Big Player

@nanochess Oscar Toledo is a member here, so I'm tagging him to let him know about your questions.

I agree about the productivity of the Atari 8-bits. I could have used my 800XL through college. I did use it through June 1988, when I graduated from high school. I considered taking it with me to college but my freshman year roommate brought his Radio Shack MS-DOS compatible computer. Space in the dorms was tight and we had to dedicate one of the desks to the computer and printer. The university I attended (Ohio State) had a ton of computer labs, including one that was open 24/7, with IBM PC's and Mac's, so I had that option as well. I had to use the labs a few times during freshman year when we both had papers due at the same time. If I had gone to a smaller school and not had a roommate with a computer, I would have taken my Atari and used it. The only feature I missed was spell check, which I could have if I had bought a 130XE or a different word processor than PaperClip.

I owned AtariWriter when I first got my 800XL in 1984 when I first started high school. I upgraded to PaperClip in 1986 when I read about the Antic magazine staff using it for their work. The details are fuzzy but I remember it being a much better word processor. I used it for any writing that I had to do for high school, not just papers. My decision was based on this article from Antic, which also has comparisons for AtariWriter+ and Superscript. https://www.atarimagazines.com/v5n10/sevenwordprocessors.html

I used z26 as my main 2600 emulator in the early 2000's. The big feature was that it is written in assembly language, which helped with emulating the games at the proper speed. The CPU's back then needed all the help they could get (or at least the CPU's that I could afford back then.) Stella ran the games just a bit too slow for my setup. For homebrew authors, z26 also had a scan line counter that helped make sure their kernals were always displaying the correct amount of lines. It was Windows-only, though I see a Linux version was created at some point. I had to switch to Stella in 2009 when I moved from Windows to Mac's.

And most of those quality arcade ports that Atari published after Pac-Man were developed by General Computer Corporation, not their in-house developers. So you had 2600 Ms. Pac-Man developed by the same company that created the arcade version. https://www.fastcompany.com/3067296/the-mit-dropouts-who-created-ms-pac-man-a-35th-anniversary-oral-history

Bumping this because John's technical discussion was uploaded in September 2022.

I hope someone recorded this talk and shares it.

Strong disagreement on the gameplay for 2600 Basketball. Have you played it or are you judging the gameplay from watching a Youtube video? 2600 Basketball has solid one-on-one basketball play. It's simplified of course, not only because it's a late 1970's release for the 2600 but the ROM is only 2K. Alan Miller did a great job translating the sport to those limitations. There is no key, free throw lane or foul line. Since there are no fouls or out of bounds, they would just clutter the screen. Also missing 3-point lines but those didn't exist in the sport at the time of the game's release. My brother and I played this game quite a lot in the early 1980's, when it was even primitive compared to the 1980's 2600 games we had. It's the one 2600 sports game that didn't get a Realsports or M-Network update. I think part of this was due to how good the game play is. From the comments section of the video you linked: "I have an old Atari and had my 10 year old son and his friends play it to see what they would think of it and they LOVED it. No joke.. they loved how easy it was and how competitive you can be. Goes to show you graphics aren't everything...Something to said about simplicity and game play..." Really? The vertical purple line is the pole and the horizontal purple line is the net.

Two threads with more information and pictures. The other pictures with Bob Gale show it's a XE. It looks like Paperclip was the word processor used, if I remember correctly, since it shows two windows of text. You could have two files open on the same screen. I used it through my later years of high school (1986-1988) but I'm not an expert on all the word processing programs on the Atari 8 bits. But if it is Paperclip, I would assume they used a 130XE, since you got a spell checker that wasn't available with only 64K of RAM. I had an 800XL and wished I had that spell checker. Is it possible that these pictures shows them writing the sequels to Back to the Future instead? Wouldn't that fit the time frame better? Does anyone know exactly when the XE's were first released? I got my 800XL for Christmas in 1984 and there were no XE's then. Also, in one of the threads, someone points out that printer came out in 1987. Still it's cool either way.

So Coleco, Mattel, Magnavox, Milton Bradley, Emerson, Bally(Astrocade) and Zircon(Channel F) were all unaffected by the crash? These hardware manufacturers all produced video game consoles that were available in 1982-83 and discontinued by 1985-86. They all left the video game industry. I'm not going to try to list all the software firms that went out of business, downsized or got acquired in the crash.

Four newer homebrews to add to the list: Tower of Rubble QYX VROOM! Wizard of Wor Arcade

Things do change in 20 years. I am a software developer now.

@nanochess Oscar Toledo G. is the author and a member here. Looks like your question was answered but he might like to see this thread.

I received my copy on Saturday. Nice addition to my 2600 programing library.

So how much programming could you do with it? How long could your programs be? The 2600 Basic Programming cart had tight memory limitations, so I'm guessing nothing long. I took a look at the manual, that is a nice introduction to how computers work and assembly language, especially back when consoles were much cheaper than computers. https://archive.org/details/computer-intro-us-odyssey-2-1979

But if I understand correctly about the ARM games, only about 20% of the 70mhz processor is available for use by the game? So would there have a been a processor back then that could be the equivalent to a cut down ARM. Or would it still be too powerful for the time?

In the presentation, John mentioned having another presentation where he would focus on the technical details. Did it get recorded?

That game looks like Advanced D&D: Cloudy Mountain for Intellivision.

One game with Stella version 6.7 and I had a full crash in the first bonus round. I'll keep testing though.

I am getting crashes during the bonus rounds as well. Two different kind of crashes. The first one I get shows this screen with a message "Fatal error instructions > 500000." I am able to click "continue" on the box and then "run" in the window to continue my game. I have more screen shots of the state tabs if they would help with debugging. The second crash takes me out of the game and puts me back on Stella's ROM menu, as if I hit escape during the game. The also happens during the bonus round but later in the same game, after continuing the game about 5 or so times. I play the bonus rounds by setting a lot of bombs in a row and walking through the enemies, which sounds like the same way knievel1 plays. I am running Stella 6.6 on macOS Monterey 12.3.1 and using the boom_RC1_NTSC bin. I was having this problem with earlier versions of the game but a new version would get posted before I could report it.

I had the same problem. I did make sure Fire2 was selected on the main menu. I use a Stelladaptor, which due to this game and the 1942 port, I learned it doesn't support a Sega Genesis game pad. Never had the need to use one with Stella before. It's great that 2600 homebrews are starting to use it to have a second button.

Have you looked at using CDFJ+ bank switching with the Harmony/Melody cart? It might be a better option than adding a pokey chip. https://atariage.com/forums/forum/389-cdfj/ Here is a new game for the 2600 with some great music using CDFJ+.

So will this be an officially licensed version of Lode Runner? I see the Tozai Games logo on the start up menu and it looks like they hold the rights to Lode Runner.

Those are Stan Jr's maps. He posted them to two different web sites that are both long gone. He also wrote walk throughs for each case. KevinMos3 was able to capture both in a Word doc that was posted in this thread.

Here is a link to the blog entry with the ROMs.