Brainworm

Yeah, Kaboom! is very sensitive to paddle jitter. So paddles that work OK for Video Olympics or Breakout may freak out on Kaboom!. I've had better luck cleaning my paddles/pots with Deoxit than with rubbing alcohol, but YMMV.

I'll second or third this. I've owned a Retron and now own two 2600s. I really appreciate what the community is trying to do with the Retron, but: 1) Once you shell out for the Retron 77, plus the USB/stelladapters you need to get it to actually work OK, you might as well have bought a 2600 or 7800 to begin with. It also takes a substantial amount of time to actually get the thing working with the community image, etc. 2) The Retron, even with Stelladapters and the community image, is no good for paddle games. I hate to say that because a lot of people have put a lot of work into getting everything to work properly, but paddle performance was absolutely the dealbreaker for me. Even when there's no jitter the movement is laggy, which makes a big difference with fast games like Kaboom! 3) You can get a mono headphones jack extension and use it to lengthen the power cord for the 2600. With that and a 15-foot RCA cable for A/V, I can just move the console to whereever I'm playing it so I don't have to get up to hit Reset/Select/etc. Wins all around. 4) That said, you could also get a VCS for around the same price (I just got my third one during the New Year's sale), and while it's not as good for paddle games as an original 2600, it is miles better than the Retron and also has wireless controllers for both joystick and paddle games. Also, you can run Stella on it and use it for all kinds of other games. If wireless controllers are a must have I think it's the best option. 5) That said, you could also look at a Flashback 2. It's a hardware re-implementation of the 2600 and can even be fitted with a cartridge adapter, so it'll run your games absolutely flawlessly. There's somebody around here who'll sell you a cartridge-modded flashback 2 for like $150; I bought one about a year ago and it's pretty great.

It's the reason I got one of the new VCSs -- the Classic Controller does dial on Breakout and handles rotation in Yars', Asteroids, Gravitar, and Black Widow. It's incredible how a paddle/twist controller works for these kinds of games. IDK what it says that this was worth $300 to me, but there you have it. One thing that nobody's mentioned so far is the speed of some games. Not the loading speed, but the actual responsiveness of controls while playing. There are some games -- I'm thinking Kaboom! and Dragonfire -- that I call "fast." I mean that the gameplay is absolutely frantic in a "milliseconds matter," hardware-dependent kind of way. There's nothing like Kaboom! or Dragonfire on the Switch, and I suspect that they're not really possible on modern consoles. The degree of input responsiveness they depend on just isn't there.

Got a VCS Onyx off eBay, and I've been pleasantly surprised. I'd originally planned to use it for emulation and Steam games, but the kids and I have had a much better time playing the Recharged titles (on co-op) and multiplayer Vault titles like Warlords. The experience in AtariOS has been very smooth. The logic of the Recharged titles, and of Atari titles in general, also works really well with little kids -- the games are easy to learn, and each game itself is short, but the level of challenge is still there for adult players. That makes it a very good console for family gaming. Like the 2600, it's great for co-op and and a deal less fun playing solo. The biggest problem is that there aren't that many games. Being able to dual-boot addresses that, but not elegantly. As a user, I'd love to see access to Steam libraries or emulators directly from AtariOS, but it's hard to imagine that happening.

This rings a bell for me. In maybe 1993 I bought a copy of Super Breakout! that was packaged this way. This was at a local Big Lots (which is a merchandise liquidator) and so who knows how far it traveled to get there.

Here's a link (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/create-booklet-2/id1350225911?mt=12). I can only imagine that there are workalikes available for Windows and maybe Linux.

OK. So I just now noticed that that's a guitar.

We got a 4-switch Woody from my dad's boss sometime before we moved in the Summer of 1984. I would have been five or six at the time, and I remember using chore money to buy my first game -- Pitfall! -- at a Children's Palace toy store that was local to us before the 1984 move. I am fairly sure it was wintertime. This means that we got the system in or around 1983, although it's hard to be certain. Things kicked up in the Fall of 1984 when my dad came home with a whole bag of 2600 games that he'd either bought from or been given by a co-worker. My favorites were Defender, Kaboom!, Yars Revenge, Berzerk, and Missile Command, although there were maybe a dozen more including Donkey Kong (which I played pretty often) and Slot Racers (which I didn't). I bought a few games after that. The last one was Super Breakout, which was on clearance at the local Big Lots. This was in 1992 or '93.

