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If memory serves, to trigger an interrupt in Rambrandt you position your cursor on a line and press the I key, you can then change one of the colors from that line on down through the rest of the screen, or until it hits another interrupt that changes it. I also think Rambrandt only allows one color change per line with interrupts. It would be nice if let us swap out the entire palette.

I had a similar experience. 30 year old Atari disks that worked fine just a couple of years ago, no longer work now. I didn't change how they were stored or anything. Maybe we're running up against the limits of how long these things can last?

It's a platform game where the platforms represent ledges on a mountain. First objective is to collect enough gems (1000 I think), then that makes the flame spirit appear. you can jump platform to platform or use your flashlight to locate dark (hidden) objects like treasure chests. The second objective is to locate and find the flame spirit once it appears- It is a dark flame that you can't see without your flashlight, except for an occasional flicker. You hear music when you get near it, and the closer you get the louder the music plays. Once you catch it, you head to the bottom of the mountain to the temple. You can enter from the bottom with the flame spirit and then grab the crown at the top. Once you leave the temple with the crown, the song "In the Hall of the Mountain King" plays in all it's glory and gets faster and faster. You have to get to the top of the mountain with your crown before the music stops. But there are flying bats that will try to steal the crown. That's the game in a nutshell. The 2600 version has a fun glitch where if you do a double jump, the second jump can go quite high. You can jump almost all the way to the mountain peak if you time it right

This is hard! a lot of 2600 games are arcade translations that I prefer to play on other systems. 20. Battlezone 19. Sky Jinks 18. Haunted House 17. Riddle of the Sphynx 16. Keystone Kapers 15. Wizard of Wor 14. Frogs and Flies 13. Reactor 12. Berzerk 11. Phoenix 10. Vanguard 9. Spike's Peak 8. Tunnel Runner 7. Ms Pacman 6. Frogger (Starpath version) 5. ET 4. Pitfall II 3. Mountain King 2. Adventure 1. Raiders of the Lost Ark

The obvious reason was it made the ST line closer in capabilities to the Amiga I agree with others about the timing, 89 was too late. 87 or 88 would have been better, but after the amazing speed Atari brought the original ST to market, every R&D effort after seemed slow and behind the times. I would also say that the Tramiels seemed to just dump anything on the market to make a buck, even if it didn't have a great marketing story. The 7800 that had already been outclassed by the competition by the time it finally got released. The XE Game System (who was that for exactly?) that went head to head with the 7800. So it didn't matter if the STe's configuration was the right answer for 1989, they were going to push it to market anyway, dammit! by the way, I did buy an STe after seeing it demoed at a user group. But it hadn't even been on my radar prior to that, so Atari's marketing (or lack therof) didn't reach me

That's how Atari graphics work, basically. If you want more colors, try out Rambrandt. I believe it can use a Koalapad, but it allows you to insert DLIs into your picture which will allow you to use more colors. I think you can also paint in the more colorful (but wide pixel) GTIA modes with Rambrandt if memory serves.

Early adopting has a big downside too, not only do you pay a lot more, but you miss out on later revisions/standards that you might kick yourself for. Just off the top of my head: early Atari 800 adopters paid a lot and missed GTIA. Early 4K adopters paid a lot and missed HDR I know there are many other examples of this.

The C64 version of the Ultima games do not use artifacting, C64 hi-res mode can place 2-unique colors in each 8x8 on screen block I think. That limitation works out quite well for a tile-based game like ultima, and the C64 version is the most colorful of the 8-bits computer versions I think.

With the Atari800 emulator, I got it to an acceptable green foliage/ purple water (passes for blue), kinda the reverse of your first screenshot

exactly. I think the apple II has the same number of bytes per line, but they use an extra bit to swap between two different artifact color sets for each byte, which leaves them with 280 pixels, but up to 4 unique artifact colors (red, blue, green, purple) vs 320 and 2 artifact colors. but that means that you while you can put red and blue in a single byte on apple, you can't mix say red and green. It has to be either red + blue or green + purple. I love how all the 8-bits have their own unique quirks with color placement

Didn't realize Uncharted was that cheap. Haven't played it yet.

