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Atari Turns 40 Today
harrymcc writes "On June 27, 1972, a startup called Atari filed its papers of incorporation. A few months later, it released its first game, Pong. The rest is video game history. I celebrated the anniversary over at TIME.com by chatting with the company's indomitable founder, Nolan Bushnell. From the article: 'Like everyone else who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, I played them all: Pong, Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede, Battlezone, Pole Position, Crystal Castles and my eternal favorite, Tempest. The first computer I bought with my own money was an Atari 400. So when I chatted with Bushnell this week to mark Atari’s 40th anniversary, I felt like I was talking with a man who helped invent my childhood.'" I spent my fair share of time playing Warlords with friends on my 2600.
Atari > Commodore
Atari 400 and 800 were just plain fun. Yeah, plastic cases, and ROM cartridges, but what fun those arcade games were. The Apple II guys would say: PR#6. We'd say: PR pound sand.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The rest IF history?
I still remember the sense of pride I got when I figured out the Space Invaders strategy of shooting through my own shield to create a one bullet wide gap which could be used to pick off the invaders while staying relatively protected.
if you took all the ram used in every 2600 that was ever made you'd have less than 4GB of space. (128 bytes per system and about 30 million systems were made. Pretty much 4gb is standard on a laptop these days.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
get it away from me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk35EnnS53Y
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Don't get me wrong, I love my 7800 ProSystem, but Atari turning 40 implies that it's still alive.
All 100 Atari Greatest Hits games are free on iOS today. Link Here
Between that, discounts on Atlantic and Elektra vinyl, and the corporate game room, I wouldn't have quit back in '82.
Atari is dead and buried. RIP.
We'll be saying the same thing about FreeBSD and OpenBSD in 40 months. RIP
I remember going over to Atari in 1979 or 1980 so we could see how they made membrane switch panels. At that time they were made pf 3 pieces of mylar sandwiched together. The center had holes and the two outer layers had silver plated pads for the switch contacts.
Real News for Nerds!
Atari is barely remembered by today's 20-somethings, but back in the 70s and early 80s they were # 1. They had the number one console (Atari VCS/2600) from 1977 to 84, and the number one computer (Atari 800) in 1981 and 82.
I still love those old Atari 2600 games better than many modern games. Point, shoot, rack-up a million points. Brag to your friends.
FREE magazine : http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/
Pole position was Namco's.
Just like Xevious which had some Atari built cabinets floating around.
Now, get off my lawn or i'll xevious-bomb your balls - with just one shot in the middle, of course :)
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I spent my fair share of time playing Warlords with friends on my 2600.
The best part of Warlords was when one someone "died" - they were still there as a mostly invisible ghost and could affect the trajectory of the fireball if it hit them. So if you died, you could really mess with the remaining players anytime the fireball came near your corner of the screen.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Would you mind terribly if I ask what your problem is?
I mean, what difference does it make to you if somebody likes something that you don't?
Do y'all really have nothing better to do than criticize somebody's passion just because it isn't all shiny and new?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umnyVPgWE3g for a video.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFrhkC4Xuw4
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Many 2600 games are a bit... underwhelming either today or when they were new. But the best ones have aged really well. You can have a pick up game with a friend now in 2012 and still have a royal blast, something that isn't true of many newer games with infinitely better gfx.
I won't go so far as to say games were better then in general, but there was a lot of really fun stuff from that system, which had fuck-all for graphics. I'd rather have a good pick-up game of air-sea battle than Diablo III (and as a benefit, I don't need to ask them each time I want to play the damn thing. Company's history, and game still works).
I remember star trek on the atari 800. It took over 20 minutes to load from the cassette drive. You got to shoot at Klingons. It seemed so cool back then.
Tempest is by far my favorite video game of all time. No video game since has come close to holding my attention like Tempest. The simplicity of the game, the rhythm of the game, the invisible levels, the chip glitch that enabled you to do weird things to the game depending on the last two digits of your score. I still dream about the game, and I haven't played it in 20 years.
