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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Classic Arcade To Atari 2600 Conversions Rated 38

Posted by simoniker from the good-the-bad-and-the-ugly dept.
Thanks to PeekNPoke for its reviews of the best and worst of classic arcade game conversions on the Atari 2600. The piece looks at which early '80s conversions came off well, and notes Missile Command as one of the best ("Plays even better than the game it tries to emulate, and works very well with the standard joystick"), and Pac Man as less promising ("Usually voted as one of the worst arcade conversions on any system ever, and it is not hard to see why.") Which arcade conversions were you eagerly awaiting, only to find them ruined by classic hardware restrictions?
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Classic Arcade To Atari 2600 Conversions Rated More

Classic Arcade To Atari 2600 Conversions Rated

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  • yay for pac-man (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gasgesgos ( 603192 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @08:29AM (#8074360)
    I know the Atari 2600 pac-man game was pretty bad, I owned it at one point.

    Unfortunately, classic arcade game to home conversions still leave something to be desired. I recently purchased Midway Arcade Treasures, and the steering on some of the games is incredibly touchy... Although I can't really complain when I get 24 great games for $25... (I recommend it! An awesome bundle of games, even supports more than 2 players in the games that originally did!)

    On a more nostalgic note... One of my fonder memories of my Sega Genesis was of the version of Ms Pac-Man available for it. It had all sorts of strange mazes, along with an editor! I wish the Pac-Man Collection for GBA would've had something like that instead of Pac-Attack... Pac-Attack is like Tetris meets Puyo Puyo meets a fresh pile of puppy crap. (although the puzzle mode is kind of enjoyable)

    • Re:yay for pac-man (Score:2, Informative)

      by gustgr ( 695173 )
      If you don't have an arcade and still want to play the the 'original' ones you can easily emulate it with Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator [mame.net].

      For Unices there is the XMAME [mame.net] port, which do a great [freeshell.org] job.
    • Click my link above for an in-progress pacman game with odd mazes that I am developing. You might like it.
      • I would have written sooner, but I had to recover from my seizure first.

        I would comment on the gameplay. For seizure inducing flicker, I give the game a 10.
        • Really? I have tried it on several machines and never had a problem. What are your proc speed, OS, and Java version? I'll see if there is a fix.
          • Mac OS X 10.3 using Java 1.4.1, G3 800 mhz iBook.
            • Thanks for the feedback. I have found a computer slow enough to replicate the bug, a 300 MHz Celeron. :)

              I have made some changes and this version [angelfire.com] seems to not blink on the Celeron. I'd appreciate it if you could let me know if it works for you.

              • It looks much better. No more Grand-Mal-Man for me! You might be able to improve your ghost AI with an A-star [wikipedia.org] search algorithm. I think that dropping to a Celeron 300 to reproduce the flicker is more of an indictment against Java on OS X than is it against PPC chips in general. My 800 G3 is comparable to my 900 P3.
                • Actually, I have another applet that used to run great on the 300 MHz Celeron system and it no longer does. The applet hasn't changed, but I have installed the most recent JRE. :(

                  As for the ghost AI, I could tweak the current algorithm and increase the depth of the search and it would make perfect decisions. But that isn't what I want. It is already too good in many situations too add a second ghost.

                  What I am going to do is tweak it to make sure it won't exhibit any "back and forth" behavior, and wil

  • Had I been told it was crappy, I would not have spent so much time on it !

    • I know he's being funny, but there's some truth to that.

      Ok, I was 8 years old at the time. It was 1982 and it was a time where i first saw the game Donkey Kong at a Pizza Hut, and was amazed because it looked just like a cartoon. I think I would have played anything at the time as long as it could be classed as a video game. This was an age when arcades were leaps and bounds ahead of the consoles.

      It was a time when there really weren't many video game magazines. You have to admit that before EGM

  • Dragon's Lair (Score:4, Insightful)

    by skinfitz ( 564041 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:05AM (#8074453) Journal
    Would have been nice to see a conversion for the 2600, however it may have ended up a bit like the first game mentioned here [homestarrunner.com].

  • Test Drive (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Larry David ( 738420 )
    I think it was Test Drive. It was always excellent at the arcades. Basically you start off, and you have two roads to choose from, straight on for a really basic course, and take a slip road on the right for the 'stunt' course.

    When this game made it to consoles, it totally blew. Not just because you had no wheel, but because the graphics were insanely poor.

    As an aside, I'm actually amazed they thought ANY games were good on the Atari 2600. You had to have a serious power of imagination to play ANY game on

    • Re:Test Drive (Score:3, Interesting)

      by kisrael ( 134664 ) *
      As an aside, I'm actually amazed they thought ANY games were good on the Atari 2600. You had to have a serious power of imagination to play ANY game on that thing... :-) Are those three green blocks a tree? Ah, yes...

      Nah, some of the games were pretty visually impressive, all things considered. Just browse through the screenshots at [atariage.com]...very few block based games...Adventure comes to mind, but that was such a good game in other ways. (And the dragons are ducks, not squares...)

