zzip

You don't already have a dozen devices that play CDs like the rest of us?

Adventure!

Hmm.. my recollection was that Berzerk came first, but I guess my memory could be wrong. I just seem to remember Atari being on a roll, finally producing ports that looked like the arcade, and then blam! the Pacman disaster. The AtariSoft effort (which published Atari's hits to Colecovision/INTV/C64/Apple/PC, etc) wasn't a thing until a year or two later. In 1982 the thinking seemed to be "get the biggest arcade hits, and make them exclusive to your system". Then 83/84 seemed that cross-publishing was important-- probably because the industry was collapsing all around them and they just wanted to get those sales wherever they could.

yeah, little things like better colors, not putting an eye on Pac man would help and not consume additional memory. They should've been able to create a maze that is truer to the original maze too with little or no memory penalty. Then make the sound effects and music closer to the original and that would probably would have erased most criticism. I had also heard that this version was released in prototype form and if the developer had more time, it would have been better. I also heard the excuse that Atari had a "no black background" policy at one point, believing that showing color helped show games. But there are plenty of games from Atari in that era with black backgrounds.

I've found it's impossible to even give CRTs away these days. You pretty much have to pay someone to take them off your hands. But I wouldn't be surprised if they become valuable in the future as they become scarce.

I could see how they might come to that conclusion, but yet they produced a Berzerk port around that same time that looked as close to the arcade as the 2600 could possibly muster

Dumb question- but Atari scored the biggest video game license of all time (at that point). Why did they insist on cheaping out on it? The whole gaming world would be watching this release. Why wouldn't they want it to be a showcase for their system, like Donkey Kong was for Coleco? They already used 8K carts for Asteroids, why not Pacman?

You can switch the font on any DLI, and since there's only 40 char per line, you could even have an entirely new character set every third line, and print whatever you'd need to. Hopefully your needs aren't that extreme though. In short, whatever you need should be doable, it might just take a little planning

I do recall that there was a driver for PC serial mice- you used to be able to find those dirt cheap because nobody wants them anymore. Just remember they get plugged into the serial port with a 9-pin to 25-pin adaptor (and they mice often come with these adaptors), not the ST mouse port even though the connector is the same more info here: http://atari.org/hosted/quickfaq/stfaq_3.htm#5

You can play with the self-test mode That's about all you can do with it without software

It worked on my 520STfm, which was TOS 1.00 on Rom. I don't know about the original disk-based TOS. But I thought those models didn't have RF? Confused..

In the state I lived in, it probably would have been difficult to get a liquor license for a beer arcade. The only one I can think of was a pizza shop that sold beer and had a game room.

And I didn't even realize what a big deal that was until I started programming in other languages on other systems and discovered that their RANDOM() functions were not random at all unless you mixed up your seed. So I had to provide a random number of my own to get a random number? What??? LOL

oh wow, I've got a ton of these!

Some of my best arcade memories come from those games outside the arcade! The hot dog shop we'd go to after Saturday basketball games is where I discovered Pac Man. The laundromat down the street had Frogger, Vanguard and Asteroids Deluxe. The convenience store a little beyond that had Defender, The pizza shop had Pole Position and Pengo, and they eventually made a whole game room. The supermarket had Wizard of Wor & Ms Pac Man. So too this day, I may play Pengo and be reminded of the smell of Pizza, or Vanguard and swear I catch a wiff of Tide or Bounce

I always loved the sounds of walking into a classic arcade too. Everybody talks about how much better the graphics were, but home systems usually couldn't get the sounds right either. The buzzing of the Defender & Robotron machines, the music and jumping of Frogger, Q*Bert swearing like a sailor, and "Dragon's Lair! A fantasy adventure where you become blah blah.."

If you are open to requests- Epson 9-pin (is that the same as ESC/P mentioned above?). That was a popular standard then. Maybe Okidata Okimate 10, as that was a popular (but crappy) color printer

I used to like it in the arcade. I thought the 2600 port wasn't bad, but of course it was limited.

You can use it without a mouse, I think ALT+ cursor keys simulates mouse movement, but it's annoying and you will probably want to find a mouse. Using the RF cable might be easiest- And for game use that isn't bad, I don't think it's easy to connect these to VGA monitors IIRC, but maybe people have solved that through custom cables?

But emulators of that time period were only doing the 80s games well and struggling with the current 90s stuff. So unless your arcade was stocked with 10-15 year old games, I don't think it would impact you in any way.

I don't think it's disliked. Just irrelevant to many people. The emulation scene was much bigger around 96-97. So many emulation projections popped up in that time period.

Same for me. Played the games in the arcade first, then couldn't wait to play it at home. Then it was a guessing game among friends of whether the home (2600) version was going to be good or not.

Thanks for that info. I guess the answer is the problem did exists, but the people who did the TV graphics were professionals and knew how to hide it

It could be that in the 80s, arcades drove sales of home systems. Arcade ports were all the rage back then. Kind of like "watch it in the theater, then buy the DVD 6 months later"-- I think Atari definitely rode a wave of getting sales from both ends and preventing one from cannibalizing the other. In the 90s that was perhaps less important to selling home consoles. Yes arcade tech was barely ahead of home tech, if at all. And is it coincidence arcades all but died soon after?

Because with the much larger install base of the C64, they could still sell enough copies from people who didn't pirate.