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It's funny. Laugh. Entertainment Games

Unreal History of the Atari 2600 130

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it-ain't-no-intellivision dept.
Such_a_geek writes "Atari fans, do you remember playing Gunther Gebel Williams' Cage Cleaner, Typing Tutor, and Peabo Bryson's Cow Tipper on your 2600? How about playing the interactive Foghat 8-track while playing with your Pong action figures? Yeah, me neither. But thanks to this totally fake but quite convincing screenshots in this alternate history of 2600 games, I almost find myself remembering these things."
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Unreal History of the Atari 2600 More

Unreal History of the Atari 2600

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  • Wow (Score:4, Funny)

    by Klerck ( 213193 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @12:52PM (#5365283) Homepage
    First 64-bit UT2003 and now Unreal for the Atari 2600?!

  • Arggh.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by TopShelf ( 92521 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @12:52PM (#5365288) Homepage Journal
    The /. effect seems to have knocked the servers down to 2600-like performance...
    • These kind of posts are really redundant to those of us that don't read the article anyways. :) Someone should compile a list of all the 'server's been slashdotted' comments that get related to the story.

      Digital Guitar - Not enough guitars serving up the page..
      Atari 2600 - the ./ effect seems to have knocked the servers down to 2600-like performance..

      You guys would probably be good fortune cookie writers. :)

  • From the wouldn-it-be-cool-if-Atari-went-OS dept. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Znonymous Coward ( 615009 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @12:54PM (#5365303) Journal
    Wouldn't it be cool if Atari open the source up on all their games?

  • probablly (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Kr3m3Puff ( 413047 )
    Probablly being hosted on a 2600 and just melted down. I was rather curious, I guess I will have to wait.

  • Crimney... (Score:5, Funny)

    by crumbz ( 41803 ) <{moc.liamg>maps ... uj>maps_evomer> on Sunday February 23, 2003 @12:56PM (#5365312) Homepage
    ...That was over 20 years ago. You could probably plant fake memories of my ZX-81 having color and
    sound into my head.
    • It did! The aliens that abducted me showed me a 4 meg expansion cart too.

      Those were the days...

    • Didn't it? I seem to remember a sound pack as an add on. Or maybe I was just listening to my data cassettes. Kind of like a Laurie Anderson record.

    • Re:Crimney... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Baiken ( 630520 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @01:53PM (#5365603)
      As far as I remembber the zx81 HAD sound, only had to put it near an AM radio and generate for next loops, the CPU parasite radiation plays a siren like tune int the radio if you tune it just the right way, have to test with random numbers and complex calculations, it seems to generate more complex sounds, have fun
      • As far as I remembber the zx81 HAD sound, only had to put it near an AM radio and generate for next loops
        The
        really sad thing is that I debugged a couple of programs that way on my first computer (not an Atari) Whenever I executed a particular POKE (memories, anyone?) I used to get a pulse on any nearby AM radio, so it was great for tracing the execution of programs... :-)
      • Also, if you stared at the wierd screen flickers during a tape load, you started seeing colours in the mono display, too....uuuurrrggghhh..


    • I almost find myself remembering these things...

      ...reminds me of this article last week at CNN: Researchers: It's easy to plant false memories [cnn.com]

      This article mentions two separate research projects that examine the power of emotional belief.

      One example:

      "Other research, of people who believed they were abducted by space aliens, shows that even false memories can be as intensely felt as those of real-life victims of war and other violence.

      The research demonstrates that police interrogators and people investigating sexual-abuse allegations must be careful not to plant suggestions into their subjects, said University of California-Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. [washington.edu] She presented preliminary results of recent false memory experiments Sunday at the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [aaas.org]

      Loftus said some people may be so suggestible that they could be convinced they were responsible for crimes they didn't commit. In interviews, "much of what goes on -- unwittingly -- is contamination," she said..."

  • To heck with those games (Score:5, Funny)

    by fobbman ( 131816 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @12:58PM (#5365331) Homepage
    I was sitting here scratching my head thinking "They had Unreal for the Atari 2600?"

    • ...not the button-sequence memorization required today ala Tekken 4 or whatever's out nowadays. Seriously, some 13-year-old kid may be able to beat your pants off in the arcade with the latest glitzy fighting mutation, but just see how well that kid does against you in Demon Attack, or Keystone Capers...


