jaybird3rd

True, but then you'd probably trip over all the wires they hid behind her back.

One would think so, but this has been discussed before, and from what we've heard, the information we need to perform the modification isn't coming from the original engineers anytime soon. I posted a picture in the thread I linked to that indicates possible soldering points that I found for an NES cartridge connector, but they're scattered all over the board and it would take some reverse-engineering to figure out how to connect it. I'm really surprised that somebody like Ben Heckendorn hasn't already figured it out; the FB1 is a much nicer Famiclone than the nasty N64-controller-looking thingies that he and others are currently using for their NES hardware projects. It's a real pity, too, because I literally have no use at all for my FB1 anymore unless I can add an NES cartridge connector to it or use its case to hold some other hardware. I think it's still too small for even the smallest computer motherboards, so making a little emulation PC out of it isn't an option just yet. I'll hold onto it to see if a convenient use for it comes up, but I just wish somebody would come up with the information for the NES cartridge mod. That would be the best option of all.

I'm not aware of anyone who has already made a video. If you have a TV capture card, you could probably just connect the 7800, start recording, and power up the console. Nice choice of a startup screen, by the way ... I think it's the best one Atari did for any of their consoles, much better than their "flushing toilet" Jaguar screen.

I haven't gotten around to taking mine back yet (that's one of my errands for tomorrow), so maybe I can take a few pictures of it before I return it. I'll include a quarter or something in the picture so you can get an idea of the size. One of these units built around the FB2 chipset would actually have been pretty cool. I probably wouldn't have played it too much as a keychain game, but at least I could have moved its guts and the batteries into a different case (an original CX-40 joystick, for example). As it is, though, there's nothing to do with the board inside except give it to somebody you don't like.

I kinda figured that Curt would never have looked at one of these and said "Okay, this product doesn't need any more work, it's ready to ship just as it is." That's why I didn't mention him in my original response. I won't ask you to comment further, but I imagine he probably did an original prototype (built around the FB2 chipset and using the real games) that was actually cool, and that when "Atari" heard his price, they said "Nah, this is too expensive, we need to put that money into our next great Marc Ecko game instead, so let's find 'Basic Fun' and have them build a cheapie NOAC version that we can charge too much money for."

Well, I'm afraid I can't offer much advice (having only recently started collecting Apple ][ stuff again), but if you decide you need another ][e or some replacement parts, let me know. I recently scored several ][e computers (many of them 1987 Platinum Editions), and I can certainly send you one.

I haven't measured it, but the base of the joystick is probably about an inch and a half square. These are clearly built using the same NOAC hardware as the 10-in-1 joystick, but I don't think they're the exact same games. There are a few different keychains out there, and some of them have games that were not in the 10-in-1 (such as Millipede). There are also paddle keychains that I haven't tried, but they're probably just as bad.

That's non-tangible digital content for you: you can't save it, can't keep it, and you can only access it until sombody out there decides you shouldn't have it anymore and pulls the plug on you. Call me old-fashioned, but I'll take video tapes or discs or anything else that I can hold in my hands any day. I didn't see the video, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if the games in the "7800 demo" were actually running on some other platform; it was a very common practice.

A Pong dress, eh? I haven't downloaded the picture yet, but I don't even want to guess where they put the knobs ... ... Oh, they're using Nintendo gamepads as controllers. Never mind. It appears to be a matrix of glowing gels that one would wear on the front of the dress that, when powered up, presumably plays something resembling Pong. This just looks like another example of this stupid "Atari chic" that's been popping up a lot lately, like the Atari shirts being worn by kids who've never even seen any kind of Atari system, or supposed-to-be-funny "2600 versions" of modern games that are obviously drawn up by people who know nothing about what the 2600 could and couldn't do.

Nah, the "Ginger vs. Mary Ann" question is much easier ... it's obviously Mary Ann. Seriously, though, the Protector vs. Defender 2000 question is a tough one. One of the biggest criticisms of D2K is that it changed the gameplay of the original Defender too much, especially in 2000 mode. I think people were expecting something closer to the original; in fact, I understand that Bethesda Softworks originally decided not to release Protector (which is more of a straightforward upgrade of Defender) because they thought it would be too similar to D2K and didn't want to compete with Atari's "official" Defender follow-up. D2K is a perfectly good game and a fine example of Jeff Minter's unmistakable style (although he ranked it slightly below Tempest 2000 himself), but even though it exists in the same genre as Protector, they're really very different games. I think that fans of the original Defender would probably be happier overall with Protector, but D2K deserves consideration too.

