Atari keyboard controllers?

[Pyromaniac605]

Firstly when ever i am in second hand game store EVERY SINGLE TIME and this is no joke EVERY TIME i have ever entered a second hand game stores they ALWAYS have a 2600 BASIC programming cart and on the label it says for use with keyboard controllers. What are they? and how hard are they to find? Because ive been wanting to buy it but seems like a waste of $10 if i cant use it.

 

-Darren-

[nofrills100]

Firstly when ever i am in second hand game store EVERY SINGLE TIME and this is no joke EVERY TIME i have ever entered a second hand game stores they ALWAYS have a 2600 BASIC programming cart and on the label it says for use with keyboard controllers. What are they? and how hard are they to find? Because ive been wanting to buy it but seems like a waste of $10 if i cant use it.

 

-Darren-

ebay

[Mirage]

$10? Why would you pay $10 for a BASIC Programming cart to begin with? And, it's a useless cart anyway, except as a novelty. You can't do anything particularly interesting with it, as it's too limited.

[A.J. Franzman]

$10? Why would you pay $10 for a BASIC Programming cart to begin with? And, it's a useless cart anyway, except as a novelty. You can't do anything particularly interesting with it, as it's too limited.

I'll second that... I wouldn't deliberately buy a Basic Programming cartridge except as part of a lot. I'd give it a value of about 10 cents.

[Pioneer4x4]

$10? Why would you pay $10 for a BASIC Programming cart to begin with? And, it's a useless cart anyway, except as a novelty. You can't do anything particularly interesting with it, as it's too limited.

I'll second that... I wouldn't deliberately buy a Basic Programming cartridge except as part of a lot. I'd give it a value of about 10 cents.

If I saw one for a buck, I'd buy it. Basically, I'll pay $1 for any game I don't have.

[Pyromaniac605]

Ok whats so bad about it?

 

-Darren-

[tetrode kink]

...What are they?

They are this.

 

...and how hard are they to find?

Not hard at all. It's been a while since I actively searched for VCS accessories on eBay, but IIRC one could find at least one pair listed on any given day. Sometimes for a price that wasn't a total rip-off!

 

Ok whats so bad about [basic Programming]?

It's so horribly limited that it's practically useless. Its greatest limitation is that it has only the VCS's built-in RAM to store your program. It doesn't contain any of the additional on-cart RAM that some games had at the time. Worse, you can't even use all the VCS's 128 bytes, you only have about 63 bytes of storage. The cartridge uses the rest to store tidbits of information, such that it needs to keep track of your program's progress during runtime, etc.

 

So, you're limited to very short programs, which means writing even the simplest of games is out of the question. Oh, you can move a block around the screen, but that's about it. The most it is probably useful for is learning how a BASIC program is built and run, but it's not even the best choice for that.

 

So you're left with a cartridge with which you can write tiny programs to solve math problems or display and move one object, and which doesn't possess any facility to allow you to save those programs.

 

-tet