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ET Themed? I hope it doesn't come with that awful ET game made for the Atari.

That being said, the GBA SP is the slickest package I have ever seen. The clamshell, the screen that is viewable in direct sunlight (try THAT on your precious TurboExpress - they didn't even sell one of these [essential for backlight playing in sunlight, in my opinion]). It is slicker than snot on a doorknob. Buy it, experience the games and the great battery life, and see what I mean.

Don't forget that the Atari 7800 was backwards compatible with the Atari 2600.

Don't forget that the Atari 7800 was backwards compatible with the Atari 2600.

Wow, a lot of high-quality and completely *uninformed* posts here. See the Jaguar FAQ here or at a variety of other places.

Five processors, in three physical chips:
"Tom":
- 32-bit GPU (1)
- 64-bit Object processor (2)
- 64-bit blitter (3)

"Jerry":
- 32-bit DSP (4)

68000
- 16-bit general purpose (5)

So, by the logic in this thread, the Jaguar is a 32+64+64+32+16 = 208-bit system, if my math is right.

Pat.

Unfortunately, it really happened. Don't feel too bad - my story was almost identical. I'd promised my parents that I'd automate all sorts of household chores (remember when coupon databases were popular?) if only they'd shell out the dough. I was too embarassed by the end result to ask for a real computer for at least a year or two afterward.

There's also an Atari Jaguar version, for the Jaguar CD.

S.T.U.N. Runner was ported excellently
(in my opinion) on the Atari Lynx handheld.
3D graphics, digitized voices, and all!
Info on it at AtariAge.com...

No, the bug making Impossible Mission impossible was in the NTSC 7800 version. The bug was fixed in the PAL release. See this at AtariAge.

Here is a fairly comprehensive list of the homebrew games that have been released for the 2600 in recent years:

2600 Homebrew Search Results

And here is a list of games that are currently in development for the various Atari consoles. This list changes pretty frequently, and there are some projects not yet listed as the authors aren't very far along with them (Yes, I know that last link is listed in the linked story, just including it here for the convenience):

Titles In Development

A list of Atari 2600 games that have been hacked to change the graphics, sounds, colors, and more!

Atari 2600 Hacks

And finally, many games that were only released in either NTSC or PAL formats have been modified to work with the other television standard. This is useful for people who have the ability (such as through a Cuttle Cart) to play these binaries on a real television:

Atari 2600 TV Format Conversions

Enjoy!

Here is a fairly comprehensive list of the homebrew games that have been released for the 2600 in recent years:

2600 Homebrew Search Results

And here is a list of games that are currently in development for the various Atari consoles. This list changes pretty frequently, and there are some projects not yet listed as the authors aren't very far along with them (Yes, I know that last link is listed in the linked story, just including it here for the convenience):

Titles In Development

A list of Atari 2600 games that have been hacked to change the graphics, sounds, colors, and more!

Atari 2600 Hacks

And finally, many games that were only released in either NTSC or PAL formats have been modified to work with the other television standard. This is useful for people who have the ability (such as through a Cuttle Cart) to play these binaries on a real television:

Atari 2600 TV Format Conversions

Enjoy!

Here is a fairly comprehensive list of the homebrew games that have been released for the 2600 in recent years:

2600 Homebrew Search Results

And here is a list of games that are currently in development for the various Atari consoles. This list changes pretty frequently, and there are some projects not yet listed as the authors aren't very far along with them (Yes, I know that last link is listed in the linked story, just including it here for the convenience):

Titles In Development

A list of Atari 2600 games that have been hacked to change the graphics, sounds, colors, and more!

Atari 2600 Hacks

And finally, many games that were only released in either NTSC or PAL formats have been modified to work with the other television standard. This is useful for people who have the ability (such as through a Cuttle Cart) to play these binaries on a real television:

Atari 2600 TV Format Conversions

Enjoy!

Here is a fairly comprehensive list of the homebrew games that have been released for the 2600 in recent years:

2600 Homebrew Search Results

And here is a list of games that are currently in development for the various Atari consoles. This list changes pretty frequently, and there are some projects not yet listed as the authors aren't very far along with them (Yes, I know that last link is listed in the linked story, just including it here for the convenience):

Titles In Development

A list of Atari 2600 games that have been hacked to change the graphics, sounds, colors, and more!

