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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 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.
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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.
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
Until Commodore produced the Amiga.
Of course the Amiga really had Atari blood running through it, having been designed by Jay Miner -- the same man that help design previous Atari machines.
I can't believe Atari let the Amiga design get away from them.
Instead they came out with a machine that had a dumb frame buffer and simple syth chip attached to a CPU. The ST was more Radio Shack Color Computer than a next generation Atari machine.
I guess I can blame Commodore for that since they gave Atari Jack Tramiel. That guy seemed obsessed with undermining his old company. He basically helped Atari and Commodore destroy each other while IBM PC compatibles slowly took over.
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.
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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.
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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'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFrhkC4Xuw4
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Jay Miner - Another guy who revolutionized computing, but Steve Jobs gets all the credit & media attention while Jay gets nothing. :-|
And don't blame Atari. Blame the idiots at Warner Communications who decided in 1983 to sell-off the company on the belief that videogaming was a "fad" whose time had passed. Warners stopped funding the Amiga company, so naturally they needed to look for new funding..... they discovered Commodore who bought them out wholesale.
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Pole Position is one of many games that Atari had the exclusive rights to sell in North America. They even went so far as to add an "atari banner" flying over the racetrack.
ATARI FORCE - In the year 2005 Earth is facing ecological devastation and Atari is the savior of the world, and so too are their "Atari Force" superheroes! Try not to laugh too much. I literally bought the game just so I could read the comic (the game was not bad either). I was also a loyal reader of Atari Age which was just a glorified advertisement for new games released every other month.
Description - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Force
Whole series - http://www.atariage.com/comics/index.html
Geek Encyclopedia - http://home.hiwaay.net/~lkseitz/comics/AtariForce/
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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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The Atari 800 computer had 128 colors for better still images (great for nude girls), but only 2 sprites, so it was hard for programmers to make "speedy" arcade-style games like they did for the Commodore with its 8 sprites.
The C64 was also about half the cost, so it started outselling the Atari after just six months and remained #1 from 1983 to 86.
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As much as I was a chickenhead in my youth, I gotta say that the Atari 8 bit family had better video. I think. I haven't thought much about it in ages. If I had the room, I'd get an Atari 800 to play with.
I don't know how the Atari 800 compared to the Commodore 64, but when I was a kid my parents got me a used 800XL originally owned by possibly the biggest pirate ever. I've yet to find a video on Youtube of a game on that machine that I haven't played!
It was great machine to have at the age of 10. I remember some of the games I had were written in BASIC, I had fun going in and editing them. Heh.
Recently I went on a Youtube spree to check out some of the games I used to play, and I gotta say I was impressed with what I found. Check out this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKh5b8jcwLk&feature=related
This is Goonies, I suppose you'd call it either an adventure or possibly a puzzle game. I remember firing that one up over and over again and spending all this time trying to figure out how to progress to the next screen. I can't think of a modern day equivalent of that game.
Fun stuff. I really don't regret that this is the machine I had while all my friends had NES. (Although I was perturbed at the time...)
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
And don't blame Atari. Blame the idiots at Warner Communications who decided in 1983 to sell-off the company on the belief that videogaming was a "fad" whose time had passed.
Interesting, I remember when laser disc arcade games like "Dragon's lair" came out. They were supposed to revitalize a slumping arcade industry. I just looked it up and Dragon's Lair came out in 1983. I was an arcade addict at the time and remember it well, arcade games had stagnated and computers lacked the "horse power" to get to the next level of visual effects. I believe it was Gauntlet that was one of the first big hits, post laser disc, that really "rescued" video games. It didn't need great graphics (although we all thought it was really cool at the time), it just needed to be massively addicting and awesome to play. I couldn't count how many hours I spent shoving quarters into that game.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
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?
The only other video game out then was the Magnavox and Sears "Pong", which only had 4 varities of pong, and maybe a light sensing pistol with which you tried to hit a large white square bouncing around the tv screen. After playing nothing but pong, the 2600 seemed like a Cray Supercomputer to people then.
The Atari didn't have sprites, as such. It had a system called Player Missile Graphics. There were 4 players (8 bits wide), and 4 missiles (2 bits wide), which spanned the entire height of the screen. The 4 missiles could be combined into a fifth player. The Display List Interrupt system allowed a programmer to position the horizontal location many times during the vertical scan. On a side scroller type game, each horizontal band could have its own 5 players.
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The games that aged well were the ones that were games first, and graphics demos as an afterthought... Warlords, Circus Atari, Space Invaders, Asteroids, er... well, you know what I mean. What's kind of sad is that the games that IMHO aged the best were the ones I got for Christmas along with the 2600 itself. It seems like almost every game I got between Christmas 1981 and the arrival of my Vic-20 a year later was a disappointment and letdown, partly because Atari's ad agency was too good at hyping them up and making you think they wouldn't be lame and kind of suck. I mean, Defender and Missile Command weren't bad, and Berzerk was OK, but it seems like most of the best-looking games were fun for about 20 minutes. I think I had more fun watching Pitfall's hi-res rope swing back and forth than I ever did actually *playing* it.