I would love the irony of Activision buying Atari. Not that I think they'd do anything useful with it. I would love the name to go to a company whose output suits it. Use it as a brand-name for new arcady-retro styled games. Games in the vein of Rocket League or Resogun would be a good fit for the brand, I think.

Not only are games today cheaper, adjusted for inflation, but they offer an incredible amount of content compared to what they used to have to squeeze into a 2K or 4K cartridge. I always roll my eyes when I see gamers today complaining about getting ripped off because a game "only" offers 30 or so hours of unique content. As opposed to the 15 minutes of content, 3 lives and you're dead that we used to pay the same price for. lol

But I do think it was a big part of the reason for the disappointing Christmas 82 sales. Pacman the arcade kicked off the early 80s videogame boom. I remember everybody was excited that "Pacman is coming to the Atari!". When it finally came, I'm sure it killed off a lot of the video game hype because the 2600 port did almost nothing right

I learned BASIC on a Commodore Pet at school.

O.M.G! I totally forgot that thing existed. But seeing it brought back memories.

The updates added things like Building bases, Owning freighters, farming resources, ground vehicles, improved graphics, improved terrain generation, improved space battles, and lots of other stuff I don't recall off the top of my head. If you go to the No Man's Sky website they have all the info. The game was underwhelming to many on release, but the updates are causing a lot of people to reevaluate it.

Do you mean a font editor?

There are so many games on PS4 now, it's hard to recommend without knowing what types of games you enjoy If you like hardcore hack and slash RPGs: Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, Ni-Oh, Salt and Sanctuary Open World Action RPGs: Horizon Zero Dawn, Witcher 3 First Person Shooters: Doom, The Wolfenstein games, Overwatch, etc. Interactive stories/movies: Until Dawn, Life Is Strange, Beyond Two Souls, Heavy Rain, anything from Tell-tale games or Double Fine Action adventure (non open world) Uncharted 4, Last of Us Indie games: Don't Starve, Night in the Woods, Binding of Issac, Minecraft, No Man's Sky (divisive, I know) That just scratches the surface really

There were basically two kinds of disks, ones that you'd use with DOS and load things from the DOS menu. You can list their directories with DOS. The other were boot disks. These were often not compatible with DOS (ie, you couldn't read their directory in DOS). You'd put these in and power on, holding down OPTION on XL and XE models only to disable basic. Sometimes these were DOS disks and had a program named AUTORUN.SYS, which is a regular binary that gets automatically loaded when the disk is booted. Atari uses the 8.3 format filenames that MSDOS used to use, however the 3-letter extension held no special meaning on Atari. Common extensions for executables were .EXE, .COM .OBJ, .BIN .SYS These should be the easiest to map into memory, I believe they contain the mem address they needed to be loaded into in their header. ,ATR, .XFD, .DCM and .XEX are whole disk images

Horizon Zero Dawn No Man's Sky Planet Coaster

It's only really getting compare to Zelda because they released within days of each other. There are probably more differences than similarities.

I think ideally the foliage should be green, and the frame should be that purplish color that could pass for blue water or red brick.

AR was clearly a game designed on the Atari, with extensive use of DL's, DLI's and other feature, the ports of the game to other systems suffered, The problem with porting a game like the Ultimas to the Atari was Apple could produce 4 colors via artifacts (redish, green, blue, purplish) Atari could only produce two of those-- which two varied by machine, as posts in this thread showed.

Lol, I was actually sucked in by this very ad! Maybe not the protagonist, but the fact that it explained the concept of the game in that cartoon and made it sound interesting (for a 83/84 era game) Unlike most game ads of that era which just showed some screen shots and some gimmicks, rarely explaining why you'd actually want the game.