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Sorry, that does not compute for me. I take pride in all the people in the community that enjoy using my work for free, as I intended. When it comes to companies that are using my work to increase their profit by selling it without having to pay: why should I be proud of that? I merely accept that as it is a byproduct of the license that I choose. I much rather had if they were paying us. And if they don't even publicly acknowledge that it is our work that is powering their product and earning them money, then I don't take pride, but offense.

Amen 😏 The only more even more reasonable alternative imo would be (not financially, but morally, if they indeed cared about the community as they claim): use Stella, give proper credits to it and provide financial appreciation of the effort that was invested into building it by making a donation to the project.

What kind of "huge win"? Ego boost or what? Because of a brand name used? Personally I am way more proud about all the numerous "normal" people who decide to use Stella.

Just because this has not been answered yet does not mean it won't be. ..Al

I fully understand why some people are pessimistic or downright negative on this. As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words, and we (myself and Atari) fully intend to demonstrate that. ..Al

The amount of work done on Stella is incredible and the emulator is a miracle in my opinion. Why would anyone start all that over again?

It is kind of a tweener I suppose. It IS meant as a mass market product, but even within that market it is still a bit of a niche product. You are not going to see the 2600+ chasing the PS5 in unit sales (I mean, it would be nice). But it is also meant to appeal to core enthusiasts. That is why you have the attention to detail on the build, the resistance on the toggles, the effort put into the rubber gasket and red elastolin on the joystick, etc. The controller cross compatibility with the original hardware. The cart slot is a little wider because we know that a lot of third-party carts can stick because they wre made a little too big. The people working at Atari are the audience for this product, to be honest. I think in many ways we made what we wanted AND what we thought would do well in the marketplace. A lot of us have an OG 2600, but we wanted something we could easily plug into a modern monitor using HDMI. Just like I have two beautiful B&O turntables, but I bought a Rega Planar 1 to listen to records. The B&O's are amazing, but keeping them going is a lot of work. If you were to draw a circle around retro enthusiasts it would overlap with mass market ... retro gaming has gotten that big. I think it is very analogous to the revival of vinyl in music.

It is safe to say that Stella is one of the most accurate VCS emulators out there --- to my knowledge, Gopher2600 ans 6502.ts are the only other emulators that have the same level of accuracy. Stella and 6502.ts have soaked up countless hours of my work, and the level of quality of my work there is not different from the one I apply to professional work --- I am a professional software engineer. The only difference is that I am doing this work as a hobby in spare time, and that I give the result to the community for free. If I alone were to bill the hours invested into Stella alone as freelance work, that'd be easily a high 5-digit number, probably more, and I am just a contributor to the current core. The same goes for the other members of the Stella team (and in particular Stephen wo has invested much, much more over decades of maintenance), and for all other developers of high-quality open source software. Developing a similar emulator with the same level of quality from scratch would easily cost Atari several 100k, which would reduce the potential revenue of the project. That's the reason 😏

Hi all, I'm please to announce that the Atari 8-bit port of my game Tenebra is ready! Get it from https://h4plo.itch.io/tenebra It has been quite successful on other platforms and has won multiple awards. I hope you will enjoy playing version too. Tenebra is an atmospheric ad minimalist puzzle game with rogue-like aesthetics. Guide the hapless protagonist to the exit. Poor guy is afraid of darkness and refuses to walk in the dark areas. Move torches around, push lights on rails, find keys to doors, light up cold braziers, pass through archways that collapse behind you, find oil barrels to make your torches brighter, squeeze through cracks in broken walls, fix broken rails with a hammer, illuminate the sensors to open the exits... do whatever it takes to get out of there! The game contains 31 levels and works on both PAL and NTSC machines. This port was a lot of fun, I ended up learning quite a lot about the Atari 8-bit machines. I hope you will enjoy it!

I think the 8-bit and ST platforms are going to get some love. The team wanted to do more with those platforms on Atari 50 ... for whatever reason it wasn't practical at the time. We can't do it all at once, we'd love to, but if we try we won't do it as well as if we take our time.

Then people on here would be savaging the proprietary emulator they came up with and pointing out all the ways that Stella is better and saying that they should have just used Stella instead.

