DarthDuke

When I wear my original controller out, I'll give the Edladdin a try. Those do look pretty cool. I'd be even more inclined to get one if they made a model that had a track ball on it as well as a joystick.

It would be cool if that worked out and they released the game on cartridge!

I got Dungeon in 2023 and on cartridge, it won't work on my Retron77, but if I put the .bin file linked in one of the forum threads that a very helpful member told me about I can make it work that way. The cartridge works great on my 7800 that's modded to work with RCA cables and that has had the hardware thoroughly tested and all the worn-out parts replaced. Incompatibility is an odd thing.

I've seen footage of the game and it does look cool. I'm just fine with regular Atari 2600 Asteroids being a bit slower though. Fits the speed of my reflexes better.

Yes, Missile Command is another good example of an excellent 2600 port of an arcade game. Tough game, but a bit easier on the console. I've always loved how kinda accurate that game is, even on the 2600. When you fire your interceptor missile, it seems to behave rather realistically. It takes a bit for it to reach its target, so you have to try to aim to where you think the incoming missiles will be by the time your interceptor gets there. Sometimes, the explosion takes out more than one incoming missile if they are within the blast radius. This game really resonated with us Cold War kids because we heard about the possibility of the USSR, China and Cuba launching missiles at us when I was growing up. I lived in Western Nebraska at the time, not far from Magic Mountain in Colorado, and ICBM missile silos nearby in Nebraska, the Dakotas, Colorado and Wyoming, so the war was very real for me. My 4-H model rocketry club got to tour one of the silos that was used for training back in the day. That was very interesting.

That is true. The arcade cabinet does look and sound cool. Another arcade game that kicked my butt, yet I loved playing it, was Defender. The control scheme was too hard for me to get good at, but I loved the sounds that game made. The blaster on the ship sounded so powerful compared to the beeps and blips that most games made at the time. I just loved that I had versions of these arcade games I could actually advance in. Arcade games are designed to eat quarters, so they are usually calibrated and programmed to be really tough. Too tough in some cases, for my slow reflexes. I have a speaker bar for my TV now that can make games sound pretty impressive compared to the tinny, pitiful speakers that my old GE portable TV that I plugged my Atari 2600 into had in it back in the day. When I crank my sound bar up, even my 2600 sounds pretty good.

This is very interesting! I've tried the left controller B right controller A configuration on Xevious and it works to make the left action button fire both guns and bombs and the right button to drop bombs only. As cool as it is that the game can fire guns on one button and bombs on the other, it does make the game a bit easier if both fire on the same button. Thanks for posting this! I was thinking as I was writing this how nice it is to be able to use words like 'guns', 'bombs', etc. without worrying about triggering some algorithm that might temporarily ban me for using 'scary words' like can happen on certain social media platforms. In some of the groups I'm in on Face Book, we've taken to using euphemisms like 'pews', 'zappers', 'blewie' etc.

Thanks for letting me know about this! I just downloaded the .bin file from the link and it is working on my Retron77. I then tried sticking in the Dungeon cartridge to see if that would work but it doesn't. Only works on my 7800. It's cool that I can get the .bin file ROM to work on the Retron77 via the microSD card. Very cool feature of the Retron77 that the 2600+ is missing. It's amazing how much info and great advice there is on this forum! My Dungeon cartridge not working on my Retron77 was the final straw that talked me into getting a 7800, though I'd been thinking of getting one for quite a while so I could eventually get the 7800 homebrew games on the AtariAge store. I'm glad I went ahead and got the 7800 because I helped out the Airforce veteran who modified it and sold it on Ebay. Lots of veterans in my family, so I have a lot of respect for them. I'm also enjoying 7800 games like Ms Pac Man, Xevious and Dark Chambers that I got from a local game store on it. Holy smokes! the 7800 version of Dark Chambers is practically a whole new game compared to the 2600 version! An amazing version of Gauntlet! Even my wife was impressed with the 7800 version of Ms Pac Man and is enjoying playing it. She likes the 7800 joystick a lot more than the 2600 one too. Xevious plays very much like the arcade and with the two fire buttons doing different things - fire and bomb - it's quite impressive to me. I'm also enjoying playing my 2600 cartridges on the 7800. The Retron77 does a good job of emulating them when you put the cartridge in, but it really is interesting to try the games I have with the 7800 joystick.

