Who illustrated the original Atari VCS game catalogs?

[Who illustrated the original Atari VCS game catalogs?]

Resurrecting this old thread because I still have the same question: who illustrated the original Atari VCS game catalogs? (Such as "https://atariage.com/catalog_page.html?CatalogID=24".)I really love the whimsical nature of the artwork, and I've never seen anything quite like it since.

 

I have Tim Lapetino's "Art of Atari" book, but it only covers the games, and says absolutely nothing about the catalogs!

[Paddle controllers and test screens]

Excellent! Thank you for the reply! And please consider my comment a suggestion for next time rather than a complaint - the console is truly wonderful, and this improvement would only increase its wonderfulness by a small amount.

 

By the way - as the project leader of the console, would you please have a look at the Wikipedia article about it, and offer any corrections or additional information you think might be interesting or useful? I'd be glad of your help!

[FB2: Which are protos and which are homebrews?]

Thanks! Which were developed with the intention of releasing them, and which are just hacks on existing games? I'm trying to pin this down for the Wikipedia article. Like, Lunar Lander and Pong both look like original works, but I don't see anything about them in the AtariAge cartridge database.

[Paddle controllers and test screens]

Two things I wish were different in FB2:

 

- My old Atari paddle controllers seem to be very touchy. When I test them via the paddle test screen, it shows 0 through about three-fourths of their range, and then the remaining distance goes up to 30. Is this a problem with the paddle detection code in the FB2? Shouldn't it be giving me a smooth range of motion all the way through the dial's range? Or have my paddle controllers gone bad in the past thirty years?

 

- The test screens (hold down Select and Reset when you power on the unit, with the switch set to Color it'll give the joystick tests, with B/W it'll give the paddle tests) would be very useful, *except* for one major problem: when they sense an input the name lights up, but the name doesn't go dark when the input goes away. I'd really like to use these test screens to diagnose some old joysticks I have that only register a direction intermittently, but unless the test screen tells me when it sees an input and when it doesn't, it's useless.

[FB2: Which are protos and which are homebrews?]

Which of the Flashback 2 games are unreleased prototypes developed by Atari, and which are homebrews developed by fans?

[Stella 1.4.2 released]

Just to poke my nose in with two requests...

 

(1) At some point it would be nice if support for gzipped rom files would be re-added to the Mac version of Stella. (This support was present in version 1.2.)

 

(2) It would also be nice if Mac Stella included documentation which mentions the key bindings for Stella, such as which key is Select, which is Reset, which handles the difficulty switches and the Color/B&W switch, and so forth. I had to come to the forums to find this info.