A few good games came out after I'd fled for greener Vic-20 pastures a year later (Ms. Pac Man comes to mind), but Atari's quality seriously went down the shithole that summer, especially post-Pacman -- the point when all Atari's management could see were dollar signs and a license to print money, and they had their developers cranking out shit games with undersized cartridges and minimal quality control -- relying entirely upon a rapidly-slipping brand name and marketing -- to keep the cash flowing. By the time they got their mojo back with Ms Pacman, most of us had moved on to greener pastures -- the Vic 20, C64, and the Atari computers, in particular. Or we got a Colecovision. Or both.
It's too bad Coleco's licensing was so short-sighted and such a clusterfuck mess... if any vintage console has real market potential today as a "joystick with embedded videogame and cartridges", it's the Colecovision. Unfortunately, the licensing deals they made in haste and heat guaranteed that Colecovision games will never legally see the light of day in new hardware built this century. I don't think whomever owns Coleco's IP today could even legally still sell Smurfs, let alone Donkey Kong.
> no 3D support
Good god, are you even in middle school yet? Even 10 years ago, realtime-3D was mostly sleight of hand and programming hat tricks (think: Battle Arena Toshinden, probably the best example of a game that did a spectacularly good job of pretending to be 3D).
The 2600's hardware was seriously weak, but the biggest problem with its games were the fact that it had an astronomical learning curve. Take a simple question, like "what was the 2600's resolution?" The truth is, there IS NO simple answer to it. The 2600 has different "kinds" of pixels, and different ways to express pixel hue and luminance, and few of its "rules" were hard limits so much as timing limits you ran into when you just couldn't bitbang things fast enough.
It's hard enough to explain the 2600's theory of operation to someone with an EE degree. It wasn't enough to know "how to program" -- you had to get "down and dirty" with its hardware to a degree that's almost impossible with modern PC hardware. Literally, impossible... in most cases, the OS (Windows OR Linux) won't even *let* you get that close to it. At least, not unless you tried writing your game as a loadable kernel module, or you somehow managed to pwn Windows and get it to execute your program as Ring 0 kernel code. Go ahead... open a 320x240 legacy VGA screen filled with a single color pixel, then try bitbanging raw assembly by busy-waiting and counting clock cycles to change the contents of that one color register in realtime as the imaginary CRT your LCD panel is emulating scans each line. That's basically how many of the 2600's video effects worked.
On a modern PC, it won't work. Literally, won't work. Why not? Because modern multicore x86 architecture isn't realtime-deterministic, and hasn't been for years. Oh, the OUTCOME of a given sequence of assembly language, in the form of a specific value stuffed into a specific register or stored in a specific memory location when the dust settles, is certainly deterministic... but what happens between point "a" and "b" isn't.
On the Atari 2600, you could count the number of cycles each assembly instruction took to execute, and calculate which pixel would be getting drawn on the screen at the moment it happened (I think it was 3 pixels per clock cycle). Contrast that with a modern PC, where multiple cores, pipelines, speculative and out-of-order execution, and a hybrid architecture that decomposes traditional x86 CISC operations into bundles of virtual RISC code "behind the scenes" mean that everything that happens "along the way" is subject to the CPU's "mood".
I don't think it was a case of them "destroying each other" as much as it was the clones and ISA giving everyone a stable platform on which to build, combined with some serious disasters such as the 7800 at Atari and of course the big crash of 83.
I know that I hung onto my VIC for longer than most but in the end it was the abundance of ISA cards and software for IBM PC compatible that ended up getting me to take my first Compaq all those years ago, there really wasn't anything at either Commodore or Atari that got supported as well as ISA or X86. With both Commodore and Atari basically you got what was in the box and that was it, sure there were a few add ons but nothing like the huge explosion of ISA cards, not to mention the flood of games that came out for DOS. Anybody else remember those shareware discs? man those were fun, dozens of games on a floppy, later CDs with over 100, man you just can't pack 'em away like that anymore.
So happy BDay Atari, its really a shame your gone but between the 7800 and the Jaguar not really surprising. Like Sega who came after you you had a hell of a run and gave many of us some great times, I can still remember trying to sleep with a pillow over my head because when i was done gaming and had to get some sleep before school my mom would plop down in the living room for some Yar's Revenge until the wee hours. Even the Wii never got the whole family involved like the old 2600 did, hell of a machine.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
OTOH, C64 had a vertical scanline interrupt as well, allowing the same trick to be done, but with 8 sprites, each 24 pixels wide.
The problem (on both systems) with such interrupts and sprite swapping was that is sucked away a lot of useful CPU time that could have been spent on game logic. Also, it seriously constrains vertical movement, so those sprites aren't as flexible anymore.
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I believe it was Gauntlet that was one of the first big hits, post laser disc, that really "rescued" video games. [...] I couldn't count how many hours I spent shoving quarters into that game.
Was it even possible to play that game without shoving in another quarter every 30 seconds? IIRC it was an endless war of attrition...
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In fact, Namco entered the video game industry by purchasing Atari's struggling Japan subsidiary in 1974, when Atari desperately needed the cash. The two companies had a close relationship for years.
Warlords is probably the best 4-person game ever. No graphics to get in the way, just pure competition. I'm not sure a modern system could give it as much credence without one of those paddle controllers.