Hi everyone, I'm Mark, I'm new here so thought I'd say hi. My first home computer was a '99 in 1982 and I learned to code TMS9900 assembly with the mini-memory cartridge. It's still in the garage somewhere but I haven't powered it up in decades. I have some time on my hands now (semi-retired) so decided to dust off my TI99/4A emulator written in C that I started writing for Windows 23 odd yrs ago. At that time, it could boot from console ROM and basic video was working, but then I parked it. I haven't used Windows in over 15 yrs - I work exclusively on Linux these days (debian and ubuntu) - so I ported it to Linux using GLUT to create display a framebuffer. I also added sound emulation with pulse audio, tms9901 timer support and recently added cassette SAVE sound output emulation. I'm thinking of creating a .wav file from cassette output, now that I have audio samples, and then see if I can OLD programs back in from .wav files. This emulator is just for fun. There are many superb emulators already out and I have no interest in trying to outdo or replace any of them. If you want to know what's different or unique about my emulator, the answer is nothing that I know of, except I wrote it myself, which was as I said for fun. Also, it isn't nearly as complete as some of the others. It does have some useful (to me anyway) features for debugging such as runtime disassembling tms9900 and/or GPL code and showing comments beside them which was very useful for finding compatibility issues with games etc. I've tested munchman, TI invaders, tombstone city, the attack and all work fine AFAICT. Parsec might work whenever I get around to implementing bitmap mode. I haven't tried implementing any additional hardware, disk drives, RS232, etc, but as an EE that to me is the most interesting part, so I will probably have a go at emulating legacy peripherals at some stage. If anyone wants to browse the code it's on github here under MIT license: https://github.com/mburkley/ti994a Comments or suggestions welcome. Oh and I'm happy to help with any other current projects that need help too now that I've built up knowledge of the internals of the tms9900 and family. Cheers, Mark

This is not true. Changing the license requires explicit permission permission from everybody who has contributed to the codebase, or removal of those pieces. With a project with a history so long as Stella's, this is simply not realistically possible. That said, to reiterate, as this seems to be implied by some comments: Atari's use of the GPL is technically perfectly valid as long as they point to the source and release their changes under the GPL once they ship, and I am not whining about it. What Thomas and me are pointing at is the obvious mismatch between the all-for-the-fans attitude that we perceive in their public communication regarding the acquisition of AAge and fact that they are neither mentioning Stella anywhere in their presales announcement nor contributing to the project.

Everything you said might come true, but I’m not going to get emotional about it if it does. Everything changes, everything dies. Atari itself has gone bankrupt and risen in a different/lesser form multiple times. People I consider friends in this forum have moved on or passed away. For a period of years this very site harbored and enabled a lying narcissist who wanted only to boost his ego and sell preorders for an Android TV console. Last night the admin of this site resorted to desperately emailing everyone on a Saturday night with instructions on how to defeat warnings about SSL certificates and to assure them the outage was unrelated to the recent buyout. If the site goes away, it’s a shame for game preservation, but as a source of entertainment we have plenty of other options. Albert heavily implied he was getting burned out on running the show alone and this seemed like the best possible solution. I believe him when he says he wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t believe in the partnership. You don’t have to trust him yourself but I don’t see how fretting about it would make anything better.

@TrogdarRobusto The following 7800 games have received a "P" respecting compatibility with 2600+: Aces of Aces Alien Brigade Basketbrawl Choplifter! Crack'ed Dark Chambers Desert Falcon Double Dragon F-19 Hornet Fatal Run Ikari Warriors Jinks Karateka Mat Mania Challenge Ninja Golf One-On-One Basketball Planet Smashers Pole Position II RealSports Baseball Scrapyard Dog Tomcat F-14 Flight Simulator Xenophobe However, all of the games above require a 2 independent button controller to play properly. Although it is not clear what criteria determined 'Pass' or not, even if a 2 independent button controller is not going to be included or made available separately, it would probably be prudent in the included documentation with the system and the published compatibility list, to state that such is required for the game to fully function as intended. Further, Barnyard Blaster (Misspelled "Blster"), Meltdown, and Sentinel received a 'Pass', but all three games require a light gun. Unlike such titles like Alien Brigade and Crossbow, where a light gun is optional, for the three former games, they're unplayable without one. Respecting the "Untested" titles, all of them: Commando, Midnight Mutants, Motor Psycho, Rampage, Tank Command, Water Ski, with the exceptions of Summer Games and Pete Rose Baseball, also require a 2 independent button controller. For some, this may be their first exposure to trying 7800 games, and faulty/missing/non-function aspects of the game provides a really bad impression. 7800 Xevious is missing from the list (Ideally should have a 2 button controller as well, but can play fine with just 1).

