jaybird3rd

I'll grant that the 400/800 platform as a whole is vastly underappreciated. But when people talk about the 5200 in particular, the most frequent reasons they cite for loving the console (the games, its graphics and sound capabilities, etc) are not unique to the 5200; they all apply to the 400/800 systems equally well. It's like buying an off-the-shelf Dell computer and then saying that Dell computers are so great because they've got great versions of Windows XP and Microsoft Office. The exact same software can also be had on the 400/800, without all of the inherent problems of the 5200, so why not just use the 400/800? It's interesting to me that a lot of Atari fans love the 5200 so much; after all, the 5200 is one of the things that drove Atari into the ground. It should never have been released without drastic changes; at the very least, Atari should have come up with better joysticks and should have addressed the backward-compatibility issue BEFORE it shipped (granted, hindsight is 20/20). The aura of failure around the 5200 has always kept me from getting into it; it's the only Atari console I've avoided buying despite the fact that I'm a huge fan of the 400/800 systems.

They're outstanding. I just ordered a dozen or so Intellivision carts from them. They arrived quickly and in good shape, and everything worked.

One of the first things I bought from eBay was a two-page Atari ad ("Everything you wanted to know about Atari games, etc., etc.") that was described as being "clipped from a magazine." After I got it, I saw that it was from Playboy (it had a 1982 copyright but I don't know what issue it was). So apparently it's something that Atari did for at least a couple of years.

I still do that. I use System Commander to manage a couple of sets of startup files (one with EMS emulation support, one with a minimum set of drivers for maximum conventional memory, etc) on my 386, which is where most of my old games live. QEMM was the best in the world for memory management; that and DESQView made for a very cool system during the DOS days. I never had too much trouble with IRQs after I built my machines, but they could be a little tricky during upgrades. I just built my 386 with everything I could need to begin with (four serial ports, two parallel ports, sound, network, two IDE controllers, etc) and got everything to work together without conflicts, so I shouldn't have to mess with it anymore.

It's amazing that so much confusion persists over the Jaguar's 64-bitness. Here's the word from John Carmack on the subject:

The Ape Warp+ OS upgrade is designed to allow the use of high-speed I/O for all A8 software. Here is a direct link to the product page: http://www.atarimax.com/warpos/documentation/ I haven't tried it yet, but it's the next item on my shopping list.

Not without modifying the controllers, unfortunately. There are some instructions on how to do this in the 2600 FAQ; here is a direct link: http://www.atariage.com/2600/faq/?SystemID=2600#sega

I certainly thought there was something wrong with mine. Was that "feature" even mentioned in the documentation? I put Tower Toppler away bewildered after fiddling with it for a few minutes, and stumbled upon the solution almost by accident later on. It was only afterward that I got to enjoy the game.

I'm not sure where the 2600jr fell in terms of sales, but I doubt it was trying to compete head-to-head with the NES or SMS at that point; it was more of a low-budget release, much like the TV-games of today, with a handful of new games. The SMS was almost certainly second to the NES, with the 7800 in third place.

I miss DOS too. You could code much closer to the hardware, and so the system requirements were so much lighter than they are today. I can run games like Doom and Wolf3D very well on my 40MHz 386, which still amazes me. Then again, freeing up enough conventional memory, EMS vs. XMS, and IRQ conflicts could be a bit of a headache, just as DirectX problems and buggy video card drivers are a headache today. That's one major advantage of consoles: computers have always been a pain in the neck as game platforms, and as you say, most people don't want to spend the money to get a state-of-the-art system.

It's interesting how the two markets have evolved. It was initially thought that video game consoles like the 2600 were merely stepping stones toward computer gaming, but after the NES, it was thought that consoles would become popular enough to overwhelm any opportunities for computer gaming and that PCs would never be popular game platforms. The two platforms have always complemented each other, though, and that continues today. Consoles (either set-top boxes or handhelds) seem to me to be the most popular platforms for conventional mainstream gaming, while the PC has become the platform of choice for hardcore high-end games that require video cards that are more expensive than any individual console (oops ... I just noticed that JB made the same point as I was writing this! )

I don't understand what the point would be. Aren't there already more than enough platforms for playing 2600 games? I guess it would be cool for about five minutes to see the old games running on the Jag, but it wouldn't be worth the considerable effort that would be needed to finish the extant emulators. Maybe that's one reason they're still unfinished.

This has been discussed many times before, too. Are you aware that you can search these forums to see if something has already been talked about before starting a new thread about it?