The fellow who makes the iCode adapters has a couple instructional videos (on jitter reduction and adjusting range of motion and on basic configuration) that focus on lr-stella (the LibRetro Stella core that's used to provide Atari 2600 emulation in RetroArch). Basically, RetroArch is a wrapper for all kinds of emulators ("cores") that allows you to set up a global configuration for e.g. displays and controllers. That way, you can emulate a 2600, 5200, 7800, NES, SNES, C64, &c. games without having to set up specific configuration files for each one. And there are a whole bunch of software products that bundle RetroArch with a handy frontend, all on top of a GNU/Linux software stack, to create an OS dedicated to retrogaming. Which one you use mostly depends on which hardware you want to target. RetroPie is of course for Raspberry Pi boards, and derivatives like RecalBox and Batocera use a very similar stack of software to target (mainly) x86. Lakka is something like the official distribution for RetroArch and runs on everything from PCs to single board computers to portables like the Nintendo Switch or RG351. So you could build a dedicated 2600 emulation machine with pretty much anything you have laying around -- an old PC, a Raspberry Pi. Lakka even runs on some weirdo set top boxes. Normally, if you were going to build a custom emulation machine from scratch, most people would recommend going with a Raspberry Pi. Once upon a time they were like $25 and powerful enough to run pretty much any game that came out before maybe the year 2000. Now they're hard to find and stupid expensive, so the deal of the year is an old Chromebox (like one of these). They're just a low-power fanless PC with custom firmware/BIOS, which you can reflash with Coreboot/Openboot in order to run basically any version of linux that tickles your tulip -- including Lakka, RecalBox, or Batocera. That's a hard deal to beat for $40. I have Lakka on mine. The 16GB internal storage is basically enough to run every Atari console game and arcade classic. You can either use an iCode or 2600-daptor to connect your paddles to it, or splurge on a VCS Classic Controller to go totally wireless for both your joystick and (one player) paddle games. And -- of course -- you can configure your paddle range and everything else per the video from the iCode fellow. For me, this has been a better experience than the Retron 77 or any of the Flashback consoles because the Chromebox (a) has bluetooth, so you can go wireless with Joystick AND paddles, and (b) is powerful enough to use all kinds of tweaks (hard GPU sync, run ahead) to reduce latency -- something you really notice in fast games like Dragonfire or Kaboom!. It's still not as good as original hardware, but is easily as good as Stella on PC.

Since this thread is resurrected: I love the degree of technical ingenuity being brought to bear on this. If, like me, you don't know the first thing about potentiometers or resistors, you can solve this problem in software. All you need is (a) a reasonably fast machine and (b) a spare 2600-daptor. Either Stella or lr-stella (as seen in Lakka and RetroPie) allow adjustments to the paddle sensitivity and dead zone, and at least lr-stella allows you to change both these settings on a per-game basis. You can even "trim" the paddles by adjusting the dead zone. I like using a reflashed chromebox for this purpose, since fast paddle-based games (e.g. Kaboom!) really bring out the lag in underpowered systems like the Retron 77, the Flashbacks, and even the pi 4. Even in the midst of this chip shortage you can get one for like $50.

I'm a long-time 2600 owner who has fond memories of playing Joust and Galaga with my childhood BFF on his 7800. I'm on the fence about whether to get another system, and whether that system ought to be a 7800. 1) What are the best things about owning a 7800 (vs. playing 7800 games using an emulator)? and 2) What are the worst?

I can verify that the RetroTink 2x Pro is well worth the $130. I run my UAV-modded four-switch through it (S-Video, not composite) and the picture is lag-free and just razor sharp. It also does a great job with my wife's N64.

I don't know if these are "Stella" bugs per se, but the latest community build of the Retron 77 image has an issue in which paddles "jump" over about 1/3 of the screen. You can see the discussion here. There are different issues with the libretro Stella core (lag is one that people complain about). I think what I want to say that the paddle+emulator combo is probably going to be at least imperfect for a long time, even though a lot of very smart and dedicated people do a lot of work to make it very good. If paddles aren't important, a Retron may make more sense than original hardware since it's marginally cheaper and the video output is as good as it can be. And if you're not interested in paddles, you can forget the Stelladapter; the Retron's ports are good enough for joysticks. But if paddle games are a big part of your experience, I think you're better off just avoiding emulation. Stella is very, very good, but there's not an equally good hardware solution in the form of an inexpensive set top box.

I'ma come back on this: The Retron isn't good bang for buck. The system itself comes in at about $80, but for decent paddle performance you need two 2600-daptors or similar, which sets you back another $60. That's the best that emulation is going to get you, but not as good as original hardware. At that price point you're $30 away from an AV-modded console plus a Harmony cart, which is (a) much more playable with fast paddle games like Kaboom! (b) also compatible with the entire library of 2600 cartridges and accessories, and (c) doesn't suffer from software bugs that were not present on original hardware. Alternatively, if emulation is your thing, for $80 and two stelladapters you can also just go all in on a RetroPie or Lakka/Chromebox system, which offers similar performance but also plays Arcade games and games from other systems. I really wanted to like the Retron, and if the package was what I hoped it would be -- a dedicated Stella box with two built-in Stelladapters -- it would be a no-brainer. But since the Retron's ports don't handle paddles well, what you've really got is a RetroPie setup in a neat-looking case, except that it can only play 2600 games and doesn't allow wireless controllers. In summary: It's like all the disadvantages of emulation (fiddly software bugs, paddle configuration woes, lag) and all the disadvantages of original hardware (expensive, wired controllers, limited to the 2600 library) in a single package.

In my experience that's normal for a regular composite mod. I don't get that issue with the UAV composite video out, but I also don't get it on every display I use with my plain old composite modded vader (I have an older plasma TV that shows that blue line, but an LCD of the same vintage doesn't). It also comes and goes with levels of color saturation, which in that image appear to be pretty high.