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I was the VP of a large Atari club in the Seattle area back in the days. Somewhere stored away in my attic is an Atari 130XE with extra RAM and a device called a Black Box that was made by a company in Rochester, NY that allowed me to hook up a SCSI hardrive. I also have modified disk drives, as well as some of their 16-bit hardware. I fondly remember the days when the term "hacker" did not have such an bad meaning.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ataris-greatest-hits/id422966028?mt=8
Free Atari Games today only, got an email about it.
For iPhones and iPads only.
Be seeing you...
Meh. I don't see how anyone could have enjoyed the Atari. I was looking at the 2600 wiki page and the graphics are SHOCKING! The pixels are huge, the refresh rate was awful, lack of color, no 3D support. With no hope of a quality game like Call of Duty, how could anyone have fun with it?
Meeting the #1 influence on your childhood aspirations is indeed an amazing experience. Been there, done that, in my case with Jack Tramiel.
Atari would have been 40 today... IF it still was something more than just a trademark. Infogrames in France is not Atari. It's a trademark holder. Remember "Is it live or is it Memorex"? Those mediocre DVD-Rs you bought last month aren't coming from the same company as those cassette tapes you used to record KROQ tunes.
Friend of mine had an atari and a set of wireless controllers. We could play that game for hours, we made a very good team.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Computer games rule, Spacewar motherfuckers! YEAH. PDP11 in-da-lab!
Or just love the Ur-Quan
No one gave a shit when Max Headroom turned 25 last March.
for my computer collection ... its a pretty interesting computer ... though more of a games machine than serious stuffyness computer (we were an Apple II family) Though probally one of the XL series if it dropped in my lap that way. Definitely any of the 16 bit machines ..
My cousins had a 2600, I at one point had a 5200 with one working joystick, pac mand and pole position (still one of my favorites), though I never really cared for the consoles as much, I just about bought a 2600 till the old lady went from 15 bucks to 75 cause her grandson looked at rapebay, hope she still has it instead of 15 bucks and one less chunk of crap in her house heh
I found out a few years ago that the dude that wrote Tempest grew up in the same town as me. Interesting career indeed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Theurer
Like everyone else who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, I played them all.
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Common knowledge are there? Oh, Best. Individuals exactly what you've ME! It's official codebase became though I have never To any BSD project, oof the play area won't vote in Good to write you posts. Therefore much as Windows
Sorry for posting AC.
It seems worth noting that the Atari brand is only used by the French publisher previously named Infogrames, who bought it in 2003 and chose it as its main name in 2008. The current Atari does not have much to do with the publisher and manufacturer of which so many Slashdotters have fond memories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari,_SA
Also, a French satirical newspaper, Le Canard Enchaîné, recently published some facts about the poor management cribbling Atari nowaday. Most notably, the CEO Franck Angeard seems to get 500.000 €/y for 10 days of work per month, while they're struggling with economic difficulties and shutting down their only remaining development studio.
Sad, really, both for what Atari and Inforgrames have been in the past.
Amiga was really the next generation Atari machine, the guy who designed it was the same guy who worked on the Atari 400/etc. I have written code for Atari 8bit/16bit, Commodore 8bit/16bit and I can tell you that Atari 8bit -> Amiga and Commodore 64 -> Atari ST from the architecture and hardware design point of view.
Check out the history of Atari on WIkipedia, interesting read.
Just fired up my 2600 only to find out it no longer works.. at least I still have Stella (2600 emulator). My Atari 130XE with 1050 disk drive still works and the floppies from 1980s are still booting... amazing.
I remember getting an Atari 400 for Christmas in 79 or 80. It had two rom cartridges, BASIC and a games called something like Starcommander. I remember turning it on with the BASIC cartridge, a blue screen with the word READY in the top right. That was a bit of a letdown. It took me about an hour and a half to copy a 20 line program into it. I eventually learned to program my own simple games on that computer. I loved the way you could draw graphics in atari basic, it was so easy and intuitive. Next Christmas I got a full stroke keyboard to replace the membrane nightmare keyboard.
