Vic George

Yes, the Atari-labeled versions of Mousetrap, Venture, Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong Jr. are the same as the Coleco-labeled versions.

Centipede for Intellivision was okay, though after like 30,000 points the spider starts moving around so fast. Pac-Man could've been better, though it's not as bad as the Atari 2600 version. I have not owned or even tried Defender to even comment.

What's disappointing to me is never seeing an actual Atari 2600 Ladybug cartridge in gaming action. (I still wonder whether the writers of one of Electronic Games' Buyer's Guides actually got to play a real version of it or not, since it was listed in there as an actual game.)

In my opinion, I don't think Coleco did a bad job porting arcade games over to the Atari 2600, regardless of what people thought of Coleco's corporate strategy. There were only a few cases, however, where their ports were extremely poor (Donkey Kong Jr. was badly done on the 2600) or that they couldn't figure out how to make it exactly like the arcade (Zaxxon being that example). But overall, I think the concept of Coleco purposefully sabotaging the quality of their ports to the 2600 was mostly hearsay and very little substance. Consider that two of their ports, Donkey Kong and Carnival (both pretty good), were programmed by the Kitchen brothers (Dan and Steve) who went on to doing Activision games. And the Atari 2600 Smurf game was a quality port of the original ColecoVision version.

More songs I used for videotaped game soundtracks: Styx's "Mr. Roboto" for Robotron 2084 (7800) Journey's "Only Solutions" for Adventures of Tron (2600) Journey's "1990s Theme From Tron" for Tron Deadly Discs (2600; I also had the Intellivision version, but my Intellivision 2 was history at that time)

Player 1 Hope that helps!

I used to record games to various music being piped in through the audio input of my family's VCR. Like I would have "Pac-Man Fever" by Buckner & Garcia for Ms. Pac-Man (the Atari 2600 Pac-Man wasn't worthy enough to have that as a soundtrack!), "Do The Donkey Kong" for Donkey Kong, and for the Ghostbusters game I'd have Ray Parker Jr.'s version being belted out. Some other interesting musical videogame mixes I had done were Queen's "Flash Gordon" to Cosmic Avenger for the ColecoVision, Weird Al's "Eat It" to the 7800's Food Fight, The Rocky Horror Picture Show's "Time Warp" to Ghost Manor, Steve Miller's "Abracadabra" to Midnight Magic (the song had pinball-like sounds that I thought was appropriate), and Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me" to Sneak & Peek (one of the worst games I played).

As for the first Atari system I (or rather, my family) owned, that was a Christmas gift received in 1981, so I have no idea where it was bought. It was a woodgrain 4-switch model, BTW. The first Atari system that I bought was a Coleco Gemini in a Zayre department store in Fall River in 1985. It came with a copy of Mr. Do! that I traded with another Atari 2600 owner for his other copy of Demon Attack. That lasted me and whoever else played it the whole summer until I got my hands on a standalone model ADAM computer system and hooked up the Expansion Module #1 bought for my family's ColecoVision to it. Then came the Atari 7800 system, which I bought on my own at a Toy Works store in my own hometown of Westfield. That lasted me for three years until I sold it and the whole library of games I had for both the 2600 and the 7800 at a tag sale to raise money for my program the Forum House (a vocational rehab program for the mentally ill).

If anyone wanted to shoot a video for Buckner & Garcia's "Pac-Man Fever" (was there ever really a video for that song?), that guitar would be a good prop for it! LOL

Player 1's website has the Pac-Man and Digdug ROM files for ColecoVision, and they run perfect on my copy of AdamEm and ColEm. Unfortunately, MEKA (the Sega Master System/Game Gear/SG-1000/ColecoVision emulator) can only run Digdug.

Fast Food is the only Telesys game that I love playing, and I had that game. I like playing it on the Z26 emulator with the mouse controller.

You can, but only one of the action buttons will work. And there are certain games that nothing but the Atari 7800 hand controllers will work on, like Karateka, One On One, and Choplifter.

Just as an interesting note, you can also use the Atari 7800 controllers as replacements for ColecoVision controllers (minus the keypads), since the two action buttons also work independently on ColecoVision games. (I tried this out years ago on my ADAM computer system.)

A combination Cuttle Cart/CD player adapter would be my suggestion.

I tried M.E.S.S. before with the front-end called sMESS and it worked fine. Now I can't even get sMESS to recognize that there are any ROMs, and two other front-end programs that I tried with M.E.S.S. won't operate. Can someone please help?

To Ze_ro: Yeah, I've had a copy of the SNES version of Mr. Do! and played it. Probably the best version of that game for any home system. Kinda weird that, with a special trick, you can select how many lives and which level you want to start your game on. I never did get to try out its 2-player competitive game version with anybody, though.

I like the Venture 2 logo ("The Abysmal Abyss" is a good subtitle), and the SCSIcide label with a hard drive on it is interesting, but I half expected the ColecoVision Pac-Man, Joust, and Dig-Dug cartridges to have the Atarisoft-style labels on them! (I could only wonder what their boxes and game manuals would look like, if they even came with such!)

I think the Atari 2600 Mr. Do! was okay, though it needed a bit more work since there were only two enemies that could pursue you at a time, and it lacked the bonus prize in the center. The ColecoVision version was better, though its shortcoming was that each screen only had a total of like nine of those badguys that appeared from the center of the screen, not counting the Alphamonsters or munchers. Too bad there wasn't an Atari 5200 or 7800 version.

Gorf works fine with my copy of Z26.

I don't use an alias. Vic George is my name.

Megamania to me seems more like a parody of Astro Blaster than a rip-off, since what you're shooting at aren't aliens but burgers, cookies, bugs, tires, diamonds, steam irons, bowties, and tumbling dice.

Don't you have a URL for that, Soda Bob?

My favorites for Atari-compatible controllers were the Atari Space Age joystick (which worked great for maze games) and the Suncom Joy-Sensor, which was the forerunner to those Triax Turbo Touch gamepads for the NES, Genesis, and Super NES systems -- the controllers with the touch-sensitive joypads.

Use a front-end program with the Virtual Super System to save yourself the headaches of typing in command lines to run the BIN game files. Game Menu is my preferred choice of front-end programs.

The only Infogrames products I have bought were The Smurfs and The Smurfs' Nightmare for the Gameboy, which were pretty good games. And, through emulation, I have also tried out the Super NES Smurfs game, which was so good I became irritated at the fact that Nintendo Power had advertised this as a "coming soon" Super NES game in the U.S. and it never was released here! (Frankly, the Super NES Smurfs game would make a great Gameboy Advance translation!)