Hey, if we could slap an AtariSoft logo on them, I'd happily go for some new titles.

I doubt that this is true. Reputation is worth a lot of $$$, even for shareholders. Even if we wanted to (which is not the case at all), changing the license like you describe, is very close to impossible. Numerous people ave contributed to Stella under its current license. They all would have to agree to change it. This is never going to happen. Stella is a group effort. And we are not after money, else we would do something else in our spare time.

Whoa, let's please take a step back and not start attacking one another, and this isn't directed at you, per se, but I'd like to nip this in the bud before it goes any furhter. Thank you, ..Al

🤣 Reminds me of those old dudes who had huge collections of Playboy and Hustler, but not a single title from Shakespeare, Hemingway, Twain, Vonnegut, etc

People don’t seem to want to hear it, but charging money for unlicensed arcade ports that used assets, music, sound effects, trademarked titles, etc. from games owned by extant and potentially litigious companies e.g. Activision, Taito, Nintendo, etc. was always a legal risk that worst case could have gotten AtariAge shut down entirely. Especially the games that completely omit the name of the actual trademark and copyright holder, replacing them with the moniker of the homebrew author. That practice is extremely risky and increasingly likely to draw a cease and desist letter. Doing things on the up and up as with Lode Runner and Boulder Dash was the legally and ethically right thing to do.

Credit where credit is due... the last couple of years have seen some really solid releases from Atari. I also have been impressed with the VCS - the build quality and software library exceeded my expectations. I love the Recharged series. @davpa has done an amazing job growing the VCS library and getting some cool indie titles on the VCS. And for games that support the Classic controller's twist functionality, the VCS makes for a unique experience. Breakout Recharged and Gravitar Recharged with the spinner controls are a lot of fun. I also appreciate that Atari has started highlighting some of their lesser known titles like Black Widow, Caverns of Mars and Quantum. They have also been alluding to the APX program and their 80s computer camps. It is very refreshing to highlight things beyond the 2600 and the big coin-ops. That said, one thing that has continuously bothered me are the mistakes made by a lack of attention to detail. Almost every correspondence from Atari has a typo or error in it. If you want to honor the history, you need to take care to be accurate. Here is a Facebook post about the 2600+ from today: 5200? Seriously? And, of course, there are huge issues like the PCBs in the first round of Atari XP carts being backwards and the VCS needing to be flashed out of the box to work. Things like that do a lot to erode the goodwill and trust that you are trying to build. I also am skeptical about the 2600+ compatibility list. I just can't believe that Atari had access to a Custer's Revenge cart to test but not Popeye or Pitfall II. I want to believe that Atari is being straight with the carts they have tested but there are some carts that it is surprising they could not get a hold of. But congrats to Albert (and Atari). I do want to see Atari succeed. Wade Rosen's Atari has definitely been an improvement over the previous decade's Atari. With people like Albert working there I hope they continue to improve and release lots of really cool stuff for Atari fans going forward.

What about it irks you? The attempt to impose an artificial economy of scarcity on digital assets which are infinitely reproducible? The excessive use of energy to power massive banks of GPUs that are in turn inflating the cost of consumer GPUs to absurd levels? The weird mixture of condescension and desperation that exudes from early adopters who can't explain how any of it actually works (much less how a computer even gets an image on screen or sends a document to a printer) but they try to act like you're the idiot for not seeing how you're missing out on making free money by investing in something with no intrinsic value?

Small point of correction but it's important. Stella isn't in the public domain. It's copyrighted and licenced under the GNU GPL v2.

Yep, that's always been my thought, too. What's particularly disheartening, to me at least, is the times I've seen people get introduced to classic games because of these lackluster systems and conclude that "these games suck..." only to see them have a blast when they play the same games on real hardware. Because of that, I've held the opinion that those AtGames releases (and others) have actually caused more harm than good. But I'm aware that I'm in the minority, there, so oh well.

This is my and @DirtyHairy's point. Atari is trying to pretend that they are any different. Their PR department is trying to convince people to believe that. Just look at the announcement for the acquisition of AtariAge. And people (want to) believe. But when it comes to action, these words are just what they are: Words. And that's why I do not believe this acquisition is any good for the AtariAge we love.

