Leaderboard

The Print Edition of CLUB VCS ISSUE 01 is here and available first to members of Club VCS and Atari I/O! Here are the details: Print Edition Features: Two additional content pages, including: a listing of all CLUB VCS Members that were active as of October 13, 2023 a credits and acknowledgements page A revised table of contents to reflect the above Minor corrections and revisions from the digital version Over 60 pages of content Print Edition physical details: Size: 8.5" x 11" Binding: Perfect Bound Full-color printing, 80lb (inside) Cover: Gloss Lamination (outside), 100lb Satin Cover Cost: U.S. Domestic: $15, shipped. These will be shipped via USPS in a Large Envelope/Flat in a rigid mailer to help mitigate bending while in transit. Note: Large Envelope/Flat does not include tracking. If you want tracking, let me know and I will calculate the revised cost. International: $11, plus actual shipping to your country. Availability: 40 copies are available from this initial run of 50. I held back 10 copies for co-conspirators and collaborators. These will be first come, first served; one copy per person. Club VCS and Atari I/O members get exclusive ordering until Friday, December 15, 2023. After that, I'll open it up. Co-conspirators and collaborators, yours went out early this week so keep an eye on your mailboxes! @RickR, @Podan, @Ballistik, @Justin, @Mockduck To get your copy, send me a PM here with your PayPal email and mailing address and I will send you a request for payment.

I got my 2600+ from FedEx yesterday. My initial impressions are that it does feel like it is built really well although I was a little surprised at how small the length of screws used were for holding it all together. For those that didn't know, all of the guts of the 2600+ are located in the switch panel section of the unit. It uses a couple of different PCBs sandwiched and connected together to do everything. Here are my Pros thus far: The cartridge slot is actually quite nice and seems to have a good connection with the games I've tested it with. But do make sure you clean any of your old cartridges you haven't used in a while to be sure that you are allowing as good a connection as possible and to prevent adding any crud from your old carts into the 2600+. The switches are kinda amazing on this thing?! They have a very satisfying click to the power and color/bw switch and the select and reset have a point where you can feel them engage and their spring back action is very nice. It makes me wonder if the switches can be adapted to OEM consoles... My 2600+ shipped set to 16:9 mode. This will result in that fully stretched image that some like and some do not. I prefer to NOT have that stretched look so I promptly set mine to 4:3 mode. The hot swap ability of games is quite nice and I advise using this method since you save a little bit of time loading up games this way. If you power cycle the 2600+ off/on each time, then you have to wait for the 2600+ to boot up internally first before it starts to load the game. The hot swap works exactly as it sounds too. The 2600+ detects when you have a game in the console. If you pull it out while powered on, it will blank out and then go to game load failed. Pop in a different game and a second or two later, it will show game loading and the game will appear on the screen. Seems to work with most of the original library of games for both 2600 and 7800 that I've tested so far. Quite a few older 2600 homebrews have also come up and worked for me. Some home brew games I tested last night that worked were: Berzerk: VE originally released during CGE 2010 I believe? K.O. Cruiser (Although I still can figure out the controls on this one) Go Fish! (Worked great!) Ninjish Guy (Most modern home brew I've tried so far and it worked great) Medieval Mahem (Seemed to work okay with joystick and...bonus! It was in stereo?!) Now for the cons and most of this is just stuff I've noticed and it mainly effects the 7800 side of things: First let me get this out there. NONE of the 7800 homebrews or graphic hacks I tested would load. As the 2600+ uses a lookup table based on the game rom checksum to know how to load up, this doesn't surprise me. Hopefully the lookup table and possibly the emulated being used can be updated to allow support for some 7800 home brews. But again, NONE would load up for me. The ONLY original released game for the 7800 that hasn't loaded up for me yet in my testing, was Rampage. It will start to load