Yes, that would be very nice! I haven't played Combat in years and years because no one wants to play it with me anymore. Like Pong, it is no fun at all by yourself.

Where's the best place to find the community firmware update?

I got a 7800 that's been modified to plug into my TV with RCA AV cables, and it runs Dungeon very well. So 'maybe' it'll work on the 2600+. Hopefully someone on the forums has tried it already. I think there is a topic or subgroup on here for the 2600+ where someone might have mentioned it. It would be a good idea for whoever runs the homebrew games store on AtariAge to mark in the descriptions which games are compatible with the 2600+

I got my Atari 7800 in the mail today. It works like it was brand new thanks to the Airforce veteran's expert rebuild and modification of it. Plays Dungeon very well. What a great game! I love how tricky the game map is. It's a proper dungeon crawler. The animations look fantastic too. I can see why it needed the 7800 in order to play. I also got Ms Pac Man and Xevious 7800 carts for it at my local game store. They play very well. I love that you can use both action buttons on the controller in Xevious: one for blasters and the other for the bombs, even simultaneously. That would have blown my little mind if I would have gotten a 7800 back when I was a kid in 1986. It's awesome to have one now. It works with all of my 2600 carts except for the Imagic ones I have like Cosmic Ark and Dragonfire. Seems like their cartridges won't fit in the slot. It's a great Christmas present though. Best one I've gotten in quite a while.

I think about 80% of my Atari game collection were Christmas gifts. The 2600 console certainly was. So, Atari is synonymous with Christmas for me. One of my favorite Christmas gifts was the Empire Strikes Back game. It takes place on Hoth which is a snow and ice planet complete with an abominable snowman/Wampa Ice Creature (not shown in the game - someone needs to make a homebrew game where you fight Wampas, blast Imperial Probe Droids and ride a TaunTaun looking for Luke. You could play as Han Solo to make it different from the Super Empire Strikes Back SNES game. Could maybe be possible for the 7800), so it fits as a Christmas/wintertime themed game. I know I certainly played with my ESB toys out in snowbanks in the yard as a kid. Lost a few accessories that way, but it was fun.

My favorite game for the Atari 2600 is Defender. Maybe a Defender 3 game that is compatible with the 7800 would be really cool. It could have you defending planets with different scenery, different looking inhabitants and different alien invaders. Could call it Defender of The Galaxy or something like that. Maybe you could use the level select switch/button to pick which planet you wanted to defend rather than having to travel to each planet in order. If the graphics were kept fairly simple, but detailed enough that you could tell each planet alien and ship apart, it would be super cool!

Thank you very much! I decided to try the 7800 with the RCA video out modification. Looks like a good Christmas present. I'd rather have a console that'll play my 2600, 7800 and homebrew games than to get a Switch, Xbox or PS. I thought about a 2600+, but I really love the homebrew games people are making now and the articles I've seen about the 2600+ say it might or might not play them. Also, like you guys pointed out, it is still an emulator, so it isn't compatible with every game. The one I decided to get has a 30 day return policy, so that gives me a bit more confidence to try it. I remember wanting a 7800 when I was a kid, but my family was like 'You already have a game console, why would you want two of them?' As a kid I only ever had a 2600 and a used IBM 386 that a neighbor gave me because he'd build a 486 compatible model. It'll be interesting to try out the 7800 controllers and see how they are to use. Maybe I ought to send CrossBow my old 2600 and see if he can fix it. I'll have to think on that. I love playing games on my Retron77, but it would be cool to have my old 2600 working again someday. This group is great! I learn a lot when looking through the forums on here. I'm glad that forums like this are still around. Social media is good for certain things, but forums like this that are specific to one of my interests are even better.

