Atari Super Pong Pro Am

[bradhig1]

Atari Super Pro Am 10 I mean.

 

Just got this today. actually it has five games with two versions. Pong, Super Pong, Catch , Basketball and Handball use the same game with the long paddle either blocking the right side for handball or with a opening in the upper right for basketball.. I think someone was having a bad acid trip when they came up with the color scheme for the atari pong's.

Edited June 23, 2017 by bradhig1

[BassGuitari]

My favorite Atari Pong!

The Pro-Am Ten was actually one of my first exposures to a real retro system when I was helping move some stuff at my aunt and uncle's cottage in, like, 1998, and I noticed one of these buried under old MAD magazines and inches of dust in a side table in the living room. I remember thinking how strange it was that the controller connectors were little phono plugs instead of some kind of pin socket like every other system I'd ever heard of. I also remember being fascinated by the thing and its shiny chrome badge that said "Atari" on it. Fast forward to around 2010 and I finally got one for myself, boxed (no manual though, boo)!

I think the only difference between the Pro-Am Ten and the Pro-Am is that the Pro-Am Ten has four jacks for paddles and therefore supports up to four players instead of the Pro-Am's two. I believe the hardware is literally identical otherwise (conceivably, you could probably hack a Pro-Am with some extra mini-phono jacks and turn it into a Pro-Am Ten). It's like they created the optimum machine, then arbitrarily crippled it to create a different model for a lower price point. The Pro-Am and Pro-Am Ten even share the same manual, which somebody posted here some time back.

And call me crazy, but I think Basketball is actually pretty fun. At least considering that if you had a Pro-Am/Ten (or an earlier Super Pong unit; those had Basketball, too) back in the day, it might have been your only video game system, and it actually had some kind of winnable single-player game; most dedicated systems of the time didn't have any sort of single-player mode (apart from "Handball" or "Smash," wherein you hit a ball against a wall ad infinitum, with no score, until you miss 15 times. Meh!). In my game room, I generally like to hook up only one system at a time (so as to increase my focus on it and my enjoyment of it), and when I hook up my Pro-Am Ten, I get some mileage out of Basketball.

Edited June 27, 2017 by BassGuitari