Keep in mind that you're talking about an out-of-warranty product that probably cost only $15 to $20 new to begin with. Considering that it's a pretty small problem at that, I honestly think your reaction is a little ... asymmetrical. A class-action suit or some other major response to this incident would only be realistic if Jakks is refusing to provide a legitimate level of service that their competitors do, but none of them provide replacement parts on request and hardly anyone expects them to. You can argue that this is a bigger or deeper problem, but that's a seperate issue and there's no reason to pick on Jakks over it. Having said all that ... I've been very critical of many of Jakks' products in the past, but I'm not quite as eager to throw them under the bus as you seem to be; I reserve that privilege for real crapslingers like "Basic Fun". In my case it certainly isn't "fanboyism," but rather an attempt to consider the big picture and to look on the bright side. Jakks' Atari 13-in-1 Paddle was a great product and well worth the money. Digital Eclipse deserves most of the credit for that (I think they're the only Jakks developer who actually used the original game code), but it does prove that Jakks' products haven't ALL been crap. Second, even though the rest of their stuff hasn't been what most of us would want, to some extent they've done a real service by popularizing the whole TV-game genre (wasn't their Atari 10-in-1 joystick the first?) and opening up the market. That's clearly benefitted those of us who are classic gaming enthusiasts, even those who have never bought anything from Jakks, because it's made possible (even if in an indirect way) a number of better things that we've all enjoyed. One of those is the Flashback 2, which arguably wouldn't have been as big a success if it wasn't for the built-in audience of TV-game enthusiasts who were ready to move on to something better than the Jakks offerings. Another was the Radica Space Invaders 5-in-1, which is a great source for low-cost arcade-like controls (and fills a tremendous need for better controls on the Atari 7800 in particular). I'm sure Jakks has also sold enough TV games to drive down the cost of those stupid Asian NOAC chips enormously, and that's had any number of positive ramifications. The Blue Sky Rangers have had their biggest success ever with their inexpensive NOAC-based Intellivision TV-games, and have put those profits into more authentic Intellivision offerings that they couldn't have afforded to make otherwise. It's also made the Generation NEX possible (a flawed implementation, to be sure, but a great idea in principle that wouldn't have been possible without inexpensive NOACs). It's also put a lot of cheap game hardware into the hands of creative hackers, which has encouraged some interesting experimentation; just look at the great stuff Ben Heckendorn has come up with.

First of all, I seriously doubt that anybody worked hard on these. I just took another quick look at mine, and I've revised and expanded my bitch list accordingly (see my original post). If you had said "it's an amazing accomplishment to fit so many mistakes into that tiny case," I could have agreed wholeheartedly with you. Absolutely nothing about these units was done right: the concept is flawed, the implementation is flawed, the games are deeply flawed, and the price is totally ridiculous. I don't even like the packaging: it's deceitful (making false claims and featuring screenshots of the Atari originals and not the games in the actual unit), and I had to practically demolish the damn thing to get it open.

Uhh ... we learned months ago exactly what the FB3 was/is going to be: a 400/800 clone with built-in games (Curt talked about the specs in the other thread). And saying that "I'd want a 5200 but not an 8-bit computer" makes no sense as the two platforms use the same hardware and play (for the most part) exactly the same games. Hoping for a 5200/7800 combo is useless because, as I pointed out earlier, it's unrealistic to expect anyone to in effect shoehorn three video game systems into one unit; the platforms are totally different.

I searched but didn't find anything conclusive, so forgive me if this has been talked about before. I saw one of these on sale at Wal-Mart today (I picked a Centipede / Yars' Revenge unit like the one in the picture), and although my hopes weren't high, I figured I'd at least give it a shot. In the forty-five seconds I actually used it, I noticed the following: The picture shows a battery holder with a blue Atari logo on it (there was no logo on mine, just black plastic). This holds the three AAA cells and the A/V cables, which wrap around the holder and plug into the joystick through a little jack. Not the most elegant setup, especially for something advertised as a "keychain game." I guess you're supposed to carry around the spool of wire in your back pocket. The power switch was apparently broken right out of the package, too; I had to squeeze it to get the unit to power up. The joystick was so incredibly flimsy that I was afraid I would break it, and it tended to get stuck if I pushed it up or down. I can't imagine it surviving on a keychain for more than a few hours, and I can't imagine it being very easy to keep in one's pocket either. It would have been a lot more comfortable to carry around if they had shortened the joystick handle to about half its original height, which also would have made it easier to control with the right thumb. I thought it might at least be useful as some sort of hobby hardware project, but at $15 it isn't worth it. It isn't even worth it for $1. Contrary to the claims on the package, the games are ***NOT*** "just like the real Atari originals." They're actually just like the nasty NOAC monstrosities in the Flashback 1 (who knows, maybe those were the "Atari originals" the package referred to). At a time when the original 2600 chipset has been reduced to a battery-powered glop-top, there's just no excuse for this anymore. How hard could it have been to take the Flashback 2 chipset and bundle it with two authentic 2600 binaries instead? If they just had to be cheapskates and use the same old NOAC, they could have at least put in a little effort and modified the original software for it (as Digital Eclipse did with the Jakks Atari 13-in-1 Paddle) instead of recycling their old crappy counterfeits. There was nothing on the package or the splash screens that indicated who did the games, but they look like the work of Techno Source to me. The empty black space on the front of the joystick in the picture, to the left of the key chain and under the Atari logo, is actually a square red "menu" button (although you wouldn't know this without using it because it isn't even labeled). I'm sure it was left out of the picture to help improve the appearance of the joystick. I successfully used this button during Yars' Revenge to get back to the main menu, but it didn't work at all in Centipede; when I tried it, the screen just flashed a garish bright pink and reset the game. I had to switch the unit off and on again to get out of it. A minor complaint (but one that shows they couldn't even get the small things right): after all the splash screens, my unit showed a main menu containing the Centipede and Yars' Revenge "arcade marquees," one on top of the other, and allowed me to move the joystick up or down and press the trigger to select my game. The problem is, the menu only indicates selection using alternate colors, which is totally non-intuitive in a two-option menu because moving the joystick just toggles the colors. As a first-time user, I ended up having to "guess" which one was selected. It turned out that red meant "selected" and blue meant "non-selected," but I didn't learn this until after I pressed the trigger. Very bad usability. An arrow or some other indicator would have been better. Hopefully this will dissuade anyone who might be tempted to pick one of these up. I know mine is going back first thing tomorrow, assuming they'll take it. And to anyone at "Atari" who approved this thing and might be reading this: I would have preferred the Flashback 3, thank you very much.