the game, but then just gives a black screen for me with my actual cartridge. Ballblazer was the first game I loaded up and it did load up and play great. But... the pokey emulation isn't quite there as the entire counter melody on the title tune is missing. So this tells me that the RNG from the pokey isn't being emulated as that counter melody uses that pokey feature specifically. Commando loaded up and played correctly. The ONLY issue is that there is some slight graphical corruption on the title screen where the difficulty selection is. But very minor and the game itself displays fine. Some games appear to have their button 1 and button 2 functions swapped? Although some of the games, I've not played for a bit so I might be wrong on this. But using a normal 2-button 7800 controller, the games did work and respond correctly. Now for some oddball miscellaneous stuff I've noticed or find interesting that can be taken as a pro or con... The 2600+ outputs a 720P signal. Although it seems this isn't quite a standard 720P signal as my TV takes a second or two to lock in and show the output. Also, my capture device in the game room usually has no issue with 480P, 720P, and 1080P sources. But it does NOT like the 720P from the 2600+ and stays in pass through mode. So I'm not currently able to get any direct captures from the 2600+ output. I've heard from others that some games don't work for them while others report they do. Both 7800 Ms. Pac-Man and Crossbow are reported as non-working for some and working for others. In my testing with my actual cartridges, both games loaded up and worked without issue for me. But it is possible there are two or more revisions of these games that were released over the years that could be the cause for this if they have slightly different checksums than what is being expected for those games in the 2600+. The power LED is stupid easy to replace as there is NO soldering involved. The LED is held in place with a 2 piece bracket using small phillips screws. A 2pin JST connector is plugged into the leads of the LED. So all that is needed to change the LED with a different color if you wanted, would be to remove the small screws and put in a different LED. Plug the jst connector onto the leads and that's it. I've not checked the value of the limiting resistor in the 2600+ for the LED as yet, but as they were using a warm white LED, an those are fairly modern, it is likely the value being used will be good for any LED out there that is 5mm in size to fit in the bracket holder. I've installed a slow changing RGB LED into mine as I felt that fit better than a static color. Flash carts: No surprise, but most of the flash carts out there are NOT going to work with the 2600+. That said, I can confirm that the Dragon Fly 7800 flash cartridge does work! As the DF cart loads the game up outside of the console, the 2600+ is able to read the DF like a normal game and just loads up the game that the DF has loaded into RAM at that time. Also, the hot swap ability of the 2600+ allows for easy game changes on the DF because you can have a game loaded on the DF and playing, then use the DF menu to back out. Choose another game and then press the Enter button on the DF to start loading the other game. The 2600+ will detect this, and blank out with the Game Load Failed message, but then a few seconds later it will show Game Loading... and the game you selected on the DF will now be playing on the 2600+. So it is interesting that the DF's ability to control the 7800 consoles power on/off function seems to also trigger the 2600+'s cartridge detection routine. All other flash carts I have failed to load up with the Game Load Failed message which, is to be expected since other flash carts rely on talking with the console hardware directly to load up and show their on screen menu of games. So my initial thoughts are that I think this is a great first step from this new Atari in trying to appeal to as many audiences as possible. There seems to be a lot more market hype on this 2600+ release than anything else Atari related I've seen in well over a decade and I do believe this will get non retro gamers back and into the hobby. With updates made to the console FW or outright hacking it in the future, I'm sure more games will be made to work and that will increase sales of the 2600+ and home brew along with games second hand. I see all of that as a good thing and it might signal a true actual rebirth for Atari and interest in the hobby.

