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Atari Announces an Official Portable 2600 System
Bill Kendrick writes: "Infogrames (the folks who now own Atari) have just struck a deal with another company to produce a 10-in-1 video game system based on the Atari 2600. It'll be joystick-shaped, plug into a TV set, cost only $20, and include games like Combat, Asteroids, Missile Command, and my favorite, Adventure! It won't replace my Atari 2600 Jr and 60 cartridges, but it's a step in the right direction!"
try http://www.atarihq.de
they delivered to me 8 times reliably
There's something like this already available in the mega joy 2 - since the games are all unlicenced, they all have different names, but you get three-times the names.
Here is what happened with Atari.
It got split into 2 seperate entities.
Atari. (Home Entertainment)
Atari Games (Arcade Entertainment)
Warner Communications sold Atari to JTS i think, which sold it to Hasbro Interactive which Hasbro sold off to Infogrames of France.
Warner Spun off Atari games as a subsiderary of them. Warner sold the Division to Midway.
So that's why there is a little confusinon here.
Hope this clears this up.
A Jedi doesn't drink Coors, a Jedi Drinks Guinness or Bass!
It's sad to see Atari's legacy being abused by yet another company who just lives on Atari's fame.
Atari used to be a great systems manufacturer as well as a gaming company. Their ST line was very good and could compete with the Amiga in it's days. Their STacy an STBook were great portables where the STBook was way better then what any company could offer as a portable. It took years for the industrie to reach the same kind of portability as the STBook offered.
Alas, Atari is no more. The companies diverse owners just broke it into little parts and sold them to the highest bidders.. There are few companies which have had a change of ownership so frequently as Atari has.
Take a look at http://www.atari-history.com for some background information on Atari and it's products
I believe, until I'm corrected, that this is not actually an Atari 2600 (or anything even vaguely similar) but rather Jakks existing hardware system with classic Atari games ported to it.
(Just to clear up the comments about "wish it had a cartridge slot).
-marc
If you live in the UK, head on down to your local Game store. Mine's still selling Lynx and Jaguar games (and indeed, Jaguar consoles!).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
It's a bit deceptive to refer to it as a portable system considering you need to plug it into a TV to actually to use it. By using the word portable I thought something along the lines of Puma the portable Atari 2600 where a Sega Game Gear has been converted into a portable Atari 2600 complete with its own display.
There is a whole site dedicated to Atari 2600 portable conversion projects that has been discussed in this and repeated in this Slashdot article.
aus.music.scrapbook
Atari. ;)
The home entertainment division, which is the only Atari left. It was sold to Infogrames a while back, and since Infogrames is in the story, that's the division involved.
Midway's arcade division shut down months ago (a few months after the Williams pinball division got axed), so for all intents and purposes Atari Games (the arcade division) is dead. Midway, the home entertainment division, is still alive and kicking.
I'm not sure how the intellectual property is all handled, since Infogrames has been putting out PC ports of old arcade games under the Atari brand. Seems like Midway might be able to do the same with old Atari games.
But, then again, Midway needs profitability at this point... putting out old titles seems like wonderful ideas, I just so rarely see it actually result in profits.
Though, personally, I wish I had picked up more Infocom Treasures collections... I only got the first one released for the Mac, and there were one or two after that. Then there were a few that never made it far enough to get ported... (sigh)
Moof!
Yes, we have schematics of the 2600 on our site, you can find them here:
Atari 2600 Schematics - NTSC
Atari 2600 Schematics - PAL
As for details of its construction and roms, there are quite a few knowledgable people who visit our message boards, and they can probably answer any specific questions you have.
Well, you were partially right.
Warner dumped Atari after the videogame crash of 1984, after which time the Tramiels of Commodore fame came into power. At this time Atari was completely autonomous and had no parent company. After the mismanagement of Atari at the hands of the notorious Tramiel family with botched XEGS, Lynx, and Jaguar releases and burning bridges with just about every third-party that dealt with them, they were forced to perform a reverse merger with JTS corporation. They got a whole $5,000,000 from Hasbro when JTS could no longer stay in business themselves. Pretty sad when you think about it.
It's a pretty well-documented saga, Atari's last days, and I really recommend reading about it.
Songbird Productions ( http://songbird.atari.net/ ) produces NEW Atari Lynx games. :)
Hey, that one was made ages ago: Commodore Executive 64 (SX64/DX64). =)
(Though neither had Datassette port, and I'm not sure about cartridge support - but on C64, floppy loading times were never Utterly Horrible (especially with disk turbo), even if they're slow by today's standards...)
(Oh, and getting a SX64/DX64 is a bit hard. An used laptop, a Linux install and VICE would probably be cheaper =)