Unreal History of the Atari 2600

Such_a_geek writes "Atari fans, do you remember playing Gunther Gebel Williams' Cage Cleaner, Typing Tutor, and Peabo Bryson's Cow Tipper on your 2600? How about playing the interactive Foghat 8-track while playing with your Pong action figures? Yeah, me neither. But thanks to this totally fake but quite convincing screenshots in this alternate history of 2600 games, I almost find myself remembering these things."

Comments

Wow

[Klerck]

First 64-bit UT2003 and now Unreal for the Atari 2600?!

Arggh....

[TopShelf]

The /. effect seems to have knocked the servers down to 2600-like performance...

Crimney...

[crumbz]

...That was over 20 years ago. You could probably plant fake memories of my ZX-81 having color and
sound into my head.

Re:Crimney...

[Baiken]

As far as I remembber the zx81 HAD sound, only had to put it near an AM radio and generate for next loops, the CPU parasite radiation plays a siren like tune int the radio if you tune it just the right way, have to test with random numbers and complex calculations, it seems to generate more complex sounds, have fun

To heck with those games

[fobbman]

I was sitting here scratching my head thinking "They had Unreal for the Atari 2600?"

How about "Basic Programming"?

[Otter]

I have this memory of reading an Atari tips/review book that raved about the "Basic Programming" cartridge and how you could use it to write all sorts of sophisticated programs. And begging my mother to spring for it along with the expensive input device it required. And sitting down to try out my 1337 Apple ][ basic skills and finding that the Atari system had a maximum memory of 48 commands and variables, making it unusable for anything beyond:

10 PRINT "BITE ME, ATARI!"
20 GOTO 10

Was that a nightmare or did that actually happen?

Strongbad

[Deanasc]

I think strong bad speaks for all us classic Atari fans when he say's "Somebody get this freakin duck away from me!"

Mirror

[DigiBoi]

Here is a Mirror.

Great book for video game history buffs

[Reedo]

I picked up the book, The Ultimate History of Video Games, last year and found it to be incredibly interesting. It's packed with information covering everything from the very first game ever made (Spacewar, student Steve Russell while at MIT) onward. It goes through the rise and fall of the video game industry (which crashed hard in the early 80s), the coin shortage caused by Space Invaders, the beginnings of Atari (and their fall), Nintendo and Sega. The author interviewed countless people from that era - it has tons of first-hand information/quotes from the folks that started the industry (Nolan Bushnell, Ralph Baer, etc) scattered all throughout the book where appropriate. And you'll find out that Atari wasn't all too squeaky clean when they started - their warehouse always reeking of recently smoked pot. ;) Oh, and that Steve Jobs actually got his start there.

This may sound like an ad, but the author deserves it. If you're interested in learning about how things began and what it was like at Atari/etc in the early days, then you'll love this book.

atari 2600 hardware interesting tidbit

[drwho]

The Atari 2600 used the RCA 1802 CPU. This was an early low power consumption chip. A version of the using Silicon-On-Sapphire technology (SoS is used where solid-state devices need to be hardened from the gamma radiation of space) was used in various spacecraft on the 1970s. I heard, though I am unable to provide a URL as a reference, that a number of these Sos 1802 CPUs were used in the Atari 2600. Now this could be interesting, maybe you could use your 2600 in space: Space Invaders indeed!

Anyone who has further details on this, please reply.

Re:From the wouldn-it-be-cool-if-Atari-went-OS dep

[image]

> Wouldn't it be cool if Atari open the source up on all their games?

Think they still have it?

I work for a Fortune 500 company, and we can't find the source code to some of our production systems.

Wait, I shouldn't admit that, should I?

Re:From the wouldn-it-be-cool-if-Atari-went-OS dep

[0x20]

Yeah, get my broker on the phone, I'm dumping all my stock in "a Fortune 500 Company."

Re:From the wouldn-it-be-cool-if-Atari-went-OS dep

[DeadSea]

I work for a company that made sixty some odd atari games. We no longer make games (quit that when atari went under in the 80s) but the source code is still in a cabinent in the offices. Besides the copyright problems (code was written for hire, subsequently licensed, etc.) the stuff is all archived on reel to reel tapes. Even if we had the correct machine to read them (I'm not sure), I don't know what kind of shape the media is in and it would be a pretty big undertaking to get it all onto a hard drive and the internet.