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I'm not following your math. 38x20 is 760 squares, and if I'm right that each square could be represented in 4-bits than it's only 380 bytes of memory / disk space (without compression)

Yeah if it's about the people, the PS4, PS5 and PS Vita were all designed by former Atari employee Mark Cerny, does that make them true Atari products and not Sony products? I'd say no that's ridiculous. But on the other hand, a lot of people over the years have used that logic to claim the Amiga is really an Atari machine because of Jay Miner.

The Warner era was my favorite as well. It was the early 80s heyday of videogames and the company screamed fun (even if they were bleeding cash behind the scenes). I saw crazy Atari commercials on TV constantly, I got the colorful AtariAge magazine in the mail. I went with an Atari computer over a C64 because it at the time it seemed like that's where it was at (that didn't age so well, haha). I remember reading about the Atari sale. Suddenly all that stuff evaporated, the commercials, the Atari Club, the AtariAge magazine. There was a period of uncertainty where nobody was sure what would come next. 8-bit software dried up as publishers were waiting too. Finally the ST and XE were unveiled and there was a sign of relief... but there new Atari Corp seemed more frustrating than fun at times. They'd promise things that would end up coming late and not be quite as good as originally stated "New 3.5" Disk Drive for 8-bit line" "Well actually we decided to make a new 5.25" drive instead, but at least it's double sided!" New enhanced STe that probably should have been released a year or two earlier than it was, and still not quite up to the original 1985 Amiga specs. I stuck with Atari computers into the early 90s, but I have mixed feelings about that era- like they'd keep dangling something shiny in front of you then beat you repeatedly with a stick, and repeat that process over and over. The current Wade Rosen era seems like they are bringing the enthusiastic fun back. Maybe not to heights of the Warner era, I don't think that's possible. But so far it's been more fun the the "BUSINESS IS WAR!!" Tramiel era IMO. Also the 7800 was a Warner-era console. It was all set to release in 84, but got delayed because of the sale, and sat in a warehouse until Jack finally agreed to pay GCC. But if authenticity is about the people involved, then one could argue that Lynx wasn't a true Atari product, since it was developed by Epyx and fell into Atari's lap. Same with the 7800 developed by GCC. The Jaguar was also developed by an outside company, but it was at least Atari commissioned it. Personally I do consider them to be real Atari products as well as the ST (despite its Commodore origins) because I think the brand transcends the people involved. When you have a singular artist creating a notable art style, it's really hard to replace them. But when a corporation creates a product, it's usually created by a team of faceless people. For better or worse, corporations want people to be interchangeable like cogs. Because if your product is dependent on a specific person, then you are in deep trouble should they quit or get hit by a bus.

Really small. There is a level definition format, which allows random elements, lines, single elements etc. The size varies, but it is less than 100 bytes/cave on average. I think the contents of each square can be represented in 4 bits, and there's what 32x32 squares per level? Maybe less. Yeah it wouldn't take a whole lot of space. If they squeeze it to less than 100 bytes , they are probably doing RLE compression or something. If a theoretical purchase of Atari Games came with Williams and Midway, I wouldn't shed any tears over that Atari could finally publish the home ports of Defender, Joust and Robotron that many were looking for in Atari 50 for a start.