Atari 2600 Hacks

And finally, many games that were only released in either NTSC or PAL formats have been modified to work with the other television standard. This is useful for people who have the ability (such as through a Cuttle Cart) to play these binaries on a real television:

Atari 2600 TV Format Conversions

Enjoy!

Defender 2 'the revenge'

Check out, for example, the homebrew projects at Atari Age.

Don't forget Kool Aid Man and Chase the Chuck Wagon

Don't forget Kool Aid Man and Chase the Chuck Wagon

It's a pity so many /.ers think posting old schematics is not relevant.
I think it actually is. For example, the ATARI 2600 console has chip schematics here. And I would love to find designs for the early Space Invaders, or Galaga systems. Why ? Because the average multimedia PC today is maybe a 1000X more powerful than those older systems, yet playability of all those new games has not increased by the same amount. Video Game Archeology can teach me.
By the way - even if those scans are fake, the /. forum finds out anyhow.

Nevermind, the satellite just picked up someone playing Cosmic Ark.

Actually, only the Atari 5200 Joystick is the root of all evil.

wow, they have other hacks too!

check out the Battlezone hack- it's such a vast improvement!!

wow, they have other hacks too!

check out the Battlezone hack- it's such a vast improvement!!

Some 2600 Roms have been hacked by people who I suppose wanted to expunge some bad memories. Ms. Pacman for the 2600 wasn't at all bad and somebody hacked it into a fairly arcade-faithful Pacman. Since Ms. Pacman was decent to start with, the hacker limited it to one maze that is a good approximation of arcade Pacman's maze. The prizes were fixed in place below the ghosthouse and edited to match arcade Pacman's prizes. Go to Atari Age and check it out.

Several credible jobs were done on reforming space invaders. There is no reason why 2600 Space Invaders couldn't have been more accurate as this proves.

Oh well, anyone who played games in the early eighties knew that crap was rushed out the door. Most of us bought it anyway. Me too. Suckers....

Some 2600 Roms have been hacked by people who I suppose wanted to expunge some bad memories. Ms. Pacman for the 2600 wasn't at all bad and somebody hacked it into a fairly arcade-faithful Pacman. Since Ms. Pacman was decent to start with, the hacker limited it to one maze that is a good approximation of arcade Pacman's maze. The prizes were fixed in place below the ghosthouse and edited to match arcade Pacman's prizes. Go to Atari Age and check it out.

Several credible jobs were done on reforming space invaders. There is no reason why 2600 Space Invaders couldn't have been more accurate as this proves.

Oh well, anyone who played games in the early eighties knew that crap was rushed out the door. Most of us bought it anyway. Me too. Suckers....

How about The Texas chainsaw massacre game for Atari 2600. Apparently this game was banned from a lot of retailers for violence (pixelated blood!) I've seen it go for well over $100 on ebay. Not sure if its worthy of making that top-10 list, but certainly a worthy mention.

This directly opposes Focus on getting better games. While one or two good games might come from Joe and Tom working in their bedrooms for 8 months straight, most of todays games are massive efforts and the cost for playing helps to ensure that only those who are truely serious will play. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get my mitts on a dev kit cheaply, but games today are way more complex than the average person/small team can effectively deal with. I'm glad SOMEONE paid attention to the Atari collapse.

Atari had no real quality control. Therefore a STREAM of crap games came out for the stupid machine. Ranging from horribly awful and disgusting to just fucking AWFUL.

as much of a Sony fanboy as I am, I wouldn't wish an atari downfall on ANY console.

Actually, thew game was called "Custer's Revenge", and it was for the Atari 2600

The yellow key doesn't let you get throught the yellow bar, the black upside-down U doesn't -DO- anything and I can't get in the castles!

And nobody has posted a manual yet. For those of you who are young whippersnappers like me, here's the manual: http://www.atariage.com/manual_html_page.html?Soft wareLabelID=964

Naturally only young people are allowed to follow that link.

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

...but it was smacked down so hard by Fox's lawyers that they've basically rewritten history and you can barely find any trace of its existance on the web. I know an Atari 2600 hack of Oink with Futurama characters is a violation of copyright, but I don't have to like the way Fox behaved. I don't know that I'll bother with an official game after that.

I just loved this game but I think there's another one (that also ran on Coleco) which would also be worth Q3ing : Venture.