I handle PR and also game distribution ... those two are my day-to-day.

That is not how "placeholders" work, don't talk utter BS! If you are a sound and sincere developer, you don't want to use stolen sound FX of a very popular game to advertise your homebrew game. To make matters even worse, you would create a false impression of the quality of the final product. Both things are a NOGO. AnderLex game designer and artist

I doubt Genesis controllers would work without an adapter. I can try Seagull 78 and Mega 7800 adapters, though, to see if they work fine on the 2600+. ..Al

I think it was explained fairly well that the issue being taken here is not that Atari is using Stella, it is that the 'new friendly, arm-in-arm with the fans' Atari is using it without even so much of a nod to the the people who actually created it. Atari is going to make money off of it, and that is what companies do but I am thinking some acknowledgement to those responsible for creating the system Atari is using would not have cost them anything more then a few moments of someones time spent to type it up. Yet there is not a peep for the Stella authors. Honestly, I would be more then a little disgruntled as well if it was myself.

You are saying that open source software, or at least the GPLv2, was a mistake. That is a subject of a lot of debate. It is not an exaggeration to say that the entire corporate world and governments worldwide run on the unpaid work of volunteers. The free and open software community realized that this was not working so well, and many projects since have used more restrictive licenses, but those projects largely die because nobody uses them as a result. This was one notable recent situation where an OSS project regretted the results of using the Apache v2 license and found out the hard way there are no takebacks for earlier license choices: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3695576/somehow-opensearch-has-succeeded.html That feels like a perverse outcome to me but it is the logical conclusion of free and open software with licenses that allowed them to be used commercially without having to give anything back unless they modified the original sources. I do strongly agree that Atari should contribute meaningfully financially to the Stella project. Licenses and legality aside, it would be a valuable gesture of good will.

Thanks for all the nice words on this one, guys! I wasn't expecting a whole lot of feedback for a tech demo, so it was a pleasant surprise. I've included the source for the demo in the 7800basic samples directory, in case anybody is curious.

The 2600 games may be the most iconic / well-known. That is probably true. The 2600 was in market for so long that there are way more games tied to the platform. A lot of those other platforms had a shorter lifespan. Plus there were fewer developers in the early years. The explosion of the game development industry was a good thing, and yes, that means Atari doesn't own/have rights to as high a percentage of later platform games. But we do own or have access to a good amount of titles across ST and Lynx, even Jaguar. And don't forget we own a lot of PC titles from the 90s and 00s, and a lot of early handheld era games that have value. A lot of work ahead of us bringing titles back into circulation.

He actually works for free, as well!

If original 7800 controllers work it doesn't seem like a big deal to me. I mean, Nintendo sold numerous versions of the DS and game and watch handhelds without even including an AC adapter, they just assumed you already had one. Let's face it, most of us already did just like most of us already have a 7800 controller lol Well, somebody could pick up the "AtariSage" name just in case 😄

The 5200 was a sales disaster with a struggle bus controller that would be prohibitively expensive to recreate, literally four exclusive games, and simply no compelling reason to own one. At least half the library consists of arcade ports from a plethora of other companies that Atari would need to negotiate expensive new contracts to revive. It is simply not commercially viable to revive it. There is no more nostalgia for it in the mass market than there is for the Tiger R-Zone. I don’t know if there is a market for 8 bit computer stuff but none of the other Atari video game systems is commercially viable. The notoriety and the mystery of the Jaguar probably make it #2. The Lynx is one of my favorite systems ever but I notice that in the Evercade community a good 1/3 won’t even give the best games on the system a chance. The reason Atari keeps hammering the 2600 is that it’s the only thing the mass of consumers remembers and buys. Other systems, save for maybe the Atari 8 bits, are viable at the scale of the AtariAge store, sure, but not at the scale of mass factory production or sale in major retailers.

I did just send a bulk email to anyone who's logged in within the last 30 days, and in the 20 years of running the forum, that's actually the very first time I've used that feature. Hopefully this will enable more people to login, and of course, help get the word out that it's just a technical problem and has nothing to do with the AtariAge/Atari announcement from two days ago. ..Al

Is anyone saying that? I think we all know Atari is a business, and their first priority is to their shareholders. That said, I do think Atari might have some moral (though maybe not legal) high ground since their corporate ancestors designed the system that Stella emulates. What would be a satisfactory solution? A splash screen that says “Powered by Stella” at launch? A sticker on the box? I have trouble imagining a product like 2600+, with its pack-in multicart with physical dip switches on it, being sold at modern retail stores. Though I guess the Atari VCS (2021) was sold at Micro Center for a brief time.