Welcome to the Club VCS: The Atari VCS Fanzine Issue 01! The Club VCS Fanzine is an extension of the Club VCS subforum here at Atari I/O. The goal of the fanzine is to highlight some of the cool things going on in the world of the VCS and our little corner of the Atari fan community. In this zine, you'll find interviews, community member spotlights, reviews, previews, and more! So hit the flipbook link to view online or download the PDF here. A special thanks to @Justin for his encouragement, and @RickR and @Mockduck for their contributions. If you have an idea for an article or want to contribute to future issues, message me here or send an email to clubvcs@protonmail.com. Best, Sabertooth

THE UNAUTHORIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ATARI DISTRIBUTOR Monday, September 18, 2023 Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the third entry of what will be my personal blog, sharing small slices of life with you from within my Lab. For those who are new to Atari I/O let me introduce myself. My name is Lance Ringquist, I’m from Minnesota, and I am the world's oldest surviving Atari dealer. You may have heard of me before as Video 61 Atari Sales which I have consistently operated since 1983 and I have been at it now for more than 40 years! I need to update my website about my longevity. I always have so much to do. Anyway, with everything going on in the Atari world right now, I had some thoughts from these 40 something years as an Atari dealer that I wanted to share with you. I have now survived at least FOUR incarnations of “Atari”. I started as an Atari dealer in 1983 under Atari, Inc. - “Warner’s Atari.” I really didn’t know anyone there. Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Communications in 1983. Steve Ross is not often spoken of within the Atari community, but it was Steve Ross who bought Atari from Nolan Bushnell, who both hired and fired Ray Kassar, who single handedly took control of Atari in 1983 often showing up in person to run the company, who ultimately sought out Jack Tramiel with a deal to take Atari off his hands, and who orchestrated the Time-Warner merger. WARNER'S ATARI Atari dealers at the time were contacted and supported by dealer representatives who were supported by Warner Communications and would occasionally stop by the stores. I had a good one that supplied me with lots of dealer cartridges, floppy disks, and promotional materials. This is essentially the same way PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo support their retailers today, with reps who go into the stores to update the demo games in kiosks and make sure there’s current promotional signage in the stores. They usually have goodies to give to the workers too. One day my Atari dealer rep came into my store and announced “This might be the last time I see you. A new owner is taking over… everything is up in the air, and the rumor is he does not support his operations in… let’s say… “a traditional way.” That was Jack Tramiel, later on affectionately known as “Jack". He was right. That was the last time I ever saw my friendly dealer rep, and I never heard another word from Atari until the Atari ST computer was released. Alan Alda from the popular TV show M*A*S*H* was a celebrity spokesperson for Atari Home Computers during the Warner Communications era of Atari. (1984) All high-paid celebrity endorsements were dropped when Jack Tramiel took over. One day out of the blue I received a packet along with an Atari ST with some software. Gone were the days of glossy print ads in National Geographic, and sophisticated TV commercials with Alan Alda, the popular actor who played “Hawkeye” on the top TV show M*A*S*H* and was Atari’s spokesperson. The Atari ST that I was sent came with the instructions that - as a dealer - it was up to ME to educate my customers about the new Atari ST computer line, and it was up to ME to support and sell the machine as support from Atari would be minimal. STUNNING, to say the least. This began the second incarnation of “Atari” - Atari Corporation, or Atari Corp., - “Jack’s Atari”. This was the incarnation of Atari that I was most involved in, and had a lot of day-to-day interaction with. That was sometime in 1985. JACK'S ATARI I did not hear from Atari again until 1986 or possibly 1987. It’s been so long that it’s difficult to remember the exact timeline, but around that time I received a letter from Atari Corporation with a hefty “release schedule” of games lined up for the Atari 2600, Atari 7800, and Atari XEGS. I was impressed! For nearly two years it was crickets out of Atari, and finally we were receiving real support and a commitment for new games. At the time, the only real major supporter of the Atari 2600 was Activision. It felt like