Atari 400/800 home computer cartridges
Shown here are Star Raiders, Basketball, Pac-Man, ET Phone Home, Zaxxon (by Sega), and Donkey Kong Junior. Basic Language came with the computer.
Say hello to the one of the worst (if not THE worst) game ever made. I’m strangely excited to own one of these. The only game that has ever been abundantly buried in the desert
It’s the most abundantly buried in the desert, yes, but it’s not THE worst Atari game ever. Try all of the titles by Mythicon and half of the titles by Data Age.
DigitalPress’ list of the 24 worst 2600 games. I own or have owned (and sold) some on this list. I love “Amidar”, for the record. Why wasn’t 20th Century’s “Worm War 1” on the list? It’s pretty bad and I have two copies to get rid of.
(via imgTumble)Atari Mindlink, 1984
The Atari MindLink was a peripheral planned by Atari for the 2600 that didn’t see a public release. AtariAge Magazine spoke of it as an up-and-coming item and at least one of the game pack-in catalogs showed an illustration with no description in the “coming soon” section, but it (like the module to turn the 2600 into a home computer) was quietly dropped. One game was written for the MindLink, “Bionic Breakthrough”, which is available as a ROM image but is impossible to play without the the peripheral. (I’d never heard of the second game mentioned by Wikipedia, “Mind Maze”.)
the Atari Lynx and Lynx 2, way ahead of it’s time and although bulky, had some amazing (backlit, color) graphics and great arcade-perfect conversions, circa 1989 (the same year GameBoy came out).
Near and dear to my heart since I have a model 2. :)
Atari Mega ST 4 home computer, which was among the first dedicated desktop publishing computers, circa 1987. I’d never heard of this series yet a guy I knew may have been running a small town’s newspaper off of a machine like this (I do know it was a highly modified Atari computer).
Old-Computers.com:
“This computer was especially designed to be the cheapest publishing solution (and it was!). The photo shows the Mega ST 4 (4 MB) with a monochrome display (640 x 400), the publishing software “Publishing Partner”, the Atari SH 205 hard disk (an old 20 MB 5.25” MFM hard disk) and the Atari SLM 804 laser printer. This printer was really cheap because it had no on-board memory and no page description language, the page was created in the Mega ST memory, then sent to the printer.”
BinaryDinosaurs.co.uk:
“One of Atari’s successes can be regarded as the MegaST series. Building on the success of the ST machines (520, 1040) they produced a more professional box with 4mb of RAM, TOS 1.2 and something else not many competitors had at the time - a laser printer. This was because everybody else’s laser printer had the printers brains actually IN the printer; Atari kept costs down by bolting the printer onto the DMA connection for external disks like the Megafile series of hard drives - an interface box produced the required signals to make the printer work and some nifty coding on Atari’s part made sure the machine wasn’t crippled when it was printing since essentially the CPU of the MegaST did all the work.”
![Sub Commander. Made by Atari for the 2600 in 1982, but only sold through Sears. Toss torpedos at passing ships. Yup. You will perpetually miss the swift blue boats, but the slow grey ones will always be hittable. [ AtariAge listing ]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3ucspchWe1r0mjn1o1_500.jpg)
Sub Commander. Made by Atari for the 2600 in 1982, but only sold through Sears. Toss torpedos at passing ships. Yup. You will perpetually miss the swift blue boats, but the slow grey ones will always be hittable. [ AtariAge listing ]
Atari 2600
I got out my Atari 2600 for my son to play with a bit tonight and snapped some pics to post. As you can tell, this is not one of the original versions of the Atari 2600. This is an Atari 2600 Jr. It has all of the same capabilities as the original versions but was a later model that was smaller in size and cheaper. It sold for around $50 when new. This one obviously is not in great shape but my main goal when I purchased off of Ebay last year was not to drop $150 on a mint unit without games or controllers. I instead just wanted something that was playable and came with everything or almost everything that I needed to get started. For the most part I got all of what I have for around $100. The unit itself with one joystick and a few games was about $70 which is what you can probably expect to pay for a unit like this these days. The rest of the stuff I bought is small lots of games on Ebay or off of atari2600.com (which I can highly recommend buying from). I saved a lot of money by buying some of the torn label games since I really only wanted playable games and didn’t really care to much about what they looked like.
As I’ve said before, I really want my son to experience some “retro gaming” before he really gets into the new mainstream stuff when he gets older. I guess I feel that maybe he will have a better appreciation for what is around now, like I do, than if he hadn’t ever seen old technology before. It’s worth a shot anyway and for now he thinks it’s cool but he wants to change the game cartridge about every 2 minutes saying “How bout a new game”. I’m sure that will change once he’s a little older and kind of knows what the point of the game actually is. Until then, you can’t help but to smile while he gladly plays what is basically vintage gaming history.
I did not have an Atari 2600 when I was young. My first console was the NES which sadly I sold long ago. I had some older friends that did have the classic Atari 2600 though and I remember fondly the times that we had playing Pitfall and other classic games in the living room of their homes. That was cutting edge stuff back then! You didn’t have to go to Aladdin’s Castle at the local “mall” to play arcade games! What a concept!
I see you have a couple Gemini joysticks… pretty much duplicates of the stock sticks but with bigger yellow buttons. :-P
