Garrettimus

Thank you very much, I recovered my old profile's password. Now I'm using it. Who's there?

Hey! Trotter has arrived safe and sound in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It's with me now. I'll take it to a city tour ASAP!

Wow, I can't wait to see that. Matt Patrol is fun already, I'm sure that Eduardo Mello will bring an even better version to the ColecoVision.

Yeah, he's awesome, it was very cool!

That's a difficult question... Moonsweeper perhaps.

I'm looking for a working Cuttle Cart 3 cartridge for the Intellivision. I'm in Brazil. Thanks!

Olá, amigos, moro em São Paulo.

Dear friends, I'm the editor of a Brazilian electronic magazine, "Jogos 80", on Retrogaming. We've published 10 issues so far since 2004 and we're mostly focused on the classic consoles (Atari, Odyssey, Intellivision & ColecoVision) and classic microcomputers such as the Apple II, the Commodore 64 and the British computers (ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro etc). Here's the URL of our website: http://jogos80.com.br/ "Unfortunately", the magazine is in Portuguese. The current issue features one of the first Atari 2600 clones made in Brazil, the mega rare "Top Game". Also, recently I wrote two books on the history of the early video games in Brazil. They're called "1983: The Year of Video Games in Brazil" and "1984: The Video Games Fever Continues". They are focused on the early video game consoles such as the Atari 2600, the Odyssey^2, the Intellivision and the ColecoVision in either official or unofficial (clone systems) machines. Also they're highly illustrated. They're in Portuguese, but I'm seriously considering a translation into English to sell them abroad in digital form. Would you guys be willing to buy the books in digital form for, say, 5 to 10 dollars? Here's the official website: http://www.memoriadovideogame.com.br/ Here's an introduction to how the first video game systems did appear in Brazil: While the world was enraptured with the music of Michael Jackson and the Cold War was still a reality, Brazil was going through a period of extreme economic uncertainty in what would be the final phase of a military dictatorship. The increase in the budget deficit caused by rising international interest rates and the subsequent growth of external debt led to macroeconomic imbalances which made inflation unbearable. In the eighties, the Brazilian economy faced a downturn unparalleled in its history. In the context of the electronics business, already weakened because of the conditions in the country, there existed a policy known as “Reserva de Mercado” – Market Reserve. To "protect" the local market from foreign interference, the policy prohibited foreign companies from entering Brazil and disallowed the importation of any computer-related products. Concurrently, the government imposed a centralization of foreign exchange by the Central Bank, which meant that a company could only do business if the government authorized the transaction. The Market Reserve, which has changed in the seven years that it existed, eventually opened a loophole that Brazilian companies exploited. Companies would copy original, imported equipment by adapting it to the local market; they would change the products' names and then release them without paying royalties to the owners. The Market Reserve leveraged the release of the first video games in Brazil. In fact, the country began to see the first consoles in the second half of the 70s, which arrived through smuggling, international travel and localized sales at the so-called “Zona Franca de Manaus”, a famous free trade port. In 1977, Philco-Ford, a department of the Ford company that manufactured radios for cars alongside other electronics, launched the Telejogo, which was nothing more than a replica of the famous Home Pong and other similar Pong-like games that were already successful abroad. The Telejogo, though itself shy of success, paved the way for the arrival of video games on cartridges and the devices that would play them. The arrival of the first official, licensed videogame happened in May of 1983, when the Odyssey² was released by Philips just as the Odyssey. The company came up with an aggressive marketing campaign, including television, newspaper and magazine ads. Philips's bet was Odyssey's alphanumeric keypad; besides giving Odyssey a computer look, the Keypad added features that weren't present, for example, in the Atari 2600. The Odyssey boasted greater integration between the user and the game, allowing one to insert words and manipulate characters onscreen. The manufacture of cartridges nationwide, "protected" by the Market Reserve, also started; however, producing cartridges at the time was laborious and expensive. The companies needed to extract the game programs from the original ROMs (chips in which the games were recorded), store them elsewhere and then rewrite them in EPROMs, a slow process due to the limitations of EPROM recorders in use in Brazil. Some small companies disregarded U.S. copyrights and began to unofficially manufacture these clone cartridges for the Atari 2600 system. While this was happening, the Warner Communications conglomerate, owner of the Atari brand, signed an agreement with the “Grupo IGB” (IGB Group), led by Brazilian businessman Eugênio Staub, which in turn owned the Gradiente and Polyvox brands. Warner would have the chance to give an extended life to the 2600, a product that began to agonize in the United States, and Polyvox would have exclusivity on the Atari branded products in the country. The official Atari 2600 was released near the Children's Day holiday in October, also with a very aggressive marketing campaign, and was a complete success. Christmas sales were unbelievable too. Other Brazilian companies, also supported by the Market Reserve, launched many unauthorized Atari clone systems such as the Dactari, the Dynavision, the Onyx Junior and the Supergame. In Brazil, Mattel was also interested in what was happening in the novel market for consoles. After probing the country, the company signed an agreement with the Brazilian branch of Sharp in mid-1983. The subsidiary Digimed was created solely for the release of the official Intellivision system. The idea was not necessarily to compete directly with other manufacturers, but rather to tap a demographic dissatisfied with other brands, a more adult audience. As a result, the Intellivision was also released in 1983, but was less successful than the 2600. After the arrival of the consoles that excited the video game market in 1983, the country has seen many releases throughout the years, some official and some not, for various consoles, including the NES, the Master System, the Genesis/Mega Drive, and the Super NES. The truth is that the Brazilian people, besides their notorious passion for Football, ended up falling in love with video game consoles and the world of dreams in which they immerse the player. Thank you very much for your time! Marcus.