they were the only kid on the block. Atari had been quiet, and most other third party publishers like Imagic, Coleco, M-Network and Parker Bros. hadn’t survived the crash. Activision was still with us though, and at Video 61 Kung-Fu Masters, Ghostbusters, and Pitfall II were serious strong sellers. Jack Tramiel with the Atari ST When I received the new release schedule from Atari, I thought “Hey, maybe the new owners figured it out!” There was still plenty of life left in Atari, even for the 2600, which I could see in my stores. To my dismay, many of Atari’s newly announced titles never came even close to being released on time, or worse - never came at all! This was very frustrating because I could see the demand for new Atari stuff and yet the Atari potential was being pissed away. There’s this common belief that “The Atari 7800 was released in 1986.” That’s not really true. I had received a few 7800s from Warner’s Atari Inc. in 1984, and they sold quickly. This was in Minnesota, not California or New York City. I never got a thing from Atari again until 1986. So as Nintendo took America by storm with Mario, Zelda and Metroid on the NES, and with Atari being run so poorly, I thought the jig was up. "When I received the new release schedule from Atari, I thought 'Hey, maybe the new owners figured it out!' There was still plenty of life left in Atari, even for the 2600 which I could see in my stores. To my dismay, many of Atari's newly announced titles never came even close to being released on time, or worse - never came at all." - Lance Then came the fury. After defaulting on their release schedule and missing any new releases at all one Christmas season in 1988, I was outraged. I picked up the phone and called Atari. I wasn’t just a customer, I was in business with Atari as a dealer responsible for a percentage of all Atari games sold that year. I was helping make them money. When I called Atari, I was given the run around about “how hard it was to keep these games in stock” and “how hard it was to bring out new games.” I interrupted the lady and told her what she was saying was word for word what Nintendo was saying to their distributors - she broke down and agreed that what she had been instructed to say was not really the case. Later on I came to find out about certain “business details” and “practices” that were happening under “Jack’s Atari” which made it clear to me HOW and WHY Atari had missed so many release dates, launch windows, and even lost new releases, but thats a whole other story that we will go into another time in an upcoming Blog entry. Jack's Atari: This was the incarnation of Atari that I had the most day-to-day involvement with I continued on the phone and was trying to be nice. It wasn’t this nice lady’s fault that she had been instructed to lie. So I asked what can be done. I was sent “upstairs" and told that Atari "had messed up and badly damaged the market" and had really had messed up in my region of the country, the upper midwest. Sales and support in our part of the country needed help, and I was asked by Atari Corp. to become a service department and distributor for Atari. I was stunned. I dealt with other Atari dealers, but it was mostly to buy or trade what was needed. I said yes. I was blown away later on when I found out how just badly Atari had shrunk. They had lost almost 90% of their workforce. Yet the "Atari" brand still commanded household name recognition and selling power, which they underutilized thanks to certain business ideologies and practices from the Tramiel family. Here is a link to my Atari distribution paperwork, which is hosted on my website: http://www.atarisales.com/dis.html I became really enmeshed in this as Atari sent me to deal directly with third parties, who I then bought from as what’s known as “direct". During this time I got to know many good people in third party companies like Activision, Avalon Hill, S.S.I., Datasoft, Eypx, Sierra Online, Microprose and more. As an Atari distributer I purchased immense amounts - truckloads - of games and software direct from Atari and all third parties at the time. When Atari pulled the plug, I had about 250,000 pieces of software in my warehouse. Today it’s dwindled to under 40,000 pieces left. Jack Tramiel's son Sam Tramiel took over leadership of Atari in the mid-'90s with Jack's continued close involvement. Was the Atari ST named after Sam Tramiel? Was TOS the "Tramiel Operating System?" Jack Tramiel and wife Helen in their retirement years Jack Tramiel traveling the world HASBRO'S ATARI After Jack Tramiel pulled the plug on Lynx, Jaguar and the Atari computers, I could see what he was doing. Sam wasn’t going to save the company, and J.T.S. Corporation - an Indian hard drive manufacturer founded after