Shaggy the Atarian

Sorry to bring dig up an old thread, but I've been looking here on Atari Age about this and as far as I can tell, no one has mentioned this so... I just found a page where a guy details his restoration project of an arcade game called Turbo. From the screenshot it reminds me a lot about this Universal prototupe game. Could it be that they were trying to make their own version of Turbo or is it just a coincidence? Again, if this has already been covered I apologize...but I can't help but thinking that this 2600 game may in fact be Turbo (if someone proves that theory wrong, that's fine) :wink:

Yep that's it (I forgot how cheesy it sounded ) ...although now that you mention it I guess it had nothing to do with the 7800. Although it seems like there was a 7800 version of this commercial for a time.

That was the "more games at half the price" ad. The Kung-Fu Master they mentioned was the 2600 version. I don't know... I remember a commercial way back when too and just like gdement said, it was 87 or 88 but I didn't even see KFM for the 7800 until around 1990! I kept on asking Toys R Us when they'd get it in but they never had an answer! This wasn't a commercial advertising 2600 at all, it was distinctly the 7800 version of KFM. It wouldn't happen to be that "Atari Rap" commercial they had going on around that time would it? I remember seeing that once but I thought they were talking about Atari computers as I had no idea something like the 7800 existed (I was only 7 or 8 at the time). I wish I could see that commercial again, just to see what it was like once again.

I was having a tough decision on which title to choose from: Atari Historian -or- Nutcase with a lot of Atari stuff looking to build more onto his house because he's running out of room..... I was really leaning towards the 2nd one.... but the producer said they were going with the smaller title Curt They should have added it as a subtitle "Also known as..." I liked seeing the footage of Asteroids (the arcade). It reminded me that I really need to fix my Asteroids Deluxe monitor.

Did you mean Trekkies or Trekkers? http://www.pywrit.com/ebooks/sfxyz/SFArtic...sVsTrekkies.htm I expect any show I watch to make at least a little sense. Better acting wouldn't hurt either. If you make a show that is supposed to be before the first series, don't make it look similar to the Next Generation world. If you must do that, then pull a Lucas and update the look of the original series so it matches. I'm sure the new DVDs would sell. That was a pretty entertaining explanation. I would most certainly be a Trekkie and not a Trekker. Redoing the old series would be interesting but everyone would probably end up hating it because 'they tampered with it'. I figure that if they had the technology and ideas at the time the original series Enterprise would have turned out to be much more advanced than the NX-01. I just don't really care that much about it. I like how they are basically introducing a lot of elements into the Star Trek universe that give it a beginning, whereas before it was just mentioned in a couple of lines. I guess we'll see how it goes from here.

I like to play Kung-Fu Master on the 7800, but I agree that it could have been done better. But then again many 7800 games could have fared much better had the enviroment at Atari been better in so many ways. If you look at it carefully, I think you can see some similarities between the 7800 and the Jaguar when it comes to the way Atari's management handled development. They just didn't understand what it took to make a great game. Of course some of the developers themselves were able to pull off some great efforts under those conditions, and hopefully as the homebrew trend continues we'll have more fun games available for the 7800. If anyone ever wanted to do a 7800 hack, perhaps KFM would make a good game to start out with, but trying to enhance the gameplay to make it more like the arcade. If I ever am able to get to the point of coding for the 7800, I figure my first effort will be a hack. :wink: Who knows, perhaps it can be KFM.

And I still can't find one around here. It's kind of strange. I haven't even seen it advertised among other similar units like Jakks. But I see this as good news since as Curt mentioned in another thread, if the Flashback does well, and it seems to be doing just that, there will be bigger, better, more enhanced things coming in the future. It will be good to see that as long as they learn from mistakes made this time around and move on.

Well I'm happy to see that other people caught that as well. I did a double-take when I heard that I was just like "why are they using 2600 sounds on this clip?" Perhaps Paramount is scrapping for cash and they figured that a 2600 works great for computer noises? As for Enterprise, I'm one of the few people that enjoys it a lot. And I'd consider myself quite the Trekkie, I've watched every series they've made rather faithfully and for some reason I enjoy Enterprise in some ways than I did Voyager and DS9. I like the story-lines they've been making, even though they have been a little heavy on time travel (who wants to bet tha tif they make another series it will probably involve some crew from the 29th century out to save the timeline.) This newest season so far has been the best one for Enterprise and I hope it continues to build on that.