ColecoVision, Odyssey^2 and several classic microcomputers.

Wow! Moon Patrol looks great!

Thank you very much, guys, I'll do that.

Exactly! No, he didn't say anything. In fact, we talked very briefly, he was about to start the talk.

Dear friends, Recently I wrote two books on the history of the early video games in Brazil. They're called "1983: The Year of Video Games in Brazil" and "1984: The Video Games Fever Continues". They are focused on the early video game consoles such as the Atari 2600, the Odyssey^2, the Intellivision and the ColecoVision in either official or unofficial (clone systems) machines. Also they're highly illustrated. They're in Portuguese, but I'm seriously considering a translation into English to sell them abroad in digital form. Would you guys be willing to buy the books in digital form for, say, 5 to 10 dollars? Here's the official website: http://www.memoriadovideogame.com.br/ Here's an introduction to how the first video game systems did appear in Brazil: While the world was enraptured with the music of Michael Jackson and the Cold War was still a reality, Brazil was going through a period of extreme economic uncertainty in what would be the final phase of a military dictatorship. The increase in the budget deficit caused by rising international interest rates and the subsequent growth of external debt led to macroeconomic imbalances which made inflation unbearable. In the eighties, the Brazilian economy faced a downturn unparalleled in its history. In the context of the electronics business, already weakened because of the conditions in the country, there existed a policy known as “Reserva de Mercado” – Market Reserve. To "protect" the local market from foreign interference, the policy prohibited foreign companies from entering Brazil and disallowed the importation of any computer-related products. Concurrently, the government imposed a centralization of foreign exchange by the Central Bank, which meant that a company could only do business if the government authorized the transaction. The Market Reserve, which has changed in the seven years that it existed, eventually opened a loophole that Brazilian companies exploited. Companies would copy original, imported equipment by adapting it to the local market; they would change the products' names and then release them without paying royalties to the owners. The Market Reserve leveraged the release of the first video games in Brazil. In fact, the country began to see the first consoles in the second half of the 70s, which arrived through smuggling, international travel and localized sales at the so-called “Zona Franca de Manaus”, a famous free trade port. In 1977, Philco-Ford, a department of the Ford company that manufactured radios for cars alongside other electronics, launched the Telejogo, which was nothing more than a replica of the famous Home Pong and other similar Pong-like games that were already successful abroad. The Telejogo, though itself shy of success, paved the way for the arrival of video games on cartridges and the devices that would play them. The arrival of the first official, licensed videogame happened in May of 1983, when the Odyssey² was released by Philips just as the Odyssey. The company came up with an aggressive marketing campaign, including television, newspaper and magazine ads. Philips's bet was Odyssey's alphanumeric keypad; besides giving Odyssey a computer look, the Keypad added features that weren't present, for example, in the Atari 2600. The Odyssey boasted greater integration between the user and the game, allowing one to insert words and manipulate characters onscreen. The manufacture of cartridges nationwide, "protected" by the Market Reserve, also started; however, producing cartridges at the time was laborious and expensive. The companies needed to extract the game programs from the original ROMs (chips in which the games were recorded), store them elsewhere and then rewrite them in EPROMs, a slow process due to the limitations of EPROM recorders in use in Brazil. Some small companies disregarded U.S. copyrights and began to unofficially manufacture these clone cartridges for the Atari 2600 system. While this was happening, the Warner Communications conglomerate, owner of the Atari brand, signed an agreement with the “Grupo IGB” (IGB Group), led by Brazilian businessman Eugênio Staub, which in turn owned the Gradiente and Polyvox brands. Warner would have the chance to give an extended life to the 2600, a product that began to agonize in the United States, and Polyvox would have exclusivity on the Atari branded products in the country. The official Atari 2600 was released near the Children's Day holiday in October, also with a very aggressive marketing campaign, and was a complete success. Christmas sales were unbelievable too. Other Brazilian companies, also supported by the Market Reserve, launched many unauthorized Atari clone systems such as the Dactari, the Dynavision, the Onyx Junior and the Supergame. In Brazil, Mattel was also interested in what was happening in the novel market for consoles. After probing the country, the company signed an agreement with the Brazilian branch of Sharp in mid-1983. The subsidiary Digimed was created solely for the release of the official Intellivision system. The idea was not necessarily to compete directly with other manufacturers, but rather to tap a demographic dissatisfied with other brands, a more adult audience. As a result, the Intellivision was also released in 1983, but was less successful than the 2600. After the arrival of the consoles that excited the video game market in 1983, the country has seen many releases throughout the years, some official and some not, for various consoles, including the NES, the Master System, the Genesis/Mega Drive, and the Super NES. The truth is that the Brazilian people, besides their notorious passion for Football, ended up falling in love with video game consoles and the world of dreams in which they immerse the player.

