Britishcar

Wow! These are great suggestions. Many of these I have never played before. Question: Ghosthunter dies on a 130XE with a purple screen but runs on an 800...correct? I'm limited to an actual 130XE for this project so OS-B only games and 4 joystick port games are out. If you have any other suggestions, please do so...I'm compiling a list of these posts.

I've never seen an 800 run Google Chrome before... Also, respect for the knife stuck in the power interlock...nice.

It won't take you long to discover that there are quite a few of these kinds of videos on PhewTube. I believe the first one I saw was a group of roughly 4 to 5 guys (with about half of them shirtless), beers in hand, destroy a functioning Atari 400. The 400 was in beautiful, almost museum quality condition before it met it's rapid end in the hands of these guys. Happy 34th birthday! I think they had an entire library of sledging computers and consoles alike but I didn't have the interest to indulge them.

Hmmm... 48K 800 with Newell FASTCHIP 1050 with HAPPY chip set 850 410 MPP1000E modem / Hayes OPTIMA 2400 various joysticks various game carts Amdek Color 300 chroma/luminance monitor lots of floppy disks ...all from the early 80's and still in use.

I have to go with a simple one: The stock BASIC in a TI-99/4A, dead dog slow and no (easy?) way to PEEK, POKE or otherwise supplement with machine language routines. I enjoyed learning BASIC on it early on and it did have some very nice features but weird, weird limitations such as only one statement per line and you're always in that light blue background with black text. Your eyes would faze out after a while looking at it. Arg.

I'm looking for some advice. I'm planning a small handful of tournament play with a bunch of high school aged teens and I'm looking for some great DIRECT two-player games for some head-to-head play. Virtually 100% of this audience will have never touched a game system that pre-dates the PS/2 / Gamecube. I've already used the following games in this setting with great success: Ballblazer Archon Joust What I've discovered is that the game needs to be something that you can explain in just a minute or two and has a lot of action as it's basis. In other words, M.U.L.E. as amazing as it is, is not what I need...so no deep strategy but just a quick: "here's a controller, here's what you do to win" type of explanations so that teens that have never played these games can get right into them. I'm also planning a "high score" type of competition and I've already used Pacman, Frogger and Galaxian so those type of games are easy to find/choose. So...here's what I need suggestions on: 1) It needs to be two player head-to-head (being played on a 130XE). 2) I would like to avoid Karate/Beat 'em up's if possible since they have played that genre to death on other systems. 3) Co-op and/or competitive like Joust are ok, but probably best if it's pure competitive like Ballblazer, Archon. Any ideas?

I think you should leave the stickers on. Why? They are part of the "history" of that package. They have time-traveled along with the game and box to be in your hands today. Why would you remove them? They are part of the object that you purchased and own, presumably for its intrinsic historical interest. Why remove them? So that you can have a plain plastic wrapped box with no individuality or etc? As it is, no other WW box looks exactly like yours. Remove the stickers and you have made it look like every other WW box with plastic on it. If you're of the mind-set to remove the stickers, why not just remove all of the plastic and re-shrink wrap it yourself? Wouldn't that be just as satisfying? Is it the 30 year old plastic that prevents you from wanting to rip it open? Of course! If that's true, then respect the 30 year old stickers that are arguably the best and most interesting part of that particular collected piece. It's truly fantastic that the piece has a LOWERING set of prices on it. A visible, not authentically replaceable once destroyed, wonderful bit of consumer/social archaeology evidencing the video game crash of its era.

An Atari 130XE (unless you can obtain or build an Incognito 800) with a good set of Wico sticks, connected to a chroma/luma separated monitor with a good monitor cable and a modern SIO/USB/APE type of device that will give you immediate access to thousands of high speed colorful games and apps. Atari BASIC is fun to play with - built in graphics and sound keywords and *instant syntax checking* on every inputted line. The 130XE is slightly cheap and clacky (Tramiel era) but they tend to run forever, have a great MMU (RAM disks, etc.) and great chroma/luma video output. 800XL's look feel more luxurious but most (all?) have a noticeably fuzzier composite video output unless modded. The original 800 is like nothing else (if it's in pristine shape) but you'll be limited to 48K titles which actually isn't too horrible, most of the classics all run perfectly on an 800 and its keyboard is one of the best ever fitted to any computer. Good luck.

Yep. Just last week I typed in a very cool Hangman BASIC game on my TRS Model 100. You key in a word on the Model 100 and hand it to your "opponent" who then either solves the word or hangs themselves, complete with graphics. My daughter and I challenged each other for quite some time while driving back from her college orientation in my 1966 VW Bug.

A lot of people feel that the awkwardly named "Power Mac G3 All-In-One" was a fairly fugly affair. It predated the much more fascinating Bondi iMac G3 that came along a bit later.

A cassette-driven TI-99/4A was my first computer, which I still own. I agree that the "TI" story has *really* never been written. I would definitely purchase your book/research. Good luck and keep us updated if you move forward.

No, just an admirer. I've always felt the Intell was the most handsome console of any ever produced. When they are pristine like that I am always reminded that they are lovely bits of industrial design -- and very pricy in the day.

It appears that a video game store from the early 1980's has been time/space teleported into your new home.