I saw the segment on HGTV last night as well. It was great to see Atari's early history represented by someone who knows it best. And it was pretty cool to see the label "Atari Historian" they had under his name. Not many people could lay claim to that. :wink:

It will be added to the contest page here shortly. Like Curt said, it's great to see these kinds of tools starting to trickle out. Keep them coming guys!

I take it you haven't played with Handy, the Lynx emulator. These games do NOT scale up well at all. A GBA or DS Lynx collection would kick all kinds of a$$. This platform still hasn't been emulated satisfactorily on a handheld. I do have Handy although ever since the announcement of that Lynx-To-TV adapter that only really materialized in prototype form (or did they release it in small quantities? ) I've been wanting to see something to play my Lynx on the big screen. I know the games weren't meant for that large of a screen, but we can always hope that someone can pull it off. Perhaps if Atari made a Lynx-to-TV adapter that's affordable. I'd buy that in a heartbeat.

I think many mystery cart are PB ones since it seems like the glue holding the labels just isn't that effective. I have several other PB games where the labels barely hold on as well (fortunately, they are not Frogger carts). I suppose I should break out the super glue and make sure they stay on there! Even though I have been cursed three times with this Frogger cart showing up and haunting me I still will probably buy mystey carts anyways, hoping for the day that it is something I don't already have, like MR, Popeye or even SpiderMan. This is why it would be useful to have a portable 2600. That way when you are visiting the thrift store you can just throw the mystery cart in there and not waste your time on those bloody Frogger carts! Then again, there always is the slight possibility of it being a Frogger 2 cart instead. I hadn't thought of that before.

I would go for a Lynx/Jaguar compilation. To be able to play Lynx games on the big screen would be pretty cool.

Hey, nice to see another Atari fan nearby! I'm in the West Valley area and it's been pretty dry for me as well, (with some great exceptions) the last Atari related thing I found was Dodge 'Em, Haunted House, and a label-less Parker Bros. cart that turned out to be the long sought after Frogger I've heard about some place in Salt Lake called Fun Unlimited that still carries some Atari games but I've never been by there to check it out. It seems like a few years back I could almost always find something at the DI but then it suddenly dried up. But since I found that Shinobi arcade at my local DI a few months ago I've been more optimistic about it.

Man that is a very, very cool find. Only in my wildest dreams could I come across something like that. Now I want to go out and look at all the local thrift stores and flea markets.

Thanks for pointing those out. I do have several books on programming the 8-bit computers and I figure that if you can learn how to program those you can learn how to code for the 7800. Perhaps I'll pick it up again and give it another shot. I have plenty of ideas for Atari 7800 games, but I need to learn quite a bit of programming first.

Wow, great work there, I liked the b demo better myself but both of them are neat. :wink:

Man that's quite the find there. I think I need to start looking at different thrift stores as I can never come across anything I haven't already seen in the ones I always visit. (except for that Shinobi cabinet of mine )

Well, we know of: Kenfused = working on Beef Drop Bruce T. = working on Tubes Christopher T. = working on something that will use scrolling, perhaps a platformer. I know there are others. Who else am I missing?

I wish I had the time and the focus to learn how to code for the 7800. My problem is that I usually get confused when I'm trying to learn programming as the people who usually write programming documents seem to assume that you already know everything they are talking about. Perhaps I just wasn't meant to be a programmer, even though I would like to be.

I wasn't able to get AA yesterday but it's good to hear that it supports 720p and 1080i on the Xbox, especially since I just bought a new HDTV. I can't wait to try the vector games out on it.

I have Space Dungeon but I can't enjoy it since I only have one 5200 joystick

And don't forget a password scheme to pick up where you left off.

Hmm, I noticed that it went along really fast. But since I've never had the joy of playing the arcade game itself I figured it may have been normal. Well, I'll just keep playing WOW on my 800XL.

I just got this today and so far I like it. Although on Wizard of Wor I noticed that the sounds aren't there for the player, i.e. when you shoot, when you die, etc. Was it like that in the arcade(the only versions I've played are the A8-bit and 2600 versions)? Otherwise, I find that the menus are much better this time around and I haven't found anything wrong with the other games yet...although I have yet to play them all...