Something like if you held RESET as you turned it on, you could shoot 2 or 3 shots at a time (instead of one). Check AtariAge... they have hints and 'did you know?' info for tons of games (along with all of the other typical info & images).

One of the coolest things about connectors is that the Atari 2600, C64 and Sega Genesis all had the same 9-pin connector. You can hook a Genesis pad up to your 2600 and it works well (B is the only button that works, along with the D-pad). There's even a hack for making the Genesis pad work with the two-button 7800 -- sadly I can't find the link atm. Coolest thing I've seen recently is a converter that lets you use PlayStation dual-analog controllers on the Atari 5200. I believe I saw something about it here.

Have they already done Invaders, night driver (scroll down) would be also possible - the classic Snake could be fun too. Well, actually, I quess any classic is rather easily portable :)

Not even close. The Controller Design From Hell was definitely the Atari Jaguar controller. Telephone keypad style, hurt your index fingers a lot and the buttons were plungy.

And despite this, Tempest 2000 still 0wns.

I doubt Saddam bought them to control missles after being fooled the last time.

Wow! Slashdotted. And my page survived too. Now I just have to bowl and 300 and get on the gong show. :o)

Programming the Atari 2600 is pretty unusual. I had never programmed anything else like it. The 128 bytes of RAM and crazy cycle dependency is really satisfying to conquer. For in-depth info on Atari 2600 programming, check out The Dig.

I've always had fun getting music out of devices that weren't really intended for it. One day I whipped together a really simple music program on the 2600 and it sounded so neat that I just kept adding features.

The Synthcart does just use the Atari 2600's built in sound circuits. The only modification I did to my Atari was to get the audio before it goes to the RF modulator, but this was just for convenience. The 2600 has two independent oscillators. It's basically got 8 different waveforms, 4 bit volume control, and 5 bit pitch. The biggest limitation is the pitch since it's just divided down from the system clock, so you don't end up with many in-tune notes.

There are a lot of other great Atari 2600 homebrew authors out there doing some neat stuff. You'll find most of their works on Hozer Video and you can find info on works in progress on Atariage.

See you at CGE!

-Paul

Len Charest even created a web-based Synthcart Beat Data Generator for the contest to assist people in generating the beatdata.h file necessary to recompile the beats binary that you could then run on an Atari 2600 to listen to your creations.

Len Charest even created a web-based Synthcart Beat Data Generator for the contest to assist people in generating the beatdata.h file necessary to recompile the beats binary that you could then run on an Atari 2600 to listen to your creations.

...console-perfect pitfall music...

If you want to talk real Atari 2600 music, then at least pick something cool like California Games ('Louie, Louie' and 'Wipeout') or BMX Airmaster. Heck, even Pressure Cooker had a catchy freakin' tune that puts Pitfall to shame.

If by Pitfall you really mean Pitfall II, then that wasn't really the Atari 2600 doing all the sound. That was a special chip on the cartridge (similar to the hack done with Ballblazer on the Atari 7800) that was handlin the cool music. It was awesome, that I'll admit, but it really isn't the 2600 doing the work and the emulators that support it had to add specific support for that particular cartridge to make the music work correctly.

...console-perfect pitfall music...

If you want to talk real Atari 2600 music, then at least pick something cool like California Games ('Louie, Louie' and 'Wipeout') or BMX Airmaster. Heck, even Pressure Cooker had a catchy freakin' tune that puts Pitfall to shame.

If by Pitfall you really mean Pitfall II, then that wasn't really the Atari 2600 doing all the sound. That was a special chip on the cartridge (similar to the hack done with Ballblazer on the Atari 7800) that was handlin the cool music. It was awesome, that I'll admit, but it really isn't the 2600 doing the work and the emulators that support it had to add specific support for that particular cartridge to make the music work correctly.

...console-perfect pitfall music...

If you want to talk real Atari 2600 music, then at least pick something cool like California Games ('Louie, Louie' and 'Wipeout') or BMX Airmaster. Heck, even Pressure Cooker had a catchy freakin' tune that puts Pitfall to shame.

If by Pitfall you really mean Pitfall II, then that wasn't really the Atari 2600 doing all the sound. That was a special chip on the cartridge (similar to the hack done with Ballblazer on the Atari 7800) that was handlin the cool music. It was awesome, that I'll admit, but it really isn't the 2600 doing the work and the emulators that support it had to add specific support for that particular cartridge to make the music work correctly.

