Atari2600-game manuals-worth anything to anyone?

[EwJ]

Topic says most.
Pic says rest.
Are they trash or are there still collectors out there that try to get full sets of cartridges/boxes/manuals/etc, that might be missing a few books?

[ChadTower]

Go to AtariAge.com and ask a couple bucks.  There aren't any titles in there worth money but there are definitely lots of collectors who may want them.

[ChadTower]

What the hell would an Atari 2600 manual consist of?

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Game options, man.  For a lot of games there are tons of game variants that you have no idea what the difference is unless you look in the manual.  Incremental register value tweaks done via the game select switch. 

[EwJ]

Thanks Chad. 
I'll let it sit here on BYOAC first - any collectors here?
They're yours for the taking.
I'll add this to the B/S/T Free Thread for a while - if no bites,
then AtariAge.com it is. (thanks for the info).

[missioncontrol]

I'm interested, PM sent

[missioncontrol]

What the hell would an Atari 2600 manual consist of?

PRESS BUTTON



 

Game options, man.  For a lot of games there are tons of game variants that you have no idea what the difference is unless you look in the manual.  Incremental register value tweaks done via the game select switch. 

Exactly... That's kinda why E.T. had a bad rap, people were too lazy to read the manual and find out the objective and how to play the game properly.

[ChadTower]

Exactly... That's kinda why E.T. had a bad rap, people were too lazy to read the manual and find out the objective and how to play the game properly.

Well, that, and that the game really does suck.  Just not as bad as people say it did.   

[missioncontrol]

Exactly... That's kinda why E.T. had a bad rap, people were too lazy to read the manual and find out the objective and how to play the game properly.

Well, that, and that the game really does suck.  Just not as bad as people say it did.   

only sucked if you didn't know how to play it right or jumped on the let's hate E.T. bandwagon... I found it a great challenge due to the randomness of the game play...

but to each their own....

[Ed_McCarron]

Incremental register value tweaks done via the game select switch. 

Or, in english, Space Invaders had like 130 options.

[fjl]

I remember playing E.T. way back when. I never did understand what I had to do in the game. I just remember always falling in a hole and having some black figure spy character chasing me down and taking what I thought was an M&M.
 

[AtomSmasher]

Exactly... That's kinda why E.T. had a bad rap, people were too lazy to read the manual and find out the objective and how to play the game properly.

Well, that, and that the game really does suck.  Just not as bad as people say it did.   

only sucked if you didn't know how to play it right or jumped on the let's hate E.T. bandwagon... I found it a great challenge due to the randomness of the game play...

but to each their own....

Heh, I just watched an episode of Little Miss Gamer where she talks about this same exact thing

[ahofle]

Exactly... That's kinda why E.T. had a bad rap, people were too lazy to read the manual and find out the objective and how to play the game properly.

Well, that, and that the game really does suck.  Just not as bad as people say it did.   

only sucked if you didn't know how to play it right or jumped on the let's hate E.T. bandwagon... I found it a great challenge due to the randomness of the game play...

but to each their own....

I agree 100%.  I never understood how this game was somehow labeled as the worst Atari 2600 game.  Haven't any of these people played the true turds of the 2600 like Pacman or Football?  I mean I remember making fun of those games as a small kid when I first played them!  ET had pretty complicated gameplay (for an Atari 2600 game) and it even had an ending!  And yes, no way you could play that without a manual.

[ChadTower]

E.T. is far from the worst 2600 game and I've never seen any credible classic gamer say that.  It is the biggest failure, that's for sure, but there are a lot of games that are way worse.  Sorcerer by Mythicon comes immediately to mind and all of the Swordquest games.

[Chris]

Haven't any of these people played the true turds of the 2600 like Pacman or Football?

Pac-Man wasn't awful if taken as a game unto itself (other than thart horrid flashing)... it's awful as an adaptation of a beloved arcade game, but if you had never seen the arcade version, it was certainly far from the worst.

Any discussion of "worst 2600 games" is incomplete without "Custer's Revenge".

[ChadTower]

Pac-Man wasn't awful if taken as a game unto itself (other than thart horrid flashing)... it's awful as an adaptation of a beloved arcade game, but if you had never seen the arcade version, it was certainly far from the worst.

That flashing is actually a 2600 programmer's trick to display that many independent moving objects at a time.  The 2600 was really only designed to display two nonplayer moving objects.  The guy got all of the ghosts in by keeping track of all of their locations but only displaying two at a time, flashing them so that your eye could still track them.  Later programmers figured out better ways but for the time that was a pretty slick way of doing it.

[Chris]

That flashing is actually a 2600 programmer's trick to display that many independent moving objects at a time.  The 2600 was really only designed to display two nonplayer moving objects.  The guy got all of the ghosts in by keeping track of all of their locations but only displaying two at a time, flashing them so that your eye could still track them.  Later programmers figured out better ways but for the time that was a pretty slick way of doing it.

Yeah, Commodore 64 programmers used to do the same thing to go over 8 moving objects.   The effect was less noticable on a dark background; I have no idea why the Pac-Man programmer didn't use the arcade version's black background.

I think what sucks about Pac-Man is that it appears they just didn't put any serious time into it... like they rushed it to market.  The Ms. Pac-Man cart showed that it could be done better.

[ChadTower]

Yeah, Commodore 64 programmers used to do the same thing to go over 8 moving objects.   The effect was less noticable on a dark background; I have no idea why the Pac-Man programmer didn't use the arcade version's black background.

I think what sucks about Pac-Man is that it appears they just didn't put any serious time into it... like they rushed it to market.  The Ms. Pac-Man cart showed that it could be done better.

They did rush it to market.  Atari paid huge for the license and gave the guy a very short amount of time to pull off the most advanced 2600 game to date.

Plus there was no history to that point of any home games being all that close to their arcade versions.  Everything up to then was a lot of pong and such.  I'm not sure why they didn't go black background - but very few of the early 2600 games used black for some reason.  They all had grey or light blue type backgrounds.