retroking1981 wrote:

The 7800 was ready years before it came out, at that time it was actually pretty impressive apart from the sound chip which was the same one found in the 2600, what an odd decision. As was the one to sit on it doing nothing.

The 7800 still managed to outsell the Master System in the US though.

Yep...the 7800 is one of those what ifs.  If Atari had built the POKEY sound chip into the console instead of having to add it to the carts, AND , if they had decided to support it with new games instead of yet more old arcade game ports, who knows what would have happened?

Nintendo probably would have come up with a deal with Atari who could at least been a NES distributor for them (according to the Sheff's Game Over) but they screwed it up - a mix of arrogance, complacency and incompetence. 

The 7800 was at least as capable as the NES though in different ways - think the NES had a tile architecture that was pretty powerful while the 7800 had pure grunt.

Would be a nice feature.


But - yeah some nice posts in this thread. People older than I thought here....

OOhh.. just remembered Space Shuttle for the 2600.

This "epic" game came with overlays for the console as it used all the switches as controls. It was a basic sim with a launch, orbit insertion, satellite rendezvous, re-entry and landing phases.  

The launch phase had a great screen shaking effect that was quite the thing back then.

You had to manage fuel on the full sim level (satellite rendezvous gave you more fuel) and you had a target number of satellites to dock with ; each one becoming harder to lock on to - which involved matching its speed in 3 dimensions while simultaneously homing in on its position.

Re-entry was a nice phase as you lost instrumentation in places because of ionisation effects. A really cool game.

The switches on the console controlled stuff like the payload bay doors, landing gear etc. When you suffered a failure you got a status code you had to look up in the manual to see why you died  

Coded on a machine designed to play Pong and Tank. Incredible.

Millionaire Todd Frye (made his pile on original 2600 Pacman royalties) wryly "reviews" an 8K homebrew remake. His version ran in 4K.

They were pioneering times. You couldn't ever get that rush back. Kids are born into a world in which gaming exists. I feel lucky to have lived through their "invention", the height of the arcade era, and the start of home gaming.

Gaming is stupendously good today of course but having that feeling of where it came from enriches the experience in my opinion.

@ Davy.

It certainly does and it all happened so quickly. The best games are still to come but an incremental increase doesn't have the same same impact as seeing 54 colours on the NES followed by 32,000 on the SNES, SMW followed by SM64. Heady days. Games have more subtle beauty now but less impact and amazement is, or at least was, a key factor in appreciation.

Enjoying this thread. We had one, iirc it was my brother's. I was about five or six and played Cookie Monster Munch obsessively as I loved the character. Then I got a Mega Drive and shit went real.

We had the keypad overlay and everything, was so cash.

I had a pirated version which my parents got me in the very early nineties... had about 100 games (actually several variations of a few games). It wasn't great at the time, but it was a step up from my hand-me-down Odyssey 2.

@Facewon...

HERO was one of he greats. Pretty tough after the first few levels - technically very strong too. Wouldn't take much of a brush up to be a nice mobile game nowadays.

How could I forget Missile Command? Never owned it, but played it so many times. Loved that game. Also Activision Skiing. Played that with Dad a lot.

Another memory is when we went shopping on a Saturday. If we went to Boots to collect our photos for example I would always ask if I could look at the games. I distinctly remember a definite bias in Boots towards Activision. Lots of colourful boxes including titles like River Raid, Stampede, Pitfall!, Enduro, Sky Jinks, Dragster and Oink. I never owned any of these games, but I was in no doubt that they were all fun to play. Look at the bright, jolly boxes. How can something that colourful not contain something fun?

I have that and it's great. Went on a nostalgia trip with it over a few evenings. There is some cracking artwork relating to an arcade game called Gotcha! Not inappropriate at all and as for the original controllers, well.

My mother never partook in Atari. She called it "that space game" or the "beep beep machine". 


Video Chess was another marvel. Hilariously the screen blanked out when the computer was thinking because it used up too much execution time to display the board at the same time (no screen buffer remember).

So I had a travel chess set that I used when playing against it. It was fascinating playing against a computer back then though. My father couldn't believe such as thing was possible. And to swap a cartridge and be playing something like Space Invaders seconds later? Sorcery!

Diluted Dante wrote:

The artwork for Atari stuff was largely amazing. Reminds me a lot of the Boyzone Paper.

Don't see it myself but whatever floats your boat I guess.




Top stories all btw.

I wore a joystick or two out myself. I don't think I've put in more hours on any other console.  I still think it's a decent controller for the style of game it plays host to. The ones I have are still pretty responsive. There's a healthy market for kits for reconditioning them.

Forgot to mention - Megadrive controllers work with the 2600.  


The holy grail of the 2600 collector scene is the "heavy sixer". It was the first generation of the hardware assembled in California. It's the classic wood grain shape but the plastic edging is thicker and more rounded at the corners. It also came with joysticks of a slightly better build quality.

Most people have the light sixer which is the most popular "woody".

There was a revision of hardware that moved the difficulty switches to the back - called the 4 switcher.

Then there is the all black model - called the Vader in collecting circles.

Finally there was the remodelling to a modern slab design called the Junior.

A Vader & Jr yesterday..





I much prefer the woody design though the Vader does look nice. There are all sorts of stories of different models having better/worse video quality which of course was ropey old RF - but that was good enough in the day. I still use mine hooked up that way to my CRT and the picture is pretty damn good.

You can get them modded for composite. And there are RGB SCART mods too but I've heard results are mixed.

There is a rare French model that works with RGB SCART but it uses the SECAM TV standard which has very restricted colour palette so the games look pretty shit which is a pity.

The cartridges also went through several revisions - early ones had text only labels with later ones having the box art reproduced in miniature on them. The collector scene is bewildering as each game comes in so many cart versions.

Atari did a deal with Sears back in the day that enable Sears to produce their own version of the console. The games were renamed with special labelling too - making things worse for any OCD collector.

There are hordes of clones and hacks too - particularly from Brazil for some reason.

Then there was the infamous Mystique games for adults including Custer's Revenge et al that were sold under the counter and came in VHS style packaging.

Pitfall 2 was an amazing achievement on the 2600. Way ahead of its time. But that music put me off - was ear splitting.