      Seriously, those old, super-simple games like Pitfall or Chopper Command relied on raw eye-hand coordination, not some lame formula you've memorized. Partially because most of those games encompassed only one lousy screen at a time (what was that one where you use the paddles to catch bombs?), there was a high degree of randomness that didn't allow for any kind of strategy, just gut reaction.


      Of course Nintendo with it's fancy amount of memory changed all that.

  • Slashdotted? (Score:4, Funny)

    by jhughes ( 85890 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @12:58PM (#5365335) Homepage
    ping....

    Pong!

    Ahkay, that was weak...:)

  • How about "Basic Programming"? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @01:06PM (#5365361) Journal
    I have this memory of reading an Atari tips/review book that raved about the "Basic Programming" cartridge and how you could use it to write all sorts of sophisticated programs. And begging my mother to spring for it along with the expensive input device it required. And sitting down to try out my 1337 Apple ][ basic skills and finding that the Atari system had a maximum memory of 48 commands and variables, making it unusable for anything beyond:

    10 PRINT "BITE ME, ATARI!"
    20 GOTO 10

    Was that a nightmare or did that actually happen?

  • google cache (Score:3, Informative)

    by minus_273 ( 174041 ) <aaaaa.SPAM@yahoo@com> on Sunday February 23, 2003 @01:06PM (#5365362) Journal
    for what it is worth.. here [216.239.51.100]
    check your flash ;)

  • Who needs those? (Score:3, Informative)

    by immanis ( 557955 ) <immanis@sf[ ]h.com ['got' in gap]> on Sunday February 23, 2003 @01:07PM (#5365365) Homepage Journal

    I have one of these. [firebox.com]

    Target, 15 bucks or so. Money WELL spent. How long has it been since YOU held a joystick like that?

    perv.

    • Re:Who needs those? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by badasscat ( 563442 )
      Target, 15 bucks or so. Money WELL spent. How long has it been since YOU held a joystick like that?

      About 5 minutes... you do realize you can Ebay [ebay.com] the real thing for not much more (if any) than that, right? (Sure, it costs a bit more to buy one with a collection of games, but not much.) I can understand the appeal of having something that takes up less space, but really, when half the games in that 10-in-1 were paddle games anyway, I'd rather have the real thing. You can never replicate the feeling of slapping a cartridge in a real 2600, switching your RF switchbox over to "game" and sitting there playing in front of that big, ugly piece of woodgrain.
    • I bought one of these, too. Only a /.er would even WANT one. I like Yar's Revenge, personally. The others, well, are atari games.

  • Strongbad (Score:5, Funny)

    by Deanasc ( 201050 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @01:07PM (#5365366) Homepage Journal
    I think strong bad speaks for all us classic Atari fans when he say's "Somebody get this freakin duck away from me!"

  • slashdotted (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by t_allardyce ( 48447 )
    there isnt even a google or archive.org cache. Slashdot should create mirrors to all the sites they link atleast for the first hour

    • Re:slashdotted (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by FlippyBoy ( 43225 )
      thats not a bad idea - to pay for it, they could add that feature to subscribers' services. or, they could have a list of volunteer mirrors that got the articles, say an hour in advance of posting, and just post those links along with the article. id volunteer some bandwidth for the community.

  • Mirror (Score:5, Funny)

    by DigiBoi ( 139261 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @01:15PM (#5365402) Homepage
    Here is a Mirror [great-grooms.co.uk].

  • pong action figures? (Score:4, Funny)

    by zephc ( 225327 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @01:17PM (#5365413)
    I think those are called sugar cubes

  • Great book for video game history buffs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Reedo ( 234996 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @01:37PM (#5365497)
    I picked up the book, The Ultimate History of Video Games [amazon.com], last year and found it to be incredibly interesting. It's packed with information covering everything from the very first game ever made (Spacewar, student Steve Russell while at MIT) onward. It goes through the rise and fall of the video game industry (which crashed hard in the early 80s), the coin shortage caused by Space Invaders, the beginnings of Atari (and their fall), Nintendo and Sega. The author interviewed countless people from that era - it has tons of first-hand information/quotes from the folks that started the industry (Nolan Bushnell, Ralph Baer, etc) scattered all throughout the book where appropriate. And you'll find out that Atari wasn't all too squeaky clean when they started - their warehouse always reeking of recently smoked pot. ;) Oh, and that Steve Jobs actually got his start there.

