DarkCart

First of all, Merry Christmas. I've often wondered the same myself. I think anything can be scary under the right circumstances, but with a console that doesn't even have any text-rendering built in, you're pretty screwed if you wanted to chill anyone with a psychological horror game. Combined with the fact that sprites are (by default) 8x8 and the playfield isn't too much of an improvement, you couldn't even really make scary looking graphics on the 2600. Even the audio chip holds you back, as the scariest sound you can make with it sounds like a robot having a heart attack. That said, there are definitely some freaky moments in Atari games, just because of how strange or unexpected they are. I know the bat in Adventure used to always freak me out, and it's just a blob of pixels that looks vaugley like a bat. So maybe instead of trying to make a traditional horror game on a 2600, you'd have to get creative and find a way to scare people without resorting to horror cliches like loud sounds and scary images. But if that's what you're planning on doing, why would you make it on the 2600 in the first place?

Well, the first problem with using that board is that it doesn't come with a built-in speaker, meaning you'd either have to connect headphones or somehow shoehorn a speaker into the cartridge as well, further increasing hypothetical costs. Secondly, unless you just wanted to use it for background music, there is no way to get the 2600 to talk to the board. It would be essentially impossible to dynamically play sound effects using this board, as the 2600 would have no way of telling the board to play sound like it can its own audio chip. Even if you could somehow magically put the board, a battery, and some form of speaker inside a 2600 cart and it not look awful, and somehow magically convince the 2600 to address a component some 40 years newer than itself, then the third problem arises: What would you use it for? The only kind of music that would feel appropriate to play while playing such primitive games would be some form of chiptune music, but if that's all you're going to do you probably could've accomplished that without the expensive audio components inside. Anything newer would sound out of place. In the end, your'e no better off than when you started, and you essentially made the cartridge cost $20+ extra for no real benefit in the end.

Thank you, this fixed it.

I've run into a very strange problem. In my code, the player can move down and right just fine, but cannot move up and left. I have no idea as to what's happening, and here's my code. if joy0up && player0y > 32 then player0y = player0y - 23 else player0y = 55 rem the player 0y > 32 is bounds detection if joy0down && player0y < 78 then player0y = player0y + 23 else player0y = 55 if joy0left && player0x > 55 then player0x = player0x - 23 else player0x = 78 if joy0right && player0x < 101 then player0x = player0x + 23 else player0x = 78 The only sort of pattern I see is that the player's not moving when their x or y is subtracted. Could you shed some light on the situation? Thanks, DarkCart

This is my first game using batari Basic. It's called "Raindrop" and you're supposed to catch the raindrop in the basket. If you don't, you'll be subjected to the still-slightly-too-long "death" animation. raindrops.bin

Most of these are pretty common games. The couple that are rare are overshadowed by how many of these games you can find pretty much anywhere. I'd pay ~$50, only because of how many there are and because there are a few obscure titles.

You'd need about 10 times that power to run an Atari, 120 volts to be exact.

I had an idea. Would anyone be interested in a Atari programming language for Java? I'd imagine the code looking like this public class Game { public static void main(String[] args) { AtariGame a = AtariGame.createGame("My Game"); Playfield p = a.getDefaultPlayfield(); p.setPlayfield("playfield data here"); Screen s = a.getScreen(); s.add(p); } } The code would be interpreted to assembly, which would then be compiled using dasm. Have I gone crazy?

Christmas seems to be coming 27 days early.

Dang, that looks like a good buy.

*Silent evil cackling*

I'd be interested in seeing the code.

Unless the seller's console is special in some way, I'd tend to go to the cheaper side.

That actually looks kind of good. I don't know what the actual console looks like, but I'd pay ~$100 US dollars.

Depends on the shape of the unit. Do you have any pictures, or are you just taking his word for it?