrong. I suppose we'd be able to tell by failure statistics but nobody does such a thing that I know.

I was really impressed by this too, because A) it's a good game unto itself, and B) it's an ingenious and creative port of an arcade game that I really wouldn't have considered portable to the 2600/Video Arcade hardware. It was programmed by (not a joke, keep straight face) Phat Ho (who also did Up and Down) and Steve Beck (who also did Save the Whales). The first level if you look at it just does amazing things to faithfully interpret the arcade game which had many elements (you have the steps, the gorilla is rolling coconuts at you, you have the waterfall, you have the slide, the monkey jumps on your back, and oh my gosh this is all in isometric perspective) and overall it looks very nice and pleasing to the eye. The second level decides to forgo the isometric perspective but just look how interprets that with really artistic use of rainbow colors and keeps the elements mainly. I think this is a lesser-known title that serious 2600 enthusiasts should acquaint themselves with.

I found an interesting article about the Apple version of the Versawriter device (http://www.filfre.net/2011/10/mystery-house-part-1/). I personally am not in the market for such a thing but the auction linked earlier in this thread seems like a real good deal for such a rare and complete item.

With expert switches in "on" position to get the saucer and the drone? Pretty good!