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Atari 800 game night
Ravenger:
I used to work in a computer shop that specialised in Atari computers.
So I got to play on a lot of really excellent games - Star Raiders, Rescue on Fractalus, Drelbs, Fort Apocalypse, Encounter, Necromancer, plus of course the excellent arcade conversions - Pengo, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, etc.
In the UK Atari's weren't that popular as they were insanely expensive - we tended to go for the cheaper ZX Spectrum and C64, but generally the Atari's outclassed them (though the C64 did have better sprites).
Bitter were the home computer wars of those days. :angry:
RandyT:
I had a 400. Had to paint roadside billboards with my dad for a whole summer to buy it. We didn't need no stinkin' safety harnesses. In retrospect, it probably wasn't worth the risk, but it sure seemed like it was at the time 8)
The drawback of the 400/800 was the elongated pixels. Not sure if that was a design decision to allow for more colors, but it wasn't the best one they could have made. The C-64 was at the same or lower price point as the 400, and had a real keyboard. Hard to fathom that something we take for granted, and is so cheap today, made such a difference back then, but it did. The C-64's built-in BASIC interpreter was also major selling point. The 400 had only one cartridge slot, compared to the 800's two, so the 400 wasn't a full-time "real" home computer.
The arcade conversions were all great. Pacman, Galaxian, Centipede and Missile Command were my favorites. Played Shamus and Star Raiders for hours on end as well. Star Raiders is particularly noteworthy, as it was one of the first to demonstrate what a keyboard could do to add greater dimension to the gameplay.
Vigo:
--- Quote from: unkpinball on May 08, 2014, 12:58:05 pm ---Loading Scott Adams adventures for the first few weeks on the tape drive, pure bliss.
--- End quote ---
+ Rep for Mentioning Scott Adams. The dude was a text adventure king.
popsicle:
Wow, I didn't even realize that the Atari was so expensive compared to the C64. I had the 800xl (which was a Christmas present from my uncle). It's hard to imagine at that point the prices were as outrageous or he wouldn't have bothered. A few years later he brought me like 30 games on cassette and cartridge he found in some big warehouse-type place in Chicago that he bought for a few bucks each.
The 800xl had a real keyboard, not a chiclet style one like the 400, and had built in basic that you had to bypass when you turned the computer on by holding 'option'. I used the cassette drive for a good two years before getting a floppy drive. Then, I met some 9th grade kid who had *loads* of pirated disk compilations that he threw me. My grades suffered.
Anybody else spend hours typing in Compute! programs only to miss a :censored: space or turn a $ into an S and spend just as many hours proofreading only to find the game was lame? :laugh:
eds1275:
I'm just gonna drop my $0.02! If you are playing with children I find running old console stuff on emulators works best because in my experience they get frustrated with the olde controls, but if you give them something they are more familiar with such as an xbox 360 controller then they hold interest longer. Also, if you are doing anything with load times...
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