In Other Classic Systems

and do you know if it's for sale any where or know anyone who owns one? This quetion as always revolved in my mind. I think manuel or Roth told me one time but I forgot the thread that was in.

Behold the !

They usually sell for around $50.00 (US) with games, and are not really as hard to find as you might think.

yep, that was the first home console, in all of it's terribly glory...

most people only have the odyssey to be different, the sequel is the same, it sucks. but I don't care too much for that era of gaming to begin with. the Sega/Nintendo 8-bits are what's cool.

Same with me.
For me, gaming starts from the 8bit era. On Nintendo and Sega consoles you had acceptable graphics. Atari 2600 is nice and all, but... yeah, the pixels were too big.

I thought it would be worse. Not such a bad thing to start with, I love pong and the size increasement would have helped.

http://www.pong-story.com/odyssey.htm

Behold the !

They usually sell for around $50.00 (US) with games, and are not really as hard to find as you might think.

The Odyssey2 sells for about $50 and the games aren't all that hard to find. The original Odyssey is alot harder to find and goes for alot more $$

I agree, gaming back then is very different from gaming today, I believe gaming as we know it began on the NES. However, I still have an old pong system Hooked up (Bentley Compuvision). Amazingly, people from Generation X will gladly face off against you on pong, whereas they'd otherwise not play games.

Gen X?

I was never really a fan of anything before the NES. Im more of an 8-bit and up kind of guy. (however, Im not sure, but if PacMan is Atari then thats the only game by them I like. PacMan kicks ass.)

what about space invaders?

eh, it was cool to a point. but space invaders wont ever have anything on PacMan.

Atari starts gaming for me. I justs love PacMan, Space Invaders, Cenipede, etc.

I thought PacMan sucked on Atrai 2600................now don't get me started on E.T!

If we're talking Atari 2600 games...
Space Invaders PacMan

PacMan was just too generic of a port. Space Invaders was the best version ever (better than arcade IMO).


Go ahead... get started (so I can put you in your place.)

*Reads thread and remembers to scoff at everyone who thinks gaming didn't start until the NES*

E.T. is actually a really good game, especially for the 2600. It's actually a game that you can BEAT. It doesn't just go on and on, though you can keep playing it. I think this whole "E.T. is the worst game OMG, I can't believe it!," comes from people who just don't know what the hell they're doing. If they would take the time to read the manual, they would see it's a cool game. If you don't have a manual, go here to read it...

^Haven't played it. I would try it out, but my Atari 2600 broke. My brothers stupid friend broke a part on the system where you put the game in.

It uses the same port 5 1/4" disk drives for the PC. Get yourself an FDD cable if you want to fix it.

It uses the same port 5 1/4" disk drives for the PC. Get yourself an FDD cable if you want to fix it.


Firstly, You should rehost images you're going to show in a post.

Secondly, it's not just as simple as soldering the cable in there... there are a lot of small wires to individually attach, as well as extra pins, the atari carts only use about half of the pins in a 5 1/2" FDD connector.

I know this because a friend and I are in the process of building a portable right now.

Actually, there are some awesome Atari 2600 games.

From Atari themselves, Combat (the cart that was bundled with the VCS) is simple, but an excellent two player title. Space Invaders isn't bad either: It's all about chasing high scores against a friend as well though.

Also, I recall The Smuffs being quite good, Pitfall (by Activision) practically invented the platform game and Pheonix is one of the greatest Space Invader clones of all time.

The 2600 is notable because it's been described as a "Turing Machine" for games. It contains the bare minimum hardware required to play games, and creating games requires you to know what's going on with the hardware to a ridiculous degree.

Another interesting thing you can see is that early NES titles aren't actually all that different to Atari games: They usually have slightly better graphics, but they're very much the same kind of game. The NES doesn't become the first of "this" generation of consoles 'till you start playing games with more complicated memory mappers.



Atari is maligned, and in some ways, rightly so. The quality of many of it's later releases dipped alarmingly as the US headed towards it's big Video game crash and every company started putting out any old junk in an box under the assumption it would sell. Still, some of the games are great. Don't tar em all with the same brush.