Pipercub

"The watches are numbered too, which will only serve to boster resale value (especially for low numbers)." "True, as I had no initial idea of the release quantity. Thank you for clarifying that, Mindfield. Like some of my Star Trek memorabilia, released in limited quantities, the price can and often does skyrocket. " COME ON. There were ONLY 2000 watches up for sale and two years later they are still available from the manufacturer! Most collectables of that limited production are gone in days. When I had fossil on the phone right before I sent mine back for a refund the guy said he really didn't want to give a refund because they all kept coming back. There is no hot market for this "collectable" now and it's value isn't going anywhere but down.

I remember a PacMan when I was a kid that was REALLY accurate, the joystick was removeable and was a red ball top that reminded me of one of those safety glass head pins. With todays multifunction dials and encoders like the one on my Breitling there is no reason you can't make a playable with a game like breakout, centipede asteroids etc.

That has got to be the most useless thing EVER. A game watch you can't play is like a girl that "just want's to be friends" They had a HUGE return rate on the original Asteroids including the giant hunk of useless watch that I sent back to them. Been throught this before, but it was advertised as "plays the game" not displays an animation so I ordered one. To be honest it never crossed my mind that someone would sell a gamewatch that isn't playable, especially at that price for a game watch.

My wife had these as a kid, and the mother in law brought them with her when she came to visit from Italy for Xmass. They have been stored in their boxes in a drawer for 20 years or so!

I better check the ones I got for my brothers for Xmass.

I love the look, but the game quality is pure junk. IF I was inclined I could see using one as a casing for a PDA based project.

You know, jbanes has a really good idea there. ISO 7816 (smart card) is a perfect format for distributing Atari games on a "cart" slot equiped unit. The 7816 ROM cards are so cheap that they are used in many kiosk units because you can spit them out by the stack for next to nothing. You can also print them with very slick looking artwork. The sockets and interfact ASICs are also incredibly dirt cheap and have been used in all sorts of consumer products. Some of the learning laptops that sell you "additional programs" on smart cards actually have the full software load and the smart card just contains a single character in ROM that enables the menus. If the FB3 had a 7816 slot then you could have a TON of multicarts with slick graphics and sell them with very little production and distribution overhead. They could be mail ordered and shipping and packing would be nothing more than a pre-stuffed envelope that they address.

They are pretty flakey, I placed an order and after weeks of waiting for product and or replies I gave up.

I have seen it done with some of the various color palm pilot type PDAs. With those older color ones being available for so little now I am thinking about picking one up and loading up the arcade classics and putting it in a case like these.

On a similar note, Walmart has some Donkey Kong and SMB water games. The DK one has a mario on a dime sized disk that you navigate through the gates. You control them from dials and fire the water jets from buttons. I played one for a moment and unless you like those water games the only reason to buy one is as a collectable.

I will be the guy who says NONE> A large part of the problem was that the 5200 and 7800 had such a large library of warmed over games that had been released before. All the energy and manhours that went into making yet another port of Asteroids and Joust should have been diverted into making a ground breaking title on the order of Super Mario Bros or Legend of Zelda.

Got my cart the week after I ordered it, thanks guys! Forget 8bitdomain, you will never see your cart.

Solaris for me too. My parents got me a colecovision instead of an Atari 2600 and I felt cheated, although the coleco is closer to a 5200 the 2600 was what the world had. When the 2600 came back in the late 80's with the under $50 campaign I bought one and a rack of games. Playing the ones all my friends had like joust, space invaders etc. was about like I remembered. Then I pluged in Solaris and WOW it was like a my NES in terms of graphics and speed. Today as a serious collector I have seen few games like Solaris.