...console-perfect pitfall music...

If you want to talk real Atari 2600 music, then at least pick something cool like California Games ('Louie, Louie' and 'Wipeout') or BMX Airmaster. Heck, even Pressure Cooker had a catchy freakin' tune that puts Pitfall to shame.

If by Pitfall you really mean Pitfall II, then that wasn't really the Atari 2600 doing all the sound. That was a special chip on the cartridge (similar to the hack done with Ballblazer on the Atari 7800) that was handlin the cool music. It was awesome, that I'll admit, but it really isn't the 2600 doing the work and the emulators that support it had to add specific support for that particular cartridge to make the music work correctly.

...console-perfect pitfall music...

If you want to talk real Atari 2600 music, then at least pick something cool like California Games ('Louie, Louie' and 'Wipeout') or BMX Airmaster. Heck, even Pressure Cooker had a catchy freakin' tune that puts Pitfall to shame.

If by Pitfall you really mean Pitfall II, then that wasn't really the Atari 2600 doing all the sound. That was a special chip on the cartridge (similar to the hack done with Ballblazer on the Atari 7800) that was handlin the cool music. It was awesome, that I'll admit, but it really isn't the 2600 doing the work and the emulators that support it had to add specific support for that particular cartridge to make the music work correctly.

...console-perfect pitfall music...

If you want to talk real Atari 2600 music, then at least pick something cool like California Games ('Louie, Louie' and 'Wipeout') or BMX Airmaster. Heck, even Pressure Cooker had a catchy freakin' tune that puts Pitfall to shame.

If by Pitfall you really mean Pitfall II, then that wasn't really the Atari 2600 doing all the sound. That was a special chip on the cartridge (similar to the hack done with Ballblazer on the Atari 7800) that was handlin the cool music. It was awesome, that I'll admit, but it really isn't the 2600 doing the work and the emulators that support it had to add specific support for that particular cartridge to make the music work correctly.

Kaboom! for the Atari 2600 and Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar are the only two games for which I've ever entered a trance-like state.

With Kaboom!, it was an attempt to hit the 10,000 point mark. By the time I was at the higher levels, all there was in front of me was the TV - the rest of the room and the people in it faded into the background. It was cool. :^)

With Tempest, you need strong focus to see past the flying pixels and giant "EXCELLENT!" that get between you and the baddies down the tube. The techno music helps a lot, too. ;^)

The only other game that's come close was WipEout for the PlayStation. With that game, though, it just got to the point of "need to pause before scratching nose."

-bill!

Kaboom! for the Atari 2600 and Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar are the only two games for which I've ever entered a trance-like state.

With Kaboom!, it was an attempt to hit the 10,000 point mark. By the time I was at the higher levels, all there was in front of me was the TV - the rest of the room and the people in it faded into the background. It was cool. :^)

With Tempest, you need strong focus to see past the flying pixels and giant "EXCELLENT!" that get between you and the baddies down the tube. The techno music helps a lot, too. ;^)

The only other game that's come close was WipEout for the PlayStation. With that game, though, it just got to the point of "need to pause before scratching nose."

-bill!

A lot of the games were the same, but the technology behind them was not. If you compare the Atari 2600 version of Asteroids, Pac Man, or Star Wars with the arcade version, you will see light-years of difference.

Some examples:

Asteroids on the Atari 2600 (Raster graphics)

Asteroids in the arcade (Vector graphics)

Atari 2600 Pac Man (Raster)

Arcade Pac Man Plus (Also Raster, no shots of the original, but the graphics are the same)

Atari 2600 Star Wars(Raster)

Arcade Star Wars (Vector)

A lot of the games were the same, but the technology behind them was not. If you compare the Atari 2600 version of Asteroids, Pac Man, or Star Wars with the arcade version, you will see light-years of difference.

Some examples:

Asteroids on the Atari 2600 (Raster graphics)

Asteroids in the arcade (Vector graphics)

Atari 2600 Pac Man (Raster)

Arcade Pac Man Plus (Also Raster, no shots of the original, but the graphics are the same)

Atari 2600 Star Wars(Raster)

Arcade Star Wars (Vector)

Try looking at AtariAge.com. Either the site or their forums should be able to point you in the right direction on where to go.