Dead?! I'm not so sure about that; things seem to be pretty busy (new MIO release, new game development, new hardware in the works, etc) considering that the platform is ~27 years old now. The thing to remember is that the Atari 400/800 was (in terms of sales) in second or third place in much of the world for much of its lifetime, so it's only logical that the C64 archive sites get more activity. There is more C64 hardware and software in the hands of more people, so there are more people to collect and send in new submissions. That shouldn't reflect badly on the A8 or the willingness of the community to participate, and it shouldn't be a source of discouragement. You've already got a very large percentage of the A8 library available on the site (and you deserve congratulations for building such an exhaustive collection), and a lot of what is left seems to be rarer or more obscure titles that will take longer to turn up. It is important to remind people to keep sending them in, though.

I think the VCS obviously handled abstract games better. It didn't have the horsepower for realistic physics or audiovisuals, so the best it could create (when it even attempted to do so) was a very simplified representation of real-world situations or events. Those limitations were a wonderful creative challenge, though, because they freed game developers from the restriction of creating games that could only exist in the real world. This gave them the opportunity to create what became the classic game paradigms and play patterns; many of the greatest video games (Pong and Breakout, Tetris, Pac-Man, etc) could never have existed if the industry was always as obsessed with realism as it is today. So I generally prefer abstract games, and on limited 80s platforms from the VCS up until about the Atari 7800. They have a cleanness and an elegant simplicity about them that modern games do not, and of course they continue to be a wonderful source of escapist entertainment today.

The 800XL uses the same power supply as the 130XE, but the 800 does not; it uses the same power supply as the 1050 disk drive, 1020 printer, 1010 cassette recorder, and a few other peripherals. I don't happen to know the part number off the top of my head, but you might want to check B&C ComputerVisions; they have them in stock and probably list the model number on their website.

I'll try to dig my keyboard out later this week, and will PM you for your info when I have the keys ready to ship.

Okay, the reason I asked is that they come in black and beige, and I didn't want to send you the wrong color. I've got a black keyboard inside one of my spare-parts 99/4A consoles. Let me know which keys you need (or if you'd rather just have the whole keyboard to exchange with your old one), and I'll see what I can come up with.

Does he? I knew he was designing them, but I didn't know he had them made. Guess I need to pay more attention!

Is it a black or beige keyboard?

Outstanding! I'm so happy to finally see new 7800 cartridge PCBs being made, and I especially like the fact that it even has gold fingers on the card edge. Very nice-looking board! When will these be available in your store?

You're right about the FB2 being better, of course. I just want to put an NES cartridge slot in the FB1 so I can at least get some use out of the machine again. It's a nice little Famiclone implementation and would be a handy thing to have for playing NES games; its biggest problem now is that it's saddled with some really crummy software. As for the FB1 games and putting them on an NES cart ... I suppose it's possible, but as you say, why bother when you can play the FB2 (or even get copies of the originals)? Even if someone did manage to make a FB1 cart, I would have no use for it.

Personally, I'm still waiting to see if anyone figures out how to get an NES cartridge slot wired into the FB1; based on Curt's last post on the subject, getting the information from the original designers appears unlikely.

Great, thanks! I can't wait to try it!