I think the same as you. If they are going to use something like Stella or an emulator from the 7800 that was made by enthusiasts, then why didn't they reach out to the programmers and make some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement? If you're not going to do that, then I don't think they should really be using Stella as the heart of their product. And this should have already been done, prior to the console's launch.

I am not complaining about GPLed code being used in commercial products, I underlined multiple times that I accept this as a side product of the license. But this is business, and it has nothing to do with caring about the community that evolved around the products that the new Atari is trying to montetarize again. And that's the whole reason why I keep insisting on that issue: if there was anything other than business behind the motives of Atari, then I would expect them to act differently.

Bluto (Brutus) makes his first appearance! He can't yet chase Popeye, but he (a) takes full part in the first round intro, (b) kills Popeye (very "touchy" at the moment, this will be fixed, proper infrastructure for this is already in place), (c) can be punched out when on-spinach, (d) takes a water dive then, and (e) gets out of the water. I did have a bug I could not put my finger on, when the collision with Bluto kicked in out of nowhere right at the entry of the round, I think I fixed it (I painted over a not yet erased intro screen, which made Bluto collide with a stale "GET READY" sign), but I think I did get it one more time at a later stage, but now cannot reproduce it (I might have as well pressed L sometime during the intro). Also, all Bluto sprites are now loaded in, so now I am certain I have enough of VBXE space (which was not so obvious, out of 512KB it has, taking into account that S_VBXE may reside there too, I have around 60K left). Due to this the XEX file also grew substantially. Next on the todo list, small things: one more internal refactoring I know I will need, auto spinach punch when Bluto is in range, and Bluto's collision with barrel. Then the other Bluto animations and some sort of decision making for him... popeye.atr popeye.xex

It is going to be interesting. I'd agree that the 2600 has the most nostalgic appeal and it was the most logical platform to revive. But retro gaming overall is a solid market right now. There are so many good games that were sort of lost as the console wars heated up and new and more powerful became much more important than backwards compatibility. Older games will continue to come back into circulation. Some will be ported to PC and modern console. Some will be rereleased in their original physical form. And I expect you will see more retro hardware that accepts original media coming to market as well. Commercial viability will always be an issue for more obscure platforms, but it you are realistic about the size of the market and can right size your development and distribution costs ... I mean we all want to get our hands on new versions of these classic legacy platforms for Atari and other brands. Unfortunately some games are owned by very big players who are unlikely to want to revisit them because they are always chasing much higher-dollar opportunities. The rerelease of some classic games on the first party platforms subscription services is cool, but I doubt they will go very deep into their catalog. So unless they license their tier 2 and tier 3 titles out to someone else to commercialize I think a lot of games are just not going to see the ight of day. Let's hope I am wrong.

Hence all the BS surrounding this dude - bad choices.

The cool thing about it is: patterns would work, because the full maze fits on screen. Another benefit, fruit can be colored, but only on the bottom of the screen, not on the play area (unless it was multiplexed). I'm only showing 4 fruit per row, but 5 could be shown per row, colored like this.

Just wanted to pop in and say congrats. Lived on this website when I was in High school back in the 00s and loved learning about and nerding out about Atari. Still play many 2600 games today. Much love to AtariAge!

Got the good ending on xeno crisis!! It was no easy task

I feel like this has been asked, and I hate to be the 'I didnt read all 33 pages' guy, but I did read the past few dozen posts. However, I'm curious as to what guarantees, if any, are in place? Could they fire Al next month? Next year? Shut it all down suddenly? The company I currently work for had no 'intention' of any major changes when they bought the previous company a couple years ago. A lot of my friends are out of work and our product is no longer being developed now. Our CEO who would remain our manager and was 'in this with us' was gone within 6 months.

Technically this iteration of Atari has existed for a while, but in many ways it is a pretty new organization. Some of the team members have been around for six or seven years, but the majority have joined within the last three after Wade become CEO. The energy within the company is pretty amazing. Maybe it is best described as a very new chapter?

Oh, but this one requires a third screenshot: the back of the Jaguar's retail box: You're fulfilling a prophecy 25 years in the making, clearly doing The Lord's work.