Play Classic Atari 2600 Games Online
Remember the days of the Atari 2600? While it wasn't the first video game system, this was the one that got many involved with video games. Be sure to bookmark this page for a retro flashback whenever you need it! Some you will remember; some you will probably see for the very first time! More will be added all the time!
* Air Sea Battle
* Amidar
* Berzerk
* California Games
* Cosmic Ark
* Dark Chambers
* Dig Dug
* Dragon Defender
* Enduro
* Frogger
* Jr. Pac-Man
* Kangaroo
* Klax
* Ms. Pac-Man
* Night Driver
* Pac-Man
* Phoenix
* Polaris
* Secret Quest
* Solar Fox
* Steeplechase
* Strategy X
* Superman
* Threshold
* Tom Boy
Link: http://www.jimbogames.com/vcs.html
WIGI Report: Dona Bailey, BioWare, SOE Talk Diversity
It would have done Dona Bailey good to know more about herself when she went to work at Atari back in 1980, as she told a group of about 70, two-thirds of them women, at the Women In Games International (WIGI) Summit at the Austin Convention Center on Saturday, in an event that immediately followed Austin GDC.
After a friend introduced her to Space Invaders, Bailey said she moved from Santa Barbara, Calif., where she worked at General Motors, north to Sunnyvale, where Atari was based. At GM, she'd written assembly code for the first Cadillac to feature a microprocessor, a 6502, which Atari was also using for arcade games at the time. She was stubborn, she said, and had made up her mind she wanted to make games.
But she also was, and is, an introvert, and on top of that painfully shy and polite to a fault. Atari hired her, the only woman in a company with 30 men, which would continue growing to about 120 when she left in 1982, with Bailey still the only woman. Before she left, she'd co-created Centipede, now considered an arcade classic, but when she left, she left the game industry for good.
I kind of vanished from that whole scene,” she said. “Know yourself” was the first of seven tips Bailey gave her audience. Atari's attempts to foster creativity included fun-filled weekends in far-off locations, or conference-room bull sessions, neither of which worked for Bailey, who would clam up when pushed.
Link: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15454
Atari Video Music: Psychedelic 1970s Music Visualizer
I'm sure that developing video games for Atari in the late 1970s was an incredibly stressful job. There are several stories circulating about how the software team used mind-altering substances to help them transcend to a higher plane of pixelated paradise. It seems that the hardware guys also loosened their ties and got into the spirit of things.
How else can one explain the psychedelic Atari Video Music? This odd beast was styled to resemble a high-end stereo component and produced a kaleidescope of weird video effects that pulsed in time to your favorite Kraftwerk or Pink Floyd LPs. If offered a pair of RCA audio inputs and an RF video output, along with a series of buttons to select several profoundly named effects including Solid, Hole, and Ring. There is also an Auto mode, just in case the unit's owner is unable to escape the giant blue spiders long enough to press another orange button in a timely fashion.
The Video Music was released in 1976 as an ill-conceived attempt to bridge the video gaming and home stereo worlds. It was a crude precursor to the modern visualization functions that are standard fare in every mp3 audio utility. The design itself appears to be based on a custom digital IC driven by analog inputs.
I'd love to take one of these apart to find out how it works, but they're extremely rare. In fact, the only one I've ever seen is lurking in Retro Thing author Bohus Blahut's living room, patiently awaiting the day that I dismember it with a screwdriver while he isn't looking.
Link: http://technabob.com/blog/2007/08/24/atari-video-music-forgotten-19...
Link: http://www.atarihq.com/dedicated/videomusic.php
From: http://www.retrothing.com/2007/09/atari-video-mus.html
Crazy Atari Jaguar Ad
"Cybermorph has so many bits you'll puke."
Link: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1775128
Xbox Live Arcade Review - 'Space Giraffe'
Space Giraffe features uniquely beautiful graphics and 100 levels of lovingly hand-crafted shoot-em-up action gameplay from the makers of Llamatron and Tempest 2000. Collect power-ups to activate Bonus Rounds and master the strategies necessary to maximize your score on every level!
Jeff Minter is a name known to many old-school gamer types. Almost anyone in the UK who grew up with an Atari ST will at the very least know of Llamatron, a psychedelic re-envisioning of Robotron, and I suspect that most will be nodding their heads in fond reminiscence. Others — those outside the UK included, and PC and Jaguar owners particularly (do the latter exist?) — will know Tempest 2000. For those of us in either of these camps, Space Giraffe, Minter's latest, has been a long time coming, and I can happily announce that it was worth the wait. Probably. I'll get to that.
At first glance, Space Giraffe on the Xbox Live Arcade is Tempest. Again. Your avatar, a continually firing giraffe, is placed at one end of a grid, while enemies move toward you from the other end. If they reach your side, they begin moving horizontally along it in an attempt to destroy you. Sound familiar? Right. It's not. In practice, this game is very much the mirror image of Tempest; if you want a bonus multiplier or a high score, then you absolutely have to let them get to your end of the grid before you kill them. The entire grid is a power gauge of sorts which builds up as you shoot things, pick up power-ups or use them. If the grid has any charge in it whatsoever, you can ram enemies in the vicinity to get extra points and add to your multiplier, as well as direct your fire with the right analog stick. It's a simple enough concept, albeit one that takes some getting used to if you played Tempest, and the tutorial does a more than adequate job of filling you in.
Shortly afterwards, the entire game goes insane.