the Jaguar’s launch - acquired Atari though a “reverse merger”. (Was Atari, as an entire company, "laundered" through J.T.S. so it came out nice and clean to be able to sell to a potential buyer?) This lead to Atari, or what IPs and documentation was left of it, being sold to Hasbro. This became the third iteration of the of Atari that I dealt with, “Hasbro’s Atari.” When Atari was sold to Hasbro, Atari gave Hasbro a list of contacts. I was one of them. Not only for service, parts, and software, but I was also Atari Corporation’s person who interacted with movie studios and television networks. Atari no longer had the game systems, computers, many times the software and games, nor the man power to supply the entertainment industry with Atari “props” when filming a movie or tv show that was to feature Atari in it. Atari just sent them to me for systems, computers and games, and I supplied the movie studios and television networks with what was needed, under the license agreement from Atari. One day I got a call from Hasbro, and very arrogantly told me that they would do the supplying, and the legacy Atari market was really no interest of theirs. They were going to release new games for new platforms. I supplied Atari items to Columbia Pictures (now Sony) Warner’s of course, Paramount, 20th Century Fox and others. I almost got some footage into one of the Alien movies, but Fox still owed me money from Fox Sports, and they could not come to agreements with “Jack". Many TV shows had my Atari stuff in it, one name I remember was The King of Queens, there was an Atari 7800 and Video Olympics if I remember right. Atari 2600 and 5200 game cartridges on NBC's cult classic show Freaks and Geeks (2000) Later on, my contact at Paramount studios was dismayed they could no longer get legacy Atari hardware and software for their productions, and that Hasbro’s Atari would only supply them with the newest games, which in the case of the studios and networks, was not what they wanted. I apologized to her, and said my hands were tied, "I can’t do a thing." These people at Hasbro were clueless as to what they bought. They didn’t understand what Atari was, what they still had, or the potential even for legacy markets. Hasbro really messed up quickly, and quickly sold Atari off. Meanwhile - almost daily - ever since “Jack” sold off Atari, I would get calls from disgruntled stock holders, former suppliers, and people who were owed money by Atari. Some even made threats of suing me, because in their eyes, I was Atari. That lasted even into the early Infogrames days, which is what came next. FRENCH ATARI The French company Infogrames Entertainment SA acquired Atari in January, 2001 as the biggest part of their purchase of Hasbro’s software division “Hasbro Interactive”, which also included MicroProse, and Hasbro’s game.com monochrome handheld system which was a joke compared to what the Atari Lynx could do, even years later, and couldn’t compete contemporaneously against Game Boy Color. This began the fourth incarnation of Atari - “Infogrames Atari” or “French Atari” which now goes by Atari, SA. (Infogrames rebranded themselves as Atari in 2003 and began releasing games like Splashdown, Driver 2, The Matrix and Ghostbusters for modern game systems of the time.) Splashdown was one of the first new "Atari" games released by Infogrames in November, 2001 The cover art featured branding for both Atari and Infogrames Infogrames never contacted me period, until one day a fellow named “Wim” (not sure of the spelling…) gave me a call. I tried to enter him into my contacts database, he would not spell his name for me, and acted quite annoyed that he even had to speak with me. I found out that Infogrames had an operation that was local to me in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Minneapolis / St. Paul, in a suburb named Plymouth I think. “Wim” wanted to know who I was, and he was looking for certain items. He would discuss nothing, could care less about Atari’s legacy, knew that many, many people were looking for Atari service, parts, games etc., but "Wim" was only interested in my Atari 2600 power supplies, Atari 7800 power supplies, TV switch boxes and R.F. cables. He demanded to buy them all. I said no. “What about my customers?” I retorted … let alone the legacy Atari systems that found their way to me. "Wim" had no interest in the Atari legacy, nor the history I was privy to, and had lived through much of. "Wim" only wanted to get the people off his back who were looking for those particular legacy parts. Why? I found this simply amazing. Here I was, and of course the two other legacy dealers (we’ll get into that in a minute) who could step in and help Atari’s legacy customers, and help guide Infogrames in making decisions