It would be fair to say that it was the combination of acquiring the Atari Gamestation Pro and then THE400 Mini that re-ignited my Atari retro-focus.  I have computer-based ways to do everything they do, but these dedicated units were very appealing for use on the big-screens and group-play without needing a dedicated computer in the living room.

Credit where it is due; it was @jonreddick's videos on both units, on his GenXGrownUp channel, that got me interested initially.  Things snowballed from there …

These systems both make it easy to add your own games, albeit outside their rich and native primary user experiences.  And doing so either requires a fair amount of manual, per-game, work (e.g. configuring games for THE400 Mini), runs into limits (e.g. only supporting a certain number of files per folder) or is time-consuming/fussy to setup optimally.

I like to have my things “just so”.  That’s probably a minor OCD thing.  But there are often existing "99% solutions" to things that I’ll invest time in to get to “my” 100% (and/or my "way" of doing things).  Here, it was in the creation of tools to make working with extra games and/or capabilities exposed by special firmware much faster/easier for me.  And in creating such tools, I figured I'd share them:

Atari Gamestation Pro

@Brad_from_the_80s created an awesome custom firmware for the Gamestation Pro which transforms the experience of playing games you add yourself, by making it possible to add them to the main interface, complete with descriptions, banners and screen shots.  You will find an excellent video on doing this, here.  However, while this is not difficult, it is a bit fiddly and by far the most time consuming part, for me, was finding high-quality box/cover-art and then cropping/resizing it to fit the Gamestation Pro's menu system.

So, I built a tool to do that ...

Atari Gamestation Pro Box Art Tool

This is a command-line tool for fetching, cropping and resizing box art for Atari 2600, 5200 and 7800 cartridges for use in the main menu of the Atari Gamestation Pro.  The link, above, will take you to the tool itself, and in the "docs" folder there are complete instructions.

For those that don't want to deal with the tool, I'll attach the covers I created for 2600, 5200, 7800 using this tool (along with some Arcade game graphics), and the .INI file entries needed to make them work.  You can read this post/thread to see how to apply them (the individual sets are in that thread, the file on this post combines all of them, by platform).

THE400 Mini

Adding your own games to THE400 Mini couldn't be much easier.  It's all USB thumb-drive/folder-browsing based at this time, so the time-consuming/fiddly aspects of it come down to a) creating individual config files for each game - as the default configuration limits screen size/overscan and which model Atari is configured and b) the fact that the file-browser is limited to displaying the first 255 files in each folder - typically necessitating manually reorganizing one's games.

Of course, I wanted to make that easier for myself, so I built a "multi-tool" to allow automated/bulk handling of such things:

Atari Eight-Bit Multi-Tool

This is a command-line tool, intended to provide some "quality of life" improvements to managing large game/program libraries, on USB Media, for the "Atari THE400 Mini" (with utilities for other Atari 8-bit emulators).  The link, above, will take you to the tool itself, and in the "docs" folder there are complete instructions.  Current functionality includes:

• Moving files, in bulk, to organized folder structures - with the ability to control how the organization is done and to limit the number of files per folder (to avoid exceeding "THE400 Mini's" 255 files-per-folder limit).
• Creating, applying, and updating .cfg files automatically, WITHOUT having to set them individually, one game at a time, from within "THE400 Mini's" file browser.
• Identify and validate CARTRIDGE files (".car" and ".c01" to ".c70"), including decoding the header, showing the stored ROM data checksum and computing the actual checksum of the contained ROM data.

Holler if you have questions, and I hope you find them useful ...

AGSP All Sets.zip