-- QED
I spent many an afternoon/weekend playing Goonies on my old 800XL. I loved that game!
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
I still remember it to this day (I had the 6 switch VCS, family got it in December '79):
Atari 2600/VCS + Space Invaders cart - turn the power off and on rapidly until you get a screen with out the invaders and only the mothership travelling across the screen at the top. Once you see that, start the game and you will fire two shots at a time instead of only.
My dad would get pissed if we did it 'cause he swore we were going to destroy the console.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
If you are, indeed, one of the Stella team, then I thank you for the years of enjoyment that Stella has brought me and my friends. It gave us a chance to relive the old battles of Combat, Air-Sea Battle, and the like as adults.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
The 8 bit machines were only 8 bits, and can't hold a candle to the 64 bit beasts we have now, but what people did with those 8 bit machines was very impressive. What they lacked in hardware, they made up for in innovative software design. You were much closer to the metal back then, so assembly was more pervasive. People did a lot with BASIC back then, and the machines turned a generation on to programming. You had no choice but to program or do nothing. There were no other options. Type it in from the magazine, change it and see what it does. Awesome. Floating pixel graphics and things moving around the screen. Now you have to get past the display managers and layers of cruft. Sure its all been put there to create for the user a comprehensive experience, but you are further from the machine. The extra layer of abstraction is enough to make a lot of peoples eyes glaze over and never try their hand at writing software. Atari, Commodore, TI, Radio Shack, Sinclair, Timex. These were the machines that the billionaire internet pioneers cut their teeth on. To the great unwashed, they are just 'toy game computers that don't do much'. To the billionaires, they were machines that opened their world and got them started making millions, then billions, one peek, one poke, one byte at a time. There is nothing to replace the 8 bit machines today. That narrow window has closed. Its like the tiny wind up toys that were popular, and the kids of the 1860's and 1870's took apart, put back together and re-jigged to work better. Later those kids started building other mechanical contraptions like cars and airplanes. They don't make wind up toys like that anymore. That window, too, has closed.
As stated above, a "Player" is 8 pixels wide, but runs the height of the screen. Each "Missile" is 2 pixels wide and also runs the height of the screen. Making a change to (IIRC) one value will turn the 4 missiles into a 5th Player, an example of which was it's use in Pac Man for the 8-bit Atari computers. The players and missiles are also a single color.
Because I used to program games my 800XL I'll throw out a few tidbits that I can vaguely remember:
If you overlap two players, there's a register that can be set that will cause any area overlapped by the two (with bits turned on) to create a third color though you can't control what the third color is.
Using a Display List Interrupt, you can change the colors of each horizontal line. This is done in many games to create a sunset. It can also be used to change the color of a Player or missile per line (think "Bounty Bob" in the Atari version of Miner 2049'er)
DLI's can also be used to chop up a Player or missile into many different objects.
Vertical scrolling is far easier to do than horizontal on the 8-bit Atari computers, plus there's a register that can be set that "smooths" vertical scrolling.
There was also a way to use 16 bits for sound by combining two of the Atari's 4 8 bit channels... I never found a use for that at all.
Because the XL/XE series of computers didn't have an internal speaker, it was possible to use the channel for the internal speaker as a fifth audio channel, though games that used that 5th channel might sound a bit weird on a 400/800. IIRC, programming this 5th channel was not done through POKEY.
The 8-bit Atari's had 256 colors, not 128 as stated earlier (16 shades of 16 colors). Displaying all of them at one time required DLI trickery.
One magazine, Antic or Analog, detailed how the DIN monitor output on the 8-bit computer could be wired for S-Video output.
That's what I can remember for right now. Almost wish I still had my 800XL.
How come nobody mentioned Star Raiders yet? The most awesome game available for home systems in 1980.