around the needs and potential of the legacy market. I thought to myself "Here we go again!” Never interacted with them directly again, only indirectly when I was contacted by a debt collector wanting to know “what happened to Atari" as they were owed money. Something I have heard about many times before before, and I thought “Man, will this ever end?” I told the collector Atari was now located in New York, last time I heard. As it turned out the collector ended up being an old friend from high school that I hadn’t seen in decades.. small world indeed! "'Wim' wanted to know who I was, and he was looking for certain items. He would discuss nothing, could care less about Atari's legacy, knew that many, many people were looking for Atari service, parts, games, etc. but Wim was only interested in my Atari power supplies, switch boxes and R.F. cables... Why?" - Lance Here we are, now well over 20 years since Infogrames acquired Atari and has become the longest owner of the name, with new products being developed - finally - around Atari’s greatest strengths - it’s legacy. So that's the history of my involvement with the many evolving incarnations of Atari. The history in my eyes that counts the most, was the "Jack" era. The stories, what happened within those walls, what they pulled off and what they got away with - it’s almost too amazing to be true. When "Jack" merged with J.T.S., the government would only allow the "reverse merger" to proceed if Atari kept the American market supported. That was ignored entirely, and Atari was sold to Hasbro. The other two legacy dealers are Bruce at B&C Computervisions who started in 1984, and Brad at Best Electronics who started in 1985. I was introduced to both of them by Atari Corp. Together, the three of us became heavily involved day to day under “Jack's" Atari. This is just a minor rundown in who I am in the Atari world, and I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences with you. Today, after over 40 years, I continue to march forward in the legacy Atari world, still providing sales and support, and developing new games which I hope will continue to entertain and dazzle Atari players for generations to come. What comes next? Thanks for reading, - Lance Please visit me online for more at www.atarisales.com

DISPATCHES FROM THE LAB - RAIDERS OF THE LOST EPROMS Monday, Feb 26, 2024 Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the fifth entry of what will be my personal Blog, sharing small slices of life with you from within my Lab. For those who are new to Atari I/O let me introduce myself. My name is Lance Ringquist, I’m from Minnesota, and I am the world's oldest surviving Atari dealer. You may have heard of me before as Video 61 Atari Sales which I have consistently operated since 1983 and I have been at it now for over 40 years! Quick update here from the Lab I wanted to share with all my friends on Atari I/O so you’d be the first to see. While I was working in my warehouse high atop the escarpments of the Twin Cities, cleaning up my office with my lab assistant on Saturday, we unearthed a trove of 7800 EPROMs I didn’t realize I had, and may have discovered Road Riot 4-Wheel Drive for Atari 7800 with a few other things. Like Rampart, Pit-Fighter, and Steel Talons, Road Riot 4-Wheel Drive was originally an arcade game from Atari Games that was released on Atari Lynx and believed to be in development for the Atari 7800 as late as 1993. I will try testing these EPROMs in some of my developer boards on the 7800 and see what we can get. It may take time to get this all sorted, but we will figure out what we have and I will report back here with more updates as we make progress. We were cleaning up my warehouse office on Saturday and I said “Well, I know I’ve got EPROMs here from Atari that we should go through and catalog, and I know that I have them in two different places in the warehouse and in my office.” I hadn’t looked at these, and they were sitting in a package from Atari collecting dust for decades. My warehouse assistant and I pulled them out, and of course like everything I got from Atari, there was no rhyme or reason to it, it just gets thrown. In those days, Atari would send me all sorts of things from EPROMs to joysticks, just thrown in a box and sent to me with hardly any documentation at all. One of the things we were looking for was Fatal Run documentation, which we found. Because I don’t have the strength to venture into the warehouse all the time to do this, I thought some of it could be in my office and we should spend some time looking in my office and cleaning up in there. We started cleaning up and sorting through packages, and of course there were tubes and tubes of this stuff from Atari that I got towards the end of the Jack