Atari 2600 Fanatics out there?

[John W Kercheval]

Any other 2600 fanatics? I use one to this day. Set up in a special room designed just for the system. had the S-Video interface put in for slightly better graphics.

[Siegfried]

I do have one (plus most other Atari gear) but rarely find time to use it, let alone installing the Composite mod waiting in a drawer. Just too many gadgets competing for time

Have you tried the Harmony cart (all games ever made running from a single SD card)?

[John W Kercheval]

I've seen that but not interested I like the "vintageness" of the original machine.

[Dave Britten]

You bet! I've got a 6-switch (light) woodgrain model hooked up to a ~30 inch CRT TV in one of our two living rooms at this very moment (along with an NES and PS2).

I've got around 400 carts or so (kept downstairs in the game room), but I've also got the Harmony cart, and it's absolutely fantastic. It'll run every retail game, including the Supercharger tapes, but the real draw is being able to run all the homebrews, ROM hacks, and prototypes that are out there. There are some pretty astonishing homebrews that make use of the ARM coprocessor on the cart. I think Space Rocks - a really good Asteroids clone - makes use of it for nearly all the game logic.

There's a really good homebrew Pac-Man in the works that uses the same ghost AI logic from the arcade game. The latest version is available in this post:

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/229152-...try3158844

[Gene]

I don't use the original 2600 but one of the handheld android clones that can run the emulators.

The Yinlips model I have (JXD is another big supplier) can play 2600 games, gameboy, gameboy advance, N64 even, PS1, etc.

Pretty amazing. These machines can be viewed at this store (I have no connection with them other than being a previous customer).

http://willgoo.com/

[Dave Britten]

(01-26-2015 04:43 PM)Gene Wrote:  I don't use the original 2600 but one of the handheld android clones that can run the emulators.

The Yinlips model I have (JXD is another big supplier) can play 2600 games, gameboy, gameboy advance, N64 even, PS1, etc.

Pretty amazing. These machines can be viewed at this store (I have no connection with them other than being a previous customer).

http://willgoo.com/

The 2600 is a rather notoriously difficult-to-emulate system. Since the chip that handles video output (I hesitate to call it a graphics chip, since it's only capable of rendering a single TV scan line at a time) is so tightly tied to timing of the CPU and the executing program, the slightest emulation inaccuracy can throw the whole thing off. Plus the extensive flicker that's required to display complex sets of sprites tends to look pretty awful on an LCD; the quick response and phosphor persistence of a CRT are what makes it just bearable.

So I'll play the games from time to time on my hacked PSP if I'm desperate, but I'd rather play a real 2600 hooked up to an old TV that requires at least two people to carry.

Also, anybody on this site would probably enjoy the book Racing the Beam. It's about the hardware inside the 2600, the crazy hoops you have to jump through to program the thing, and how it factored into game design. (Spoilers: it's got a mere 128 bytes of RAM, 4 KB ROM address space unless bank switching is used, and the TIA chip can only be set up to render a single scan line at a time, requiring the game program to set a handful of registers to manipulate the few on-screen objects, one line at a time, on the fly, during the brief horizontal blanking period. Hope you can find some time to do your actual game logic during the vertical blanking!)

[Kevin Ouellet]

I got an Atari 2600 myself in 2013 as well as dozens of games. It's pretty fun to play despite the limitations and some games were very well done for their time.

There's a community of people who still make games for the platform and some are even sold in cartridge form (Halo 2600, for example)

[Dave Britten]

(02-04-2015 06:05 PM)Kevin Ouellet Wrote:  I got an Atari 2600 myself in 2013 as well as dozens of games. It's pretty fun to play despite the limitations and some games were very well done for their time.

There's a community of people who still make games for the platform and some are even sold in cartridge form (Halo 2600, for example)

Yeah, there's some really great homebrew stuff out there. In addition to Halo 2600, I'd also recommend checking these out:

Ladybug
The two homebrew versions of Donkey Kong
Dungeon
Stay Frosty
Space Rocks (Asteroids clone)
The recent Pac-Man remake
Princess Rescue (Super Mario Bros. for 2600, made with batari Basic)

[Kevin Ouellet]

What I wanted the most is a real cart of Princess Rescue but since it was taken down by a Nintendo C&D it's now $500 on Ebay...

I would like Stay Frosty 2 at one point, though. Not sure if real cartridges of Donkey Kong VCS are available but it would be cool. I tried the game on an emulator and it looks almost on-par with NES graphics.

[Dave Britten]

(02-04-2015 11:45 PM)Kevin Ouellet Wrote:  What I wanted the most is a real cart of Princess Rescue but since it was taken down by a Nintendo C&D it's now $500 on Ebay...

I would like Stay Frosty 2 at one point, though. Not sure if real cartridges of Donkey Kong VCS are available but it would be cool. I tried the game on an emulator and it looks almost on-par with NES graphics.

DK VCS has pretty mindblowing graphics for a 2600 game, though I think the other DK that's in the works (DK2600?) has much more of the gameplay intact. There's also a hack of the original Coleco version of DK under development that adds the other two missing boards.

Personally, I'm not really into the idea of selling homebrew games that are somebody else's unlicensed IP, though as freely-available labors of love, I'm not bothered by it. It's actually pretty cool to see what the 2600 can do with games we're all familiar with, or what could have been with an investment of a little more time and money from the original publisher.

For the totally original homebrews like Stay Frosty, it's neat to see actual commercial support for a game console that's nearly 40 years old.

[Rick314]

Coincidentally, I just watched "Video Games: The Movie" 2 days ago on Netflix, and the Atari 2600 is an important part of it. See the trailer for this 2014 production at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETSKGdtrMK8, with "the Atari 2600" mentioned in the opening line. (I had one, but no more, and I really enjoyed the movie.)