I sure am! I have loved video games ever since my grandma started taking me to the bowling alley with her in the 70's. It had a pool table, foosball and a shuffleboard table, but what I loved trying to play most were the pinball machine and the video arcades. I enjoyed trying anyway because I was born with diplopia, a form of permanent double vision, so I had terrible hand-eye coordination, depth perception and struggled to read and work math problems. I was hopeless at sports. Even though I couldn't really get anywhere in the pinball and video games in terms of racking up points, I still loved the cabinet artwork, sound effects, music and spectacle of them a lot. When my grandma realized that I wasn't making much progress on those games after many visits, she got me an Atari VCS or 2600 and a few games for Christmas. The game I became best at was Blackjack because it was a turn-based game that didn't require me to be fast with my hands. I got pretty good at figuring out the strategy of it and dealing with the random aspects of it that I couldn't control but could try to predict. Things that I later put to good use when playing tabletop strategy games and RPGs. We also got Combat which was tough at first until we figured out the difficulty settings and found the 'ping pong' levels that let you bounce shots off the walls. That made it more fun. Since then, we've gotten over 40 games for it, some of which I got fairly good at when set on easy enough levels. Much more fun for me than playing the coin-op arcade cabinets. We eventually found an eye doctor who figured out why I was so clumsy and prescribed eyeglasses and eye exercises that gradually helped me improve my ability to control my double vision, but I've never been as fast with my hands as a lot of other people are. Playing video games sure helped. I love that your Dungeon II game has a real tabletop RPG dungeon crawl feel to it. My favorite thing to do in tabletop RPGs is to run a hero through a dangerous dungeon, especially when I'm the DM in charge of making the dungeon dangerous. Thanks for making the game and for putting so much care into the box, manual and poster as well. It felt like the 1980's all over again opening up that brand new game and trying it out. Dungeon II sure has a lot more detail and character to it than the Atari games like Adventure and Swordquest did. I still have a tough time figuring out what I'm supposed to be doing in games like those and I've got a pretty good imagination. It's too bad that Dungeon I won't work on my Retron77, but maybe I can get an Atari 7800 one of these days that can run it.

My AC adapter and controllers for my 2600 seem to be ok, so if I can find an incomplete 7800, it should be able to play 32K games? That's something I'll check into. There's a game store in my town that sells Atari consoles and games. I will see if they have any 7800 console decks that are incomplete. I like my Retron77 for being able to play ROMs of games that I'll probably never find on cartridge, especially not at a decent price, as well as prototypes, PAL only games etc that they have ROMs of on the AtariMania website, but I'm a bit disappointed that it can't play all of the published cartridges. I can kind of understand it not playing every homebrew, sort of. It's odd how complex things get when it comes to compatibility. I wonder if Weavil made Dungeon II to not be a 32K cartridge so that it would work on more consoles. It's a fun game and is a rather impressive turn-based game for an Atari 2600. Do 7800's have the same sorts of problems that 2600's have with RF modulators going bad and such? I'd hate to buy one and find out that it won't display well.

Thank you for letting me know. It's a real shame that it won't work. The Retron77 is a great system except for this silly limitation. Why would they do that? I wonder which systems can play 32K carts. Would an Atari 7800 be able to play it? My original Atari 2600 doesn't work well enough anymore to set it back up, otherwise, I'd try it on that. I guess the first Dungeon game will just be a collector's item for me then and not playable.

Very nice! You did a good coloring and scanning to PDF job there. I like the manual for it, but I have always wished that it and some other ones were in full color. I love Dark Chambers! It's sort of like the 2600's Gauntlet.

Your home made controller actually looks pretty good. I love that the corners of the wood cabinet for it are angled. Nice touch. Interesting that the chips were going bad on your 2600 rather than something like the RF modulator. I wonder if one of the chips in my childhood 4 switcher 2600 is going bad too and it's not just the RF.

I got Dungeon II first because it had so many good reviews. I can get Dungeon II to work just great. Plays quite well. I decided to get the first Dungeon game after reading about it further. I got it in the mail today. The box and manual are just as cool as Dungeon II if a bit more hand drawn looking (which has its own charm). No poster included like with Dungeon II, but that's alright. The problem is that when I put the Dungeon cartridge in my Retron 77, the screen just goes black. I can adjust the difficulty switches and it will show whether I have A or B selected on the screen, so I know that the console is trying to play the game, but I can't see or hear anything. I have the Retron 77 settings on default. I have played with them before to play around with the phosphor and scanlines emulation as well as player controller input speed, turbo and things like that just to see what would happen. Put all settings back on default and it still won't show anything. I thought maybe it was just taking a long time to load, but even after an hour, nothing on the screen other than when I activate the emulator menu boxes. Odd that Dungeon II works just fine, but not Dungeon.