      Overall, my favorite arcade-

    • I think you mean Hard Drivin' [klov.com]. Yeah, that was cool :)

      • Definately. Hard Drivin', and it's sequel Race Drivin' had one of the best force feedback wheels ever, pedals too. Was quite a shock to me, and felt quite unnatural, until I finally got behind the controls of a real car, later that year.

        None of the home conversions could ever come close (no, not even the gameboy one [mobygames.com], chew on that thought for a while), because they didn't have the hardware.

  • Why bother doing arcade conversions? (Score:3, Funny)

    by GonzoDave ( 743486 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @09:57AM (#8074584)
    ET sold the system on it's own

  • ColecoVision (Score:5, Interesting)

    by molafson ( 716807 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @11:50AM (#8074969)
    Even back in the day, it was obvious to this youngster that if you wanted decent arcade conversions, you needed a ColecoVision. I mean, for arcade games that were brought to the two systems, compare the quality, e.g.

    -Donkey Kong
    -Frogger
    -Q*Bert
    -Burgertime.

    These were all huge titles that looked and played great on Coleco. However, the 2600 renditions are a sad thing to behold. Check out these screen shots of 2600 Burgertime [atariage.com] vs. Coleco Burgertime. [solinari.com]

    • Re:ColecoVision (Score:4, Interesting)

      by molafson ( 716807 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @01:48PM (#8075609)
      Further to my last post, check out these screenshots.

      Arcade Zaxxon [ggdb.com]
      ColecoVision Zaxxon [mobygames.com]
      Atari 2600 Zaxxon [atariage.com]
    • Part of it lies with the fact that the graphics chip in the ColecoVision was more powerful than the Atari's Stella chip (though I've seen Stella produce prettier graphics, it took quite a bag of tricks to do it and make it playable).

      The other part of the problem was that Coleco made a lot of those ports. Point in case, Donkey Kong. Coleco intentionally "crippled" the Atari and Intellivision ports to sell more ColecoVisions. You got two screens on the Atari, but 3 (of 4) on Coleco. Mario also looked like a

    • Q*bert for the Atari 2600 is actually a pretty good representation of the coin-op arcade version.

      Frogger for the Atari 2600 was ok.

      But I agree DK and Burgertime were pretty horrible.
  • Stargate (aka Defender II)
    Jungle Hunt
    Pengo
    Mr. Do's Castle
    Kangaroo

    to name a few...

  • Why do I have a problem with the "(c) 1999" in this "screenshot" from Pac Man? (from the article) pacman.gif [emuunlim.com]

  • I'd have to say Space Invaders was one of the better conversions too. It looked and played like the arcade game (unlike Pac Man which had hideous noises and had him moving backward and such when you changed directions).

  • Pac-Man (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ondo ( 187980 ) on Saturday January 24, 2004 @01:29PM (#8075515)
    only to find them ruined by classic hardware restrictions?

    Actually, I believe someone demonstrated that the Atari 2600 hardware was capable of running an perfect port of the arcade version of Pac-Man by writing one for it. The problem was with the original programmers, not the hardware.

    • Re:Pac-Man (Score:2, Insightful)

      by adamthornton ( 101636 )
      The problem, really, was with management.

      Tod Frye was told in September that he had to have Pac-Man done in mid-October so it could be in stores by Christmas.

      He actually negotiated royalties on it (a first for Atari carts) and became a millionaire, because millions of us bought the damn thing even though it sucked.

      For a game that he had to hammer out in something like five weeks, it's not all that bad, but of course the 1999 hack of the Ms. Pac-Man cart shows how it could have been done right.

      Adam
      • I actually have played the new 2600 Pac-Man on Stella [sourceforge.net] and am wondering (I admit i haven't really done any research on this) if it could actually fit "hardware-wise" on an actual cartridge and released in 1982. Aren't you less limited programing for an emulator rather than the acutal hardware? I really don't know. But when i'm playing it (the better pac-man rom) I think "Sure, now with unlimited RAM, Storage, and a processor thousands of times as fast, I can play neer arcade perfect pacman, programed for
        • The point of an emulator is that it duplicates the original hardware to the greatest possible extent. If you're programming a game for an emulator you face the same restrictions as you would if programming for the actual hardware; otherwise you're defeating the purpose of emulating the older hardware in the first place. My PC may be able to run Doom III and it may be able to run a Super Nintendo emulator, but that doesn't mean I could make a faithful conversion of Doom III that would run with the SNES emula
      • Also Todd Frye asked several times if management would give him 4k of memory to do it in, but they only allowed 2k of memory for cost considerations. Yet another reason Pac-Man sucked. It just didn't have enough rom to make it worth a hiil o' beans.
    • more information from the author of this hack: here [kudla.org].
  • I'm surprised that no one mentioned the 2600 version of Berzerk.
  • Although I never played the re-make of Pitfall,(I cant even recall what gaming console it was out on.)it was my favroite game out at the time. Man, this makes me want to break out the old 2600 and see if it still works.

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