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Say what you want about the Atari 2600 version of Pac-man -- while okay, just wasn't pac-man. (Not because of the limitations of the system, see this homebrew 4k Pac-man done right.

E.T., on the other hand is an excellent game. It's a complex and involved adventure that is challenging without being frustrating and extraordinarily well developed. The controls are very responsive, collision detection is pixel-perfect, and the NPC sprites are bright and colorful. As an added bonus, the game is loaded with secrets to find.

If there is any flaw in the game at all, I haven't found it. The only change I would make would be to OR CXP0FB and CXPPMM against 0x40 a scanline before completing drawing E.T. so that you could walk "in front" of the wells and baddies. (I'd bet this one change would have turned the so-called "worst game ever" into a "top 10 best")

A few links for the uninformed:
http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-et.html
http://2600connection.atari.org/et.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsF7q_hA6Z8
Best quote from the above link: "If you can't get out of the wells, you suck at video games"

Since you likely lost the manual more than 25 ago, check out this "How to beat home video games" tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-pzdPLfy9Y

Hmm, is there any truly comphehensive guide about the capabilities of the sound chip (Pokey) online? I got sufficiently curious to do a bit of googling about it, but didn't really find any really comphehensive feature / register descriptions or such. I did find comments about some interesting tricks, such as possibility of combining channels to produce more than 8 bits of resolution, though. (Filtering capabilities seem to have been restricted to high-pass filtering though, whereas SID filtering provided low/band/high-pass filtering options, or combinations of them.)

The pre-ST Atari machines were fairly rare around where I live, so I didn't ever really see or hear them in action. Perhaps I should give the SAP player a try and check out some Atari tunes; if somebody has cared enough to build an archive of them, they can't be truly bad :)

In a new report issued this week, eight-track and Atari 2600 game sales are down. Industry leaders blame rampant piracy and MAME.

You mean Stella, Z26 and PCAE. MAME's an arcade emulator.

And while sales of actual carts are virtually nonexistant (new 2600 games typically have production runs in the dozens), companies still sell PC/PS2/GBA versions of these classics through the magic of emulation - just as music companies sell music through iTunes (but of course iTunes sales do not factor into the 7.6 percent figure - they want to show how much their business is declining).

Also of note is Rayman. Although the background music isn't that spectacular, the game does have some incredibly surreal music-oriented background scenery.

Another game worth mention is Zoop. This game's background music will get lodged in your head and you'll find yourself humming it for a week if you're not careful. This game is worth tracking down, even today. Although it's written for MS-DOS, it's run flawlessly under every DOS environment I've thrown at it (including several different releases of Windows and OS/2's DOS box.)

d'oh! (Actually, that mistake will probably drop the traffic to my little site to something it can cope with.)

You may want to read a report on misbehaving censorware. Blocking the the article as "pornography" is misbehavior. If your company's business has anything remotely to do with video production or video games, ask your IT department to review gamesx.com (the site on which the article is hosted) and consider whitelisting it.

And although outright pornography isn't found in libraries, some books are considered pornography to conservatives.

An erotic work will fall into one of two classes: "obscene" erotica without artistic or scientific value, and merely "indecent" erotica considered "harmful to minors" even though it may be art. The Supreme Court has long held that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not protect the right to disseminate "obscene" material. The COPPA/COPA/CIPA controversy mostly considers 1. preserving adults' access to legitimate "indecent" erotica, and 2. preserving access to non-erotica that censorware miscategorizes as erotica, such as breast cancer pages, Philip K. Dick pages, pages that promote adoption over abortion or vice versa, Matsushita's site, etc.

VIA is a company. A company is a collection of PEOPLE, not a PERSON. "The people of VIA has removed..." is wrong, thus "VIA has removed..." is wrong.

Stupid Yanks.

AtheOS
BeOS
Amiga
atari's os
Ecomstation (fka OS2)

those are the *easy ones*... there are probably 500 more...

Here's a Real Testimonial in the form of an actual Apple Help Desk call I downloaded from an Apple employee's website. I love Apple, I love my MacQuarium, but perhaps Ellen's answer isn't as clear cut as it seems... The link is also found at media.atari.org

Instead of playing it in Flash, you could just get an Atari emulator like Stella, and then get the Adventure rom here.

Try Stella. It is great.

I came just shortly after. Got a 520ST+ which had
a double sided floppy and 1MB ram (done by Atari
through soldering RAM chips piggy backed)
I got fast into demo programming.
Here's my nostalgic webpage
ST emulators start to become really useable. Best ones for demos are SainT and STeem. STeem even has a linux version.

The 5200 was just an 800 whose memory map got stuck in a blender, the OS yanked, and the controller turned into an easily broken analog piece of crap. :) There were also not very many games.

I'd like to see an 800/XL/XE portable. :)

Atari800 on my Zaurus will suffice for now. ;)

(Ooh, or maybe a 7800!)

Ben is cool. I hung out with him a lot at least year's Classic Gaming Expo. The portable 2600s were cool, and I love the way you can 'link' them for two-player games like Combat.

Now if only Infogrames or JAKKS would hire this guy, we'd have a REAL retro system to stick in our pockets.

(Of course, I've got Stella on my Zaurus, but it's not quite the same.)

Meanwhile I still occasionally enjoy the Liberty Gameboy emulator. Just the other day I was playing Pokemon Pinball while waiting for a Ghost multicast session to finish.

A number of years ago, a friend of mine had his Atari STe mounted
in a PC case, complete with a PC keyboard and everything. Now that takes some dremel work!

Just the keyboard was a lot of work, since the Atari was built into the machine,
and the PC one needed a custom interface..

Oh, memories..

HTML Kit is a nice editor for win32 (though happen to prefer Crimson Editor), but keep in mind that HTML Tidy is a separate product (no affiliation with HTML Kit) that you can download on your own. And, unlike HTML Kit, HTML Tidy is available for many operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Atari.

He originally wanted to name his company "Syzygy"...

Atari.org

Little Green Desktop (only forums for the moment)

... there are really good emulators available for the old Atari :)

Troed of Sync and I.C.S

• Dungeon Master Encyclopaedia (with pics from a fully 3d version of the game called DM Nexus, and a DM forum)
• Dungeon Master Web Lots of animated gifs from the game, including characters and monsters (as seen above).

While Amiga folks have been talking about resurecting their platform for ages (to the point of appearing as a User Friendly joke about UFO and Elvis sightings!), Atari never stopped moving forward because Atari-licensed clones were developped and the OS constantly upgraded.

The current state of Atari is abundantly documented at Atari.ORG's community website.

Visit my homepage for the OS/2 version of Stella, or the Stella Homepage for version for Linux, Mac, Amiga, and many other operating systems(even winblows).