Dear friends, I'm the editor of a Brazilian electronic magazine, "Jogos 80", on Retrogaming. We've published 10 issues so far since 2004 and we're mostly focused on the classic consoles (Atari, Odyssey, Intellivision & ColecoVision) and classic microcomputers such as the Apple II, the Commodore 64 and the British computers (ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro etc). Here's the URL of our website: http://jogos80.com.br/ "Unfortunately", the magazine is in Portuguese. The current issue features one of the first Atari 2600 clones made in Brazil, the mega rare "Top Game". Enjoy!

I've received the book and it's simply amazing. And my copy has a "plus".

Absolutely amazing, congratulations!

Dear friends, The past Wednesday I've had the honor of meeting Mr. Nolan Bushnell in person at Campus Party Brasil 2013 (http://www.campus-party.com.br/). It was a memorable evening, he gave me his autograph and I gave him the two books I wrote on the early history of video games in Brazil ("1983: The Year of Video Games in Brazil" and "1984: The Video Games Fever Continues"). He said, jokingly, that he was going to read the books in spite of the language barrier for they're in Portuguese. Mr. Bushnell was extremely nice to me, meeting him was a dream come true. His talk was great, you may check the pictures here: http://s160.photobuc.../NolanBushnell/

Dear Atari Age friends, I live in Brazil and will travel to Southern California in early August. I´d like to know, please, if there are any classic arcade places (such as Fun Spot and Ground Kontrol) in Southern California, specially in the Los Angeles area and in San Fernando Valley. Are there places like that there? Thank you very much, Marcus Garrett (Garrettimus).

Nice job! However, you neglected "The Omega Man", "Soylent Green" and some classic British movies as "Legend of the Hell House".

Many thanks, guys, I gave the WinXP version a shot and that´s quite easy to use. I easily copied like 20 disks. Will test them as soon as possible. By the way, I couldn´t find Moon Patrol anywhere... Do you have it (MSA or ST), please?

Dear forum friends, I´m a newbie to Atari ST´s and I am supposed to get a 1040 STF by the end of the month. In Brazil, we had a kind of an "Amiga 500 Fever" back in the day, you know, so Atari ST machines haven´t stood a chance here. That means "no Atari ST hard users in my country", unfortunately. A lot of Amigas though... I´d like to know, please, if there´s an easy way of copying image files (mostly games) to actual 3.5" floppies. How that works? I want to play the coolest games in my STF. Since my STF is European (a PAL version), I´d also like to know whether NTSC games play well in a PAL system. Thanks in advance and greetings from Brazil!

Dear friends, how are you? At last! My friend and I have found the "lost" Atari 2600 TV commercials made in Brazil for Polyvox by the time the VCS was officially released here back in august/september 1983. Guess what! I´ve just digitized the whole thing! I invite you to watch the commercials. We brazilian collectors are very happy and proud of that "heritage". In fact, I don´t know how many countries were lucky enough to have an official VCS system. We have had our share of clones too, but... TV Commercial #1: TV Commercial #2: TV Commercial #3: TV Commercial #4: By the way, the tape was "lost" in a Marketing college, ESPM (Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing)... Please, let me know what you think. Greetings from sunny Brazil!

Thank you very much, unfortunately there's no English version yet. We are working on that.

Los amigos y hermanitos de Chile (Retrogames.CL) son fantásticos. Soy de Brasil y me recibieron muy bien en su foro aunque yo no habla Español bien. Son mis nuevos vecinos y amigos especiales! Saludos desde Brasil!

Dear Friends, I'd like to present to you an electronic gaming magazine I do with some friends: Jogos 80 (Games 80). It's focused on classic videogame systems and 8 bit computers of the pre-Crash era. We have game reviews, curiosities, interviews, hardware projects and other cool things. As a matter of fact, for the current issue we have interviewed Mr. Ralph Baer, creator of the Brown Box/Odyssey, and Howard Scott Warshaw, creator/programmer of Yars' Revenge, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E. T. You may download it for free here: http://bragatto.org/jogos80/jogos80.htm Please, manage to download it by using a software as GetRight or similar. PS: Unfortunately, it's in Portuguese. There's no English version yet. Take care!