Atari 800 / games questions......

[griff3125]

Couple of simple questions....

 

Having just gone from a 800 to a 1200xl, I noticed that Pacmam (cart and xex) has the cut scenes on the xl but not on the original Atari 800.

I'm assuming these were in there all the time but only display when extra memory is present? Or was my 800 wonky?

 

I've had a defender cart for ages, love the game to death, but it's always been on the easy side.

I recently tried a version that came in one of the atr bundles and it's much harder, enemies will spawn in 75% of the time at the start of the level,

human pickups are much quicker and the saucer appears more frequently. Were there different revisions of the game?

 

Stargate Defender - is there a better version, I've got the official release and found the prototype but both version feel like a sloth compared to the original Defender,

is there any background on the development of Stargate, was it rushed?

 

Thanks in advance for any info on the above!

[Sugarland]

The original Defender cart I have is difficult. Not sure about PacMan with regards to RAM affecting cut scenes. Have you tried the new 2014 pac man? It's much better.

[griff3125]

No, until you mentioned it, I'd never heard of a 2014 pac man, I think I found it (pacman remake), MUCH truer to the arcade, sharper - thanks for the info!

[SS]

There are no cut scenes on the Atari produced Pac-Man cartridge, no matter what machine it is played on. There are, however, a number of Atari branded prototype versions floating around in XEX and ATR format that do contain the cut scenes and/or the attract screen. One of these prototype versions was also released in 1985 on floppy disk by Datasoft with the cut scenes and attract screen intact but with the Atari copyright scrubbed off. The 5200 version of the game also includes the cut screens but is a little harder than the A8 versions; tep392 did an A8 conversion of the 5200 Pac-Man last year.

 

I have attached a zip file containing many (ALL?) of the various A8 versions of Pac-Man.

A8 Pac-Man (various).zip

Edited October 14, 2018 by SS

[griff3125]

Yep, I must have not been paying attention to the versions, just tried the cart again, no cut scenes.

Thanks so much for the collection, quite a few in there that I've never seen.