Many use the "different people involved" argument to justify why Atari now isn't real Atari, but the Atari of 1996 was. I don't think it holds water for a few reasons. 1) Warner laid off a ton of people as times got tough, When Jack bought it, he laid off the majority of the staff 2) Corporations are usually about the brand and not about the people involved (with some exceptions). Atari was known for not wanting to give their programmers credit, which is why a bunch left to form Activision. Of the famous Atarians whose names we do know: i.e Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, Steve Jobs, Todd Frye, Howard Scott Warshaw, Mark Cerney- all were gone long before 1996 3) Even if ownership was unbroken, most of the early staff would be retired by now and it would be all new people anyway. I'd also argue that Atari Corp was a very different company from Atari Inc. For one, Jack changed the focus to be a computer company. Computers were a less-important product line under Warner, but they were now front-and-center under Tramiel, with a computer designed by ex-Commodore engineers being priority one. They also tried to clean it up with a more business friendly focus so that they could sell computers to the business world. They tried to get into the workstation market. They were producing a PC line. Consoles were an afterthought at first. They just wanted to sell the existing stock of consoles to help keep the lights on. After a few years they realized there was money to be made in console gaming and computer opportunities were drying up so you saw a pivot. But one other big difference was Atari Inc was the undisputed king of the home videogame market and even Nintendo was afraid of them. Atari Corp allowed Nintendo to take over the market without a fight. That shows how different the focus was. Back in the 80s, Atari had the Atari Program Exchange or APX which published software developed by the community. Some went on to become full Atari products. Seems like AtariAge publishing will act like a spirtual successor to that. Yes the unauthorized IPs are gone, but those always seemed like a ticking time bomb to me anyway. There's other ways for homebrewers to get published as well.

I guess start with the top ST games on Atarimania and see what licenses can realistically be acquired. I think Atari already got a few of the top games through the Accolade/Microprose acquisition. Who owns the FTL games? Who owns Time Bandit? Who owns the Epyx and Datasoft catalogs? There may be things like that which are attainable. I'm pretty sure about 5,000 of them are Boulderdash levels Also Atarimania has duplicate entries for many games, since there are separate entries when it was releases by different publishers and in different countries, etc. There aren't many people with Falcons, and the state of Falcon emulation is still buggy from what I can tell.

Atari Games was the arcade portion of Atari that Tramiel didn't want. They were allowed to use the Atari name and fuji logo legally in the arcade domain, they just weren't allowed to publish home games under that name. (Likewise, Atari Corp wouldn't be allowed to create arcade games with the Atari name/logo had they wanted to) So I think they are just as much a successor to Atari Inc as Atari Corp was. I just think it's a matter of arcade cabinet manufacturers don't stir the passion in people the way home consoles/computers do. That's why everyone focuses on Atari Corp and often forget the Atari Games half existed.

The 16-bit era was the time when they really started building games on different platforms from the same codebase. You can see this in all the complaints of Amiga gamers of getting "straight ST ports", but also the Apple IIgs versions were identical (but ran poorer). PC versions also often seemed to be built from the same code base, just with color downgrades for EGA and addition of keyboard game controls There's even more active gaming platforms today: Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series XS, Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS. Some are similar, but you still need to support several different graphics systems to cover them all: DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL, whatever the Playstation uses. So I think publishers are willing to support more platforms if the sales are there, but for ST/Amiga the sales simply stopped being there. Also the rise of CD-ROM gaming didn't help. Few ST/Amiga owners had CD-ROMs, they didn't have the equivalent of VGA graphics, except for the newest Amiga/Falcon models that almost nobody bought. It was just time to move on.

Back then it changed hands twice, had mass layoffs, and split into two entities: Atari Games and Atari Corp. So 1996 Atari Corp already had very little in common with 1972 Atari. But the internet acts like it was a single harmonious entity that got defiled by Hasbro or something.

Getting a disk drive opened a whole new world of gaming. Around 1985, Atari 1050 disk drives started appearing in stores for half the price they had been previously. I don't know if it was due to Tramiel's aggressive pricing or the price of components falling, but suddenly they were affordable. I soon had a collection of RPGs and Adventure games. Yeah during the US crash, computers were the only sector of gaming where there was still life and there was a lot of innovation in computer games. How many of the computer publishers started as mom and pop operations? Selling disks in baggies and what not. I agree that allowed for more risk-taking.

