Game manuals?

[Sean_1970]

I can find 5200 game docs without much effort, but 8-bit computer game manuals seem a challenge. I had thought this site would have a repo of some kind, but the focus appears to be on Atari Consoles? Atari Mania also seems to have more ancillary stuff like ads. I’m just hoping to remove some guesswork out of downloaded ROMs and Disk Images given that home computer games rarely start up in the same way…

[Bill Lange]

Look here: https://retrogames.biz/games/the400-mini/

[+MrFish]

20 minutes ago, Bill Lange said:

Look here: https://retrogames.biz/games/the400-mini/

That's pretty nicely done.

 

[TrekMD]

53 minutes ago, MrFish said:

That's pretty nicely done.

 

Indeed!  Very helpful!

[pjedavison]

9 hours ago, Sean_1970 said:

I can find 5200 game docs without much effort, but 8-bit computer game manuals seem a challenge. I had thought this site would have a repo of some kind, but the focus appears to be on Atari Consoles? Atari Mania also seems to have more ancillary stuff like ads. I’m just hoping to remove some guesswork out of downloaded ROMs and Disk Images given that home computer games rarely start up in the same way…

Atarimania has a decent archive of Atari 8-bit game manuals, though not for every single game ever -- it relies on someone having scanned and archived it there and to my knowledge there's no means to search by "has manual" or not. Don't forget that some listings on Atarimania have multiple regional/release date variations, and sometimes only one of those has a manual attached, so make sure to check all of them where multiple exist.

 

This is going to sound like a flippant answer, but it really isn't: just try Googling "gamename manual pdf" and in a lot of cases you will find the manual online somewhere, be it archive.org, gamesdatabase.org or The Game Is Afoot Arcade. mocagh.org also has a great archive of scanned reference material, focusing particularly on adventure games and RPGs. You may want to save the files you find in your own archive and/or print them out.

[Sean_1970]

12 minutes ago, pjedavison said:

Atarimania has a decent archive of Atari 8-bit game manuals, though not for every single game ever -- it relies on someone having scanned and archived it there and to my knowledge there's no means to search by "has manual" or not. Don't forget that some listings on Atarimania have multiple regional/release date variations, and sometimes only one of those has a manual attached, so make sure to check all of them where multiple exist.

 

This is going to sound like a flippant answer, but it really isn't: just try Googling "gamename manual pdf" and in a lot of cases you will find the manual online somewhere, be it archive.org, gamesdatabase.org or The Game Is Afoot Arcade. mocagh.org also has a great archive of scanned reference material, focusing particularly on adventure games and RPGs. You may want to save the files you find in your own archive and/or print them out.

I got that impression. Problem with searching for game name and pdf is you end up with everything but what you’re looking for a lot of the time, but everything isn’t easy, I’ll just have to quest!

 

6 hours ago, Bill Lange said:

Look here: https://retrogames.biz/games/the400-mini/

Yeah those I knew about from the QR code; it’s the dozens of games I want to play that aren’t on the system already that are the issue 😉

[THX-1138]

2 hours ago, Sean_1970 said:

I got that impression. Problem with searching for game name and pdf is you end up with everything but what you’re looking for a lot of the time, but everything isn’t easy, I’ll just have to quest!

I have manuals for a lot of games I play regularly.  I go to archive.org and just search from there for "atari [gamename] manual" (like pjedavison said), you can easily refine the results and see the actual manual covers before clicking on them to download.