I was at home one day and got a call from a friend who was at an estate sale about an hour away and said that there was an Atari Xybots arcade game there and that they guy wanted $100 for it. I saw that a snow storm was on the way and the temptation to play in the snow with the truck and pick up an arcade machine was too great to resist. I left the house and got there to find a mint Xybots and I walked away with it for $100 with the guys carrying it out the back of a town house, down some creaky narrow stairs, up a huge hill and then loading it in the back of my truck which has a 12 inch lift! Of course driving home was a bit restrained since I was not looking to shake up the game too much. I got it home, wiped off the snow and fired it up. No other cool calls though...... But I did get a great Ebay buy once that is worth mentioning. I saw a Galaga listed with all the signs of a bad deal, grainy dark photo, no real details and a claim of not knowing anything about games yet they did know allot of details about how to ship them and the like. They also had Galaga, Mrs Pac and Asteroids Deluxe, three top selling collectable games. It just smelled bad but it was local so I figured I couldn't loose, if it was junk I would walk and if they gave me negative feedback I could do so in return for them representing it wrongly. I won it for $540 and when I got there it was in a fully furnished, carpeted basement along with a Asteroids deluxe and a Mrs Pac. All three looked to be new from the box condition. Turns out they were bought by her husband in the mid 80's right before they divorced, and the children were three girls that didn't care about arcade games so they sat there in the basement unused for almost 20 years. The Mrs Pac sold but the Asteroids delux didn't and she wanted all three gone that day because the contractor was coming that monday to do a remodel. She asked me to make her an offer, I said $100 she said $175 and we ended up at $125. I loaded them both up and went home. They had both been dusted and cleaned over the years on the outside but the screens had a THICK layer of dust and once it was removed they both had a bright vibrant picture.

Is it 2 1/4 3in 4in? Anyone know for sure?

After futzing around with a multicart order from 8bitdomain for over two months of them not being able to process or communicate I have given up and ordered this one today. I can't wait for it to arrive.

yep, 5 min in front of the wrong window and a sunbeam will nix it.

I have to ask myself, despite the value of the individual components or any other "worth" this thing has, would I pay $100 for it?

"Over 1,500 tapes have been recovered to date and several thousand disks." I suppose asking for that stuff to be made available on a data DVD for a small fee would not get anywhere, and I know that. It is hopefully a giant repository of future releases for Atari. So I guess the most practical request is to ask for Atari to sell these in whatever way they see fit but please do so soon while Atari has the steam and will with the success of the FB series!

It was definatly a 4 switch unit, but the joystick looked odd, like it had suctioncups on the bottom.

You sum-bitch, you beat me to this post! I am glued to this show because I am a Subaru BRAT fanatic, www.SubaruBrat.com and they have a few BRATs in that show. There is a white 84 with the seats and an American flag paint job, a red 82 (NOT to be confused with the ElCamino) and a grey Gen 1 BRAT. There are many threads on the old school Subaru boards about it now we have the Atari! And that Joy..... GGRRRRRR

How does the cart guide secure into the cabinet? How does the cart slot secure to the guide so that everything remains in place when you insert/remove carts? It is by far the cleanest one I have seen, nice work! If you could take some pics to better show the fitment of the cart guide and slot that would really help!

To see why the FB1 is trashed by many you need only to play the same game side by side or immediatly before. Take Solaris for example. When you fire the gun in the original you get a deep whooshing rumble, when you fire it in the FB1 you get a perky little tingling sound. The "problem" with the FB1 is that it uses a Nintendo NES on a chip and the NEW uses higher pitched cartoony sounds and not deep throaty sounds like the 2600. It also uses "tile sets" to assemble the image which is very diffrent than the 2600. The end result is that you have an NES with a cart full of hastlily coded games for emulation. IF you judge the FB1 by OEM Atari standards it comes out poorly. If you judge it for what it is the FB1 is really a nice little unit. I knew what it was and I bought it with that in mind and I was not dissapointed. It is what it is. I also bought it on the promise that it was a baseline product to pay the bills for a future 2600 legacy hardware compatable product. I was skeptical because when most companies float that claim the product you want never comes to be. But true to their word Atari did produce the real flashback unit using legacy compatable hardware and that is a very signifigant thing. I have bought over a half dozen FB2s for myself and gifts. I have one NIB that will stay that way, one I moded, one I play and one to make some sort of portable hack out of. So look the FB1 is a nice little unit in my opinion when judged for what it is.

I bought one just to pave the way for the FB2, let's face it, if the FB1 failed then there would be no FB2.

"1/2" with router rounded, black spray-painted edges" $50 Cab at auction $50 New joystick and buttons $20 19 inch TV $30 FB2 or multigame box of your choice $150 for side art, marquee and trim items (optional) $150 ~ 300 total investment for a superior product Or of course throw in a $100 computer and run an older version of MAME that "only" has 4,000 or so games.