The Atari 2600 VCS Thread

[TrekMD]

https://youtu.be/_eLIiNg3RfA

[guest5175]

I've successfully converted my Stranglehand game to run on the Starpath Supercharger.  I use my PSP to play back the audio file.  Good times!

I'm working on converting all the files from the tapes into MP3 files to store them in a small player I got just for this. 

I hope that experiment works.  Please report back when you get results.  I left the audio .WAV myself.

Yeah I would love to know if that works. I think I gave up on finding a working tape cassette player a while ago, although I don't really have anything for the Supercharger worth playing at the moment. I have played DragonStomper, which is a lot of fun though.

[TrekMD]

I've downloaded a program that converts binaries to wav files and then I'll use my audio conversion software to change to MP3.  I'm hoping it works. 

[TrekMD]

A new web site dedicated to the 2600 has been started:  http://www.atariboxed.com/  From the page's intro:
This project is focused on Atari 2600 games and the difficulty of collecting them these days. Therefore we are trying to create the most accurate list of all games and their rarity values. At this time you will primarily find PAL games in our database, although we are working on integrating NTSC games into it too.

[Spector]

Looks like a good resource. Loads of scans to bring back memories :21:

[TrekMD]

Just unfortunate from an English speaker's point of view that one of the members of the team is called 'Schitti'   

Well, I had a patient who's first name was Semen.  Your choice as to what is worse! 

[TL]

Reminds me of this famous German footballer who played in Euro '96:

[TrekMD]

Reminds me of this famous German footballer who played in Euro '96:

These keep getting better and better.

[TrekMD]

Getting back on topic...

https://youtu.be/0rJY4x5p_fE

[TrekMD]

The folks from AtariProtos.com have added a new article for another unreleased Atari 2600 game: Survival Run. Here is a screen capture of the game...

[TrekMD]

While looking online for pictures of the Atari 2700, I found a picture of yet another 2600 prototype, the Kee Games Programmable Game System. I must say that this is quite the brightly colored console. I don't remember ever hearing about Kee Games before, so I decided to check out some info about them. The Wikipedia entry appears below. Interesting that this company was an offshoot of Atari. Cool bit of gaming history.

Kee Games was an arcade game manufacturer that released games from 1973 to 1978. Kee was headed by Joe Keenan, a long-time friend of Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Keenan managed to hire several defectors from Atari, and began advertising itself as a competitor. In reality, Kee Games was a wholly owned subsidiary of Atari, created in response to the pinball and arcade distributors of the time who demanded exclusivity deals. Kee Games released several "clones" of Atari games, allowing Atari to "exclusively" sell games to two distributors at once.

In December 1974, the relationship to Atari was discovered by the public. However, Kee's Tank game had been so successful that the distributors wanted to buy the game even without an exclusivity agreement. At the same time, Atari was having financial and management problems, while Joe Keenan had been very successful managing Kee Games. The two companies merged, with Keenan promoted to president of Atari running the business side of things, and Bushnell focusing on engineering. Atari continued to use the "Kee Games" label to release some of their games until 1978, but from the merger on, the games were clearly labelled "a wholly owned subsidiary of Atari, Inc."

[onthinice]

Kids would have destroyed that in days. Probably a good thing Atari stuck to the simple brown wood grain. I do like the colors.

[TrekMD]

Well, there would be no missing that console at anyone's house!

[onthinice]

Yeah. I know how I was as a kid. Those stickers would have been peeled off and on my bike.

[SnakeEyes]

Some of you guys should read this. apparently the world could have done without the 2600 and the gaming industry would have been no different.

https://forum.retrogamer.net/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=49473