Great idea! I'd sure watch that. One of my favorite things about the Atari 2600 games back in the day was how much more playable they were for me than the versions at the coin-op arcades. I loved arcades and still do, but it seemed like the arcade versions were incredibly difficult. I'm sure it was partly to get more quarters from us kids, but in my case it was even worse because I had diplopia or double vision (still do but can control it a bit better now with physical therapy and glassses) so my reflexes were pretty bad. I was lucky to get anywhere on an arcade game cabinet, but I could get the Atari 2600 version, adjust the difficulty and actually rack up some points. It was so empowering for me back then! An excellent example of how much better the Atari 2600 versions were for me is Defender and Stargate (Defender II). I loved those games at the arcade. The amazing sounds they made really impressed me. It was and still is one of the best designed side scrolling shoot'em ups ever made, but between the multiple buttons needed to control the ship and the difficulty settings on the cabinet, I could barely even play it let alone score many points. My grandma got me the Atari 2600 version for my birthday after watching me struggle with the game at the arcade. Only having the one button to deal with and being able to use the joystick to control the ship sure helped. The best part though was discovering that ducking down 'behind' the buildings or horizon to use the bombs also made your ship protected from enemy attack. I developed a strategy of flying along behind the horizon looking for landers. When one would come down to pick up a humanoid, I'd pop up from behind the horizon and blast it. I got quite good at this version of the game. In the years since then, I've played just about every version of Defender, even the 3D rendered version for the Xbox, and still consider the Atari 2600 to be the best version. Not only is it easier to play, but the developers did a great job of making it look and sound as much like the arcade version as they could. It is quite close. If you decide to make videos with this theme, let us know. It would be fun to contribute to these videos in some way.

I prefer the Atari 2600 version of Asteroids over the arcade cabinet version. I always have ever since I got my own 2600 long ago. I love how it has colored asteroids instead of the black and white raster graphics. It's also great how it has that music playing in the background that sounds a bit like the 'Jaws' movie theme. Not many 2600 games had music after the game started, so that was cool. I have always been glad that this version of Asteroids is 'easy'. I have vision problems and don't have the fastest reflexes in the world, so being able to adjust the difficulty on games like this is great! When I read in a review that a game is 'too easy', I'm actually more likely to try it because what some consider 'normal' difficulty is hard for me. Asteroids is a fantastic game on the 2600. I also much prefer the 2600 version of Defender over the arcade cabinet version as another example.

I think that is why I still love the 2600 too. Such great memories playing it with my grandma who got it for me when I was 7 back in the day when it was the high-tech console to have. Mine still works too, though it is having problems showing video at times. I got an emulator, a Hyperkin Retron77, but you are right, it is not quite the same. I'm not sure if I'll get a 2600+. The fact that it can play both 2600 and 7800 games does intrigue me though. If my Retron77 quits working, I may look into a 2600+. Like you, I'd love to get my original 2600 working as well as it can again someday.

Circus Atari is my favorite paddle game. It took the Breakout idea and made it much more fun, even though it also made it much more challenging. My grandma got me the game way back when for my birthday the summer after she got us a 2600 for Christmas. I remember well how she'd laugh and laugh at the little clowns as they jumped on the seesaw that you use for a paddle on screen. Their flailing little legs just cracked us up! Even losing the game was funny because instead of the ball just going off screen when you missed it, the clown would go 'splat' on the ground with a sound effect and his little legs would keep flailing as he stuck there in the ground like a lawn dart. My other favorite is Blackjack. It was my favorite Atari game for a long time because it was one of the few that I could master, even as a little kid with vision problems and hand-eye coordination problems. Since it didn't rely on quick reflexes, I could play it and Casino quite well. I eventually got fairly good at some other games after years of eye exercises and physical therapy, but those card games were always my best scores. I especially loved the 'fart' sound that the card games made when the dealer was supposed to be shuffling the cards. That shuffle sound effect always sounded like a fart to me.