    This may sound like an ad, but the author deserves it. If you're interested in learning about how things began and what it was like at Atari/etc in the early days, then you'll love this book.

  • atari 2600 hardware interesting tidbit (Score:4, Interesting)

    by drwho ( 4190 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @01:39PM (#5365506) Homepage Journal
    The Atari 2600 used the RCA 1802 CPU. This was an early low power consumption chip. A version of the using Silicon-On-Sapphire technology (SoS is used where solid-state devices need to be hardened from the gamma radiation of space) was used in various spacecraft on the 1970s. I heard, though I am unable to provide a URL as a reference, that a number of these Sos 1802 CPUs were used in the Atari 2600. Now this could be interesting, maybe you could use your 2600 in space: Space Invaders indeed!

    Anyone who has further details on this, please reply.

    • Wrong CPU (Score:4, Informative)

      by localroger ( 258128 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @01:53PM (#5365604) Homepage
      The Atari 2600 used the 6507, a 24-pin packaging of the 6502. It was not a particularly low-power chip but it was considered very fast for its technology, executing many instructions in 2 clock cycles.

      The 1802 was, in fact, used in quite a few space probes, including the Pioneer series, because of its reliability (it was miserably slow by contrast to the 6502 but also much simpler).

      • Re:Wrong CPU (Score:4, Interesting)

        by iamdrscience ( 541136 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @02:47PM (#5365851) Homepage
        This poster is right, the parent is wrong, the Atari 2600 used a variant of the 6502. I know this because (1) I've learned a little bit of 2600 assembly and read a lot about it and (2) because I've opened up my 2600 a bunch of times to fiddle and see how it works.
      • I think that the reason why the 1802 was selected for space-going vehicles (like the Pioneer) was that it was available in a "rad hard" version -- radiation hardened, while processors like the 6502 were not. RCA was a major military contractor at the time so they had the capabilities to make Mil-spec stuff, while MOS was not.

        Anyone have any ideas what other processors at the time were space qualified?

  • mirror (Score:1, Informative)

    by iosmart ( 624285 )
    i was able to get just a few...site seems to have completely died now. i have typing tutor, hands across america, ms. paul's fish stock hunter, and part of emett-otter's jug-band motorcross.

    here's my partial mirror [pchopper.com]
  • I remember doing a report on Gunther Gabel Williams back in the late 80s for school and bringing in "Cage Cleaner" for everyone to play. Nobody believed it existed back then either.

  • whoa.. like yesterday (Score:3, Funny)

    by Racer X ( 140445 ) on Sunday February 23, 2003 @06:34PM (#5367077)
    whoa! it's been so long since i've seen a screenshot of that classic atari game, "The page you are looking for is currently unavailable." i feel overcome with feelings of nostalgia and wonder at times past.
  • As a young Geek, but avid follower of Geek history... I feel cheated out of the times of pure DOS-run PC's, Atari game systems, and especially BBS's! I love hearing stories of how the average geek was raised from the earliest of machines. Makes me wonder if my kids will think the same way about me and my experiences with technology today. Sigh... I want to go back and see those glory days you all seem to remember of so fondly.
    • Nothing will make me nostalgic for DOS PCs Nothing like rebooting constantly with different DOS disks with different autoexec.bats and config.syss only because you have too many drivers and TSRs, and your games won't run because not enough of the low 640K is free. BBS memory: Downloading an 80Kb game for an hour at 300Bps!
  • Well, I know I would buy Emmet Otter's Jug Band Motocross [vgg.com] if there was such a product. That Christmas special ruled!
  • Wow! Free the Faulklands- Two islands that are NOT a mirror image of each other! And look at how many multi-colored sprites are present in "Hands across America" and "Punch buggy", they don't even seem to be flickering!

    Not bad for a system that had no video memory.

    Why did I ever put up with games with crap graphics like Night Driver, Adventure and Outlaw when I could've had these?

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