Yeah I've heard some people complain the Star Cruiser looks more Star Trek than Star Wars. The limited amount I've seen of it, it did look a little "off". But from reviews I've heard of people who stayed there, they would have you engage in mediocre card games and what not to fill time. 48-hours is a lot of time, and it can't be all exciting space battles all that time I suppose. And time spent on "filler" activities is time that could have been spent on Space Mountain or at the Food and Wine festival. Maybe they could have kept it a hotel, but instead of making you spend two days there, they would have "shuttles" to take you to Galaxy's Edge, Planet Epcot (Epcottooine?), etc. These could be "Rise of the Resistance style"- ordinary buses or trucks, but the inside is designed to look like a space ship with fake viewing screens to make it look like your are travelling in hyperspace to your destination I just think the way it was- extremely high price, while keeping you captive while at Disney World + not quite getting the theming right was just a recipe for disaster.

I like this idea. Everytime I blink, this thread has 2 new pages of replies, I don't think anyone can keep track of what has been asked and answered so everyone keeps asking similar questions.

It's not just the price, but also the fact that you get stuck spending two days of your vacation there doing sometimes mundane things. I think it might work better as some kind of dinner theater thing, you go on a short 1-hour adventure, "land" at the cantina and eat, maybe spend no more than 3 hours there

As others mentioned Turbo BASIC has a command for this (Turbo Basic is free and faster than Atari BASIC and adds lots of cool features) In Atari BASIC, the short answer is "yes" you can mix graphics and text and there are a few ways of doing this, they are somewhat advanced: 1) write BASIC code that plots character data onto the screen (you can copy it from the built-in font) 2) manipulate the Display List to mix graphics and text modes on screen 3) Use Player/Missile overlays as others mentioned.

The Atari 8bit has 4 Players and 4 missiles (skinny sprites that can be combined into a 5th player) these sprites stretch the entire height of the screen, and can be chopped up with DLIs to create the impression of many more independent sprites in different screen region

if it got turned into a real game, I'd love the ability to choose between the artifacting version, white-on-black and black-on-white versions on the title screen. Something for everyone.

I've used a PS4 controller on mine, and the touchpad can be used as a mouse, but the Atari modern controller doesn't have this.

Voice: "REMEMBER! DON'T SHOOT FOOD! WE HAVE TO STRETCH THIS PLOT OUT ANOTHER TWO HOURS!"

Toobin' is/was Atari Games too.

If it uses the a7800 emulator like the VCS does, it emulates Pokey sound. I don't think it has Yamaha emulation though.

The question seems focused on the European market. In the US the NES came shortly after the ST and that dominated the arcade/action segment of the market and limited the ST/Amiga's appeal as game machines over here. I think the big change was when people started getting 8-bit systems with disk drives. That's when you saw RPG and strategy games start to flourish. ST and Amiga brought better graphics and deeper gameplay to such games. Dungeon Master added the point and click inventory system which was unique for its time. In the US, the PC was a couple years behind ST/Amiga, so I think you'd see those games on that. In Europe they might have gone to a different computer. I don't think such games would have gone to consoles during that time period they were too limited.

The problem was the PC clone market exploded, creating lots of price competition and economies of scale. There was a tipping point where you could get more power for less money in the PC space than you could in the 680x0 space, and at that point the ST/Amiga days were numbered.

The file extension of the executable can help here. If it ends in .TOS or .TTP than that indicates it doesn't use GEM and should be AUTO folder safe. If it ends PRG or APP then it usually means it's a GEM app. But it's not a hard and fast rule, apps can have the wrong extension.

There's parts of Vegas that could be considered Kid Friendly, but there's also stuff that goes on on the strip that isn't-- people handing out cards advertising 'girls' for strip shows and worse. Did a tour of the southwest a few years back with a stop in Vegas a few years back and kept having a nagging feeling of "shouldn't have brought the kids here" even though there was lots of cool stuff for them to enjoy, like aquariums, Hershey and M&M areas, and so on. There's always adult stuff around you can't get away from.

Atari never had a huge presence in the ST games market, and of the games the did publish, they no longer own the rights to many of them. I can see why they skipped if for Atari 50. The good news is the recent Accolade/Microprose/Infrogrames catalog acquisition gives them rights to a bunch of ST games, and TrogdarRobusto mentioned earlier in this thread that they do plan to do something with ST.,