What a clean system. http://www.ebay.com/itm/161374369306?_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2648&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

Hack for external keyboard...

My original 48K 800 with a Newell FASTCHIP and an Omnimon OS mod is SEMI-retired. My work/play machine is an Incognito 800 chroma/luma attached to my original early 80's Amdek Color 300 monitor -- crisp and beautiful to this very day. The Incog 800 is also attached to a Happy 1050, an 850 interface, a Hayes Optima 2400 and a SIO2USB interface from Germany.

Adventures of Tron: great opposite flowing color rainbows Atlantis: flying spaceships Battlezone: autoplay, very colorful, lots of motion Bugs Bunny: title / brief game play California Games: scrolling text, lots of rainbow colors and playfield animation, repetitive music Carnival: gameplay Cosmic Ark: gameplay Decathlon: running man with torch, scrolling infinite stadium Demon Attack: game play Dig Dug: "arcade" mode Enduro: driving through the scenery Fast Food: game play Laser Gates: game play Millipede: game play/arcade title look Miner 2049er: screen tour Moonsweeper: moving sprites Night Driver: drivin' at night! Phoenix: game play Pooyan: game play with color shifting Quickstep!: game play Rampage: arcade attract mode Realsports Boxing: game play Realsports Tennis: game play / title Solar Fox: game play (sort of) / title Spacemaster X-7: game play Spaceshuttle: lazy orbiting Spider Fighter: game play Sword Quest: Earthworld: cool sword Tapper: game play Time Pilot: flying around with color shifting Track and Field: game play / title Trickshot: balls moving on table Turmoil: game play Vanguard: game play Worm War 1: noisy game play

Great fun and a technological wonder. However, it seems like the early boards are much too aggressive. First time up the ramps and I'm getting swarmed by barrels. I can't put together a coherent set of tactics on the pie factory level -- the pies are so close and everything is so cramped that I can only rush up to the 2nd level and wait and hope that a firefox doesn't decide to do me in before I can scramble the rest of the way. It seems like a die roll no matter what I do or don't do. It seems like these boards are at a difficulty level that one might encounter on a 2nd pass into them or something.

Ready to go! Put me in the hat!

86,460 The "3rd" intermission is the "bell" (the "fruit" of these levels) floating/traveling from right to left with Pacman chasing it. Then a HUGE red ghost chases Pacman back from left to right. I have NEVER seen this "intermission" on any version of Pacman before. The "fruits" at these levels all seem to be the "bell" over and over. The ghosts begin to stay blue for a fairly sane and stable amount of time, allowing you to use your power pellets in a reasonable defensive fashion, however, everything is moving pretty damn fast.

For simplicity, I've stuck with the VERY EXCITING early 80's concept of "bringing the arcade home." I've picked these all for the same, simple reasons: a) They were almost better than the original arcade version i.e. slightly easier but still amazingly fun. b) They ran the best, fastest and smoothest and took the best advantage of late 70's, early 80's Atari technology: 1) Defender: this game is amazing on an Atari. Fast, smooth, colorful, with great early arcade crunchy sound effects. 2) Donkey Kong: faster and slightly easier than the original game -- arguably better. Great fun and extremely addictive. 3) Galaxian: bright, colorful and packed with motion and smooth animation with nutty sound effects. Simple and replay-able over and over and over. 4) Pacman: Yes, it came out on the 2600 first, but the Atari Home Computer version was the best kept secret for a long time. Beautiful, bright and accurate with great joystick response, it starts getting very fast and very furious after about 20,000 points. 5) Pole Position: It didn't matter that you didn't have a steering wheel or foot pedal. Atari made the acceleration automatic, with you in control of the shifting, brakes and steering. Set it for 8 laps and screech around the curves, trying to not go up in a ball of flame and beat your own record times and number of cars passed.

joyfulcoder, that is PERFECT and exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much! AA is such a great resource/community.

JD6502, thanks for the confirmation on the HELP key. I fooled around with OPTION until blue in the face. Yes, the "raster" up and down effect can be modified but there seems to be no way to kill that silly "I'm an editor" text. I did a disk scan to see if I could find any clear text to sector edit to spaces or something but no go. Ah ha! I finally found the source for the file. It's from the April 1989 issue of "Page 6" magazine. The article mentions nothing about how to turn off the blue title text. Apparently, the entire program was designed solely to create long, obnoxious scrolls. No joke. Read the article. https://archive.org/details/page6-magazine-37 If you can spot anything in the code that would let me eliminate the title text, please let me know! Thank you in advance.

I'm attempting to use this program to use as an announcement scroller (in a classroom). However, I simply CANNOT figure out how to remove the "SCROLLY TEXT EDITOR" text that appears at the top and bottom of the screen when it is scrolling its message(s). It seems like this shouldn't be the case. i.e. that this program is designed to *edit* a scroll and then allow it to scroll *without* announcing itself as the editor of said scroll. Does this make sense? I feel like I'm missing a single keystroke or something to make the title disappear but for the life of me, I'm stumped. It's a very nice program, written in assembly or machine code with a nice, clean scroll. Maybe it's the HELP key? I'm using an Incognito 800 and don't have a HELP key. If figure this out, can you please post here? Thank you! Scrolly Text Editor.atr