It was on the market for only two years before it was finally killed, so it was probably Atari's worst-selling console of all (with the possible exception of the Jaguar). It's not hard to understand why, either: the recycled 400/800 technology inside it was already about four years old when the system was released, and it wasn't too much of a leap beyond the Intellivision and ColecoVision. It also had the problem of zero backward compatibility with the 2600 (which Atari owners expected), while the Intellivision and ColecoVision were new platforms and weren't expected to be compatible with anything. Even worse, both the Intellivision and the ColecoVision eventually got their own 2600 "adapters," so they could play old Atari games while Atari's own system couldn't. The controllers were awful, the games were mostly warmed-over retreads from the 400/800, and because Atari's developers wanted to do 2600 games instead of 5200 games (because that's where the big royalty dollars were), there weren't nearly enough new titles to keep the 5200 afloat. After Atari lost Jay Miner and his top-notch team of engineers, they completely lost any ability to develop something new, and the 5200 was their only (disastrous) attempt to do so; all the Atari game systems that came after the 5200 (the 7800, the Lynx, and the Jaguar) were designed by other companies.

This subject has been discussed (and exhausted) MANY times before in this forum. Here's two examples: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...opic=73083&st=0 http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=44179

The only place an 8-bit game would be accepted now is within the impulse-buy TV-game market, as evidenced by the glut of low-cost NOAC-based toys from Jakks and the like. The FB3 was to be an Atari 800 clone within a 5200-looking case (here's hoping it gets finished and released!), and I think it would have been very successful in competition with the Jakks products, but not in competition with modern systems. That hardware was designed for a different era and a different generation of gamers. Even if Sony and Microsoft weren't around, there would still be consoles from other companies (not to mention PCs), and the FB3/5200 just wouldn't be enough to lure today's mainstream gamers away from them.

Hey, do ya think it's too late for HardWork to add FMV interludes from that video into the KR2600 game? He'd just have to shrink the video into the cartridge and develop a quick codec for playback ... what is that, an extra week's worth of work, tops? Go for it!

I believe that Sears Cannon Man was a repackaging of Atari Human Cannonball. Another Sears exclusive was Submarine Commander, which (like Steeplechase and Stellar Track) was developed at Atari but sold only by Sears.

You'll find a pretty good tutorial right here on AtariAge: http://www.atariage.com/howto/clean_cartridges.html

http://www.ocremix.org/ As for the best game music ... definitely Donkey Kong for the Atari 7800.

Well, stop sitting on them then!

Priorities, HardWork, priorities!!! There's a fortune waiting to be made here!!!

What would prevent someone from replicating the design of one of the existing boards (the C300565, for example) instead of designing a whole new one from scratch? Having larger ROMs than the old boards allowed would be nice, but it would be one way to get new 7800 games built quickly.

They have something else in common, in my opinion: they've had to take way too much crap over the years because of their flops. Neither E.T. nor Pac-Man are the worst games for the 2600 despite all the mindless Internet parroting to the contrary; anybody who things so hasn't played Froggo Karate, Apollo Racquetball, or any of the 2600's other real stinkers. They may have been among the most disappointing games for the 2600, but that disappointment is as much a result of poor marketing and management and inflated consumer expectations as it is a result of poor execution, and a lot of those factors were totally outside of Warshaw's and Frye's control. If you ask me, Atari management deserves most of the blame for the fact that those two games weren't better: I'm sure HSW would have tweaked and fixed E.T. if he had been given as much as two extra weeks to do so, and I'm sure that Tod Frye could have done a much better job with Pac-Man if he had been given 8K to work with instead of 4K (and if Atari had given their employees more of a reason to care about quality to begin with outside of the botched royalty deals). That still puts them head and shoulders above the rotten game programmers who got into the business to make a quick buck selling crap to an unsuspecting public.

It really depends on what you're looking to use it for. The XEGS and the 800XL are virtually the same machine inside, so they are equally compatible with 400/800 software. The XEGS has the added advantage of standard composite A/V jacks that are built right into the console (and produce a VERY nice picture) and the detached keyboard, and if you happen to like Missile Command, it's also built into the console. The most common complaints about the XEGS keyboard is that it feels a little mushy, the cable is too short, and that it gets dirty/stained easily because the keys are all white. If you're planning to use it as a game machine primarily, none of these issues should matter too much. If you want the XEGS but think the keyboard will be a problem for you, Best Electronics sells an inexpensive kit that drastically improves the feel of the keyboard, and you can easily extend the cord with a PC15 joystick extension cable (very common and cheap on eBay). As far as price goes, I've seen a few of both systems on eBay recently and they seem to go for about the same price (from $25 to $55 depending on shipping and how much software is included). You can also get one from Best Electronics or B&C ComputerVisions; even though the price might be a bit higher, you're guaranteed to get a good product.