Link: http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=45993&mode=thread&order=0
No Quarter: Explore Your Atari Obsession
Fortunately, cheeseball 1980 videogames have finally gotten the respect—and the documentary—they deserve. Unfortunately, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, the well-reviewed Donkey Kong doc, only opened in five theaters. Fortunately, we found a stopgap way to feed our obsession with games fit for an Atari 2600: AtariMuseum.com. http://www.atarimuseum.com/
If you're old enough to remember being awed by Pong, the site is a trip down 126-bytes-of-RAM lane. If you're too young to remember life before Madden NFL, the site is a plain trip. Did people really play clumsy-looking games on clumsy-looking consoles and computers? Yes, they did, and not only that—they liked it!
AtariMuseum.com is more for the tech head than the gamer—it's dedicated to explaining how the various systems were developed, not to showing you how the various games were played. (If you want to get your Donkey Kong on, try Free Online Games, no quarters required.) http://www.freeonlinegames.com/
But it's an invaluable resource, and a wonder to look at, especially the vintage ads. (Check out this page—and the shot of the 2600 hooked up to, like, a seven-inch TV. Fancy.) http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/atari2600.html
Were the '80s really that long ago? No. They were a really, really long time ago.
From: http://www.eonline.com/coolstuff/detail/index.jsp?uuid=d22b2293-7e9...
Now Playing... Asteroids
The arcade version of Asteroids.
On a recent family excursion to Roanoke, which is a little town north of Fort Worth, we went to the legendary Babe’s, which serves the best fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, and biscuits on the planet. More importantly, the restaurant is next door to a little arcade that is home to a dozen or so vending machines and arcade cabinets, including a soft drink machine that serves cokes in actual glass bottles and three genuine coin-op classics: Millipede, Ms. Pac-Man, and Asteroids, the latter of which is one of my favorite arcade games of all time (along with Mr. Do!, Tron, and Phoenix).
Not only is Asteroids a personal favorite, it almost made me fail junior high school (or at least the first period of seventh grade). During the early 1980s, I, like many of my contemporaries, rode my bike (a sweet black and yellow Huffy Pro Thunder) to school, which was about a mile and a half or so from my home. Unfortunately for my academic career, there was a Quickway convenience store near the school, and it contained three popular arcade games: Pac-Man, Phoenix, and Asteroids. Instead of riding straight to school, I would invariably stop at Quickway for a game or two (or three) and eventually mastered Asteroids to the point to where I could theoretically play it forever (which would’ve made me late to life in general, not just school).
As Asteroids fans know, the game, which boasts crisp vector (line drawn) graphics, puts players at the helm of a triangular ship that can shoot and fly in all directions and warp into hyperspace in case of an emergency. The objective is to blast floating space rocks into smaller and smaller pieces until they disappear, and there are large and small flying saucers to shoot as well. Over the weeks of playing Asteroids I developed a strategy that involved keeping a single asteroid onscreen, leaving my ship free to fly up the playfield with relative impunity, taking pot shots at the flying saucers as they appeared one by one.
This method, which I eventually discovered that other players across the country had figured out, is sort of a cheat (one rather intense guy at Classic Gaming Expo 2003 said that it violated the “spirit of the game”), but it gave me my fifteen minutes of fame back in the day as I could play for hours on one quarter, building up to thirty or forty or more ships in a single session (a free ship is awarded with every 10,000 points scored). When I got tired of playing the game, I would sometimes sell (for a buck or two) the rest of my game to astonished (or at least bemused) bystanders, who would invariably lose all of my hard earned ships at an alarming rate.
During the aforementioned trip to Babe’s Chicken, I tried out my old method and only scored a little over 20,000 points, meaning I was more than a little rusty. It’s probably just as well, though, because it’s one thing to be late for school, but another thing entirely to be late to dinner.
Link: http://brettweisswords.blogspot.com/2007/09/now-playing.html
Atari 2600 adaptor for Modern TVs
Does anyone know where I can get a gadget to hook up an Atari 2600 to a modern TV? I don't mean a high def or flat screen or anything, I just mean a regular TV that has AV ports. I tried Radio Shack, and they said they don't carry them anymore.
Link: http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?s=c0f4dc39b6a50220fa...
Atari 1982 7Up Pacman Commercial
Daily Motion has several Pacman-related videos, including a Japanese game with live people playing Pac and the ghost monsters. My favorite is the 7Up commercial with the "Betty Davis Eyes" soundtrack.
Link: http://www.dailymotion.com/related/5003302/video/x3eyj_atari-1982-7...
Stella - Atari 2600 Emulator 2.4.2
The Atari 2600 Video Computer System (VCS), introduced in 1977, was the most popular home video game system of the early 1980's. Now you can enjoy all of your favorite Atari 2600 games on your PC thanks to Stella!
Stella is a multi-platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator. It allows you to play all of your favorite Atari 2600 games again! Stella was originally developed for Linux by Bradford W. Mott, however, it has been ported to a number of other platforms.
This is the 2.4.2 release of Stella for Linux, Mac OSX, Windows and GP2X. Distributions for other operating systems will appear as they become available.
Changes:
2.4.1 to 2.4.2: (September 17, 2007)
* Made usage of 'GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE_ARB' extension configurable, and have it default to off. This should take care of the black/white screen many people were experiencing with ATI video hardware. This is accessible using the 'gl_texrect' commandline argument). Set it to 'true' or 'false' to enable/disable the extension.
Have fun!
Link: http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=540375
