davidcalgary29

Solaris, hands-down. I bought my first 2600 because of it. Road Runner, Klax, and MotoRodeo are pretty great, too, although it was the homebrew scene that got me interested in the system.

I'll get one from them when they have another sale. The US-only shipping still makes me irate -- have Atari not figured out that they have an international market?!

Speaking of which, the clue to 58A in today's NYT crossword puzzle is "Asteroids System". The answer reveals that the author is not an enthusiast, unless he thinks that 5200 "Meteroites" counts.

I bought the entire run in the spiral-bound collection from a member here about fifteen years ago. Great stuff.

Two for me, please!

Congratulations on the sale price! Let's hope that this will spur other people to be on the hunt for some of the more obscure 'apps' that were made for the A8 in the early '80s.

These auctions often remind me of the sci-fi novel A Canticle for Liebowitz: in the future, I can imagine religious cults being founded on obscure A8 carts -- burned with even more obscure art software -- that were found at garage sales.

I put in a bid. If I win it, I'm going to send it away to be dumped.

Popeye looks sort of scary...I almost feel that he should have "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed across his fingers.

...especially because it was created as a passion project by an 8-bit enthusiast; Activision released it in select European markets after they realized how good it was (and the fact that they already had the rights for it). Activision had never intended to release an A8 port for this game. Peter Sabath told me that: Hi David, Wolfgang forwarded me his mail to you containing my e-mail address so your mail did not come out of nothing… About end of summer 1986 I saw “Shanghai” on the ATARI ST, and liked it from the day I saw it. Unfortunately there was no ATARI XE version announced so I thought it would be a nice, relative easy to port game, so I started with grabbing graphics of the ST version (Tiles and the dragon) and started to program the whole game from scratch without any help from Activision. I used the Bibo-Assembler and a special, stripped down version of Bibo-DOS (to be able to write “normal” formatted disks for save games) from Erwin Reuss which was my friend and worked at Compy-Shop. Since I liked the mouse on the ATARI ST I had added support for the ST mouse on the XL/XE. Since this was at the time where I did my military service I had not much time to work on it. Erwin and the managing director of Compy-Shop (Peter Bee) as well as the guys from ABBUC which have seen the version at the yearly meeting found the port really great and told me it would be a waste not to try to sell it. That was the hardest part, how to connect the “right” person at Activision. Happily Activision had opened its first German office in Hamburg (by Greg Fishbach) not so long ago. (around 1985) I can’t remember from whom I get that contact, but it was a direct contact to the German management level. I send a version to them in mid-1987 and started to wait. After some months I got the info that they forwarded the version to “Rod Cousens” which was managing director of the Southampton based Activision owned studio “Electric Dreams”. In February 1988 they offered me a contract to buy the port which was nice money for a young man that just started at University. The contract requested some missing features (the help & how to play sections) which were easy to add. I asked them for the Activision logo animation I had seen on other XL/XE titles but they were not able to provide it (I think because they did not make ATARI 8 Bit titles) so I was allowed to rip it out of another title. Thanks to my friends at Compy-Shop I had a Speedy drive and was able to apply a copy protection to the disk as well. But they were not able to reproduce the disk so I had to remove the copy protection. I do not know how may copies they sold and where the title was released at all. If I remember correctly I even did not get a copy from them, I got my copy from Wolfgang. I hope that sheds some light on the creation of “Shanghai” for ATARI 8 Bit

Here's a poster up for auction to commemorate this nice piece of vapourware.

Does that bring back memories! There must have been some type of renovation -- I recall that Atari Canada had its own entrance. I also don't recall a second floor. When you walked in, there was a front counter that was staffed by a man. There was a repair "shop" in the back, as well. It was a really small operation when I frequented it in the mid to late '80s -- I can't remember seeing more than five employees there. The vapourware lists were great fun -- I'm just sorry that I didn't keep them for the XEGS.

Fat Bobby and Bubble Trouble were actually released by Telegames in a variety of cases; my copy of Bubble Trouble came packaged in this ugly white DVD movie case with cheap red printing on the front and back. Really, the CD jewel cases are an improvement. I dimly recall that Hyperdrome also orginally had some other packaging, but have never seen Raiden in anything but the CD jewel case. I believe that Pete (UK Telegames) stated that Telegames just grabbed whatever packaging (and boards) were available at the time when making another production run of their cartridges; that's why there are so many cart variants of their games.

I would love to see some pictures of the old Atari Canada HQ in Markham, Ontario! It was an ugly brown building in a nondescript business park, to which I made repeated pilgrimages to get my 1050 repaired (before I learned how to do it myself). Ah, the memories...

I'm incredibly impressed by what you've already accomplished. Thanks for doing this with VBXE!