Tramiel days. One of the packages I got from Atari were full of tubes of chips. If you don’t work with electronics you may not know, chips come in protective plastic tubes, usually five to ten or more at a time. And I’ve got rolls and rolls of this stuff, and you don’t know what they are - there’s just a kazillion part numbers and labels, or there’s nothing. Some of them are so old that the labels have fallen off to the bottom of the box and gotten all mixed up. And it’s hard to find out what they are, because it’s like trying to put a puzzle together. Not only are the labels missing, mixed up, or mysterious, but you have to figure out what the chips are and where they go, and on what board. For example, Midi Maze for the Atari XE was a 256K game, but they put it on a board that had 8 chips on it originally, so you’ve got 8 different chips that you have to sort through and figure out what goes where and get it to work. When I found the EPROMs, most of them had labels on them. I found Sentinel LO and HI chips, Xenophobe HI, and KLAX LO and HI chips which I believe is a different version of KLAX than the one I’ve published before which was also given to me by Atari. I found Barnyard Blaster and Food Fight, both of which are PAL and have dates from mid-late 1989. That 1989 date is a little later than NTSC Barnyard Blaster, and quite a bit later than NTSC Food Fight, which was completed and shipped to retailers by May, 1984. So what does it mean that PAL Barnyard Blaster and Food Fight were being worked on as late as the Summer and Fall of 1989? Well, it’s possible these games play no different than the originals - but it’s also possible these versions of Barnyard Blaster and Food Fight could be different in some other ways. You just never know what Atari would’ve done, sometimes PAL market games had different sprites, they may have played different, or had other changes to the game beyond just PAL and NTSC. Sometimes those things would happen. Save Mary surprised me - I said “Hey look, these are on 7800 chips!” That’s different than what I’ve seen before. In my trove of EPROMS we unearthed, we found Save Mary on two 64K chips (LO and HI), not on two 16K chips as you might expect to find. Like KLAX, this is NOT the same version of Save Mary that I published years ago. The Save Mary I got from Atari that I used to sell, that is on one 32K chip which is different from what I found. This is Save Mary on two 64K chips, which means this would be a 128K game, which is what a lot of the newer 7800 games were put on towards the end. It may well be the 7800 version of Save Mary, or it may be that they started to work on it for the 7800 and got the 2600 ordered on there to get it to work and go from there. Another chip I found only had half a label, with part of the EPROM window exposed. I don't know if this EPROM survived, but hopefully it will be okay. We will have to see. The half of the label that was still stuck on the chip has handwriting on it that I think says "Save" followed by the number 4800, which usually means it's 48K. I'm wondering if this is a 48K version of Save Mary? "The test cartridges used two chips, but the final production cartridge would only use one, so there’s a LO and a HI on the test cartridge. The test cartridges were set up for a 64K game or a 128K game, with two sockets. So that’s why there’s two Sentinel (LO and HI), two KLAX (LO and HI) and two Save Mary (LO and HI)." @Video 61 The weirdest, most curious EPROM has a handwritten label that looks to say “Riot”. Clearly this is an EPROM and not a RIOT chip for the Atari 2600. The EPROM is dated 1993, which is very late for 7800 development but not unheard of. We MAY have found Road Riot 4-Wheel Drive for the Atari 7800 - we’ll have to see. The label on the EPROM says “Riot” on it, it’s dated 7-20-93 and it has the number “2” circled, which means this could be one of two chips needed to test the game - a HI and a LO. This date I believe is two months newer than the last version of 7800 Toki that has been shown, so two months after Toki was nearly complete and ready to go, this game “Riot” was still being worked on for the Atari 7800. Even if this does turn out to be Road Riot 4WD, it’s possible we’re still missing one of the chips needed to get it working. I can imagine someone testing the game and on such a tiny label writing “Riot” instead of “Road Riot 4WD” almost as an abbreviation of the name, it was common for these guys to do that, just because the EPROM labels are just so tiny. Atari 7800 Games thought to have been in development during 1991-1993: Pit-Fighter ElectroCop Steel Talons Toki Rampart Road Riot 4WD More? From my knowledge there were at least five games in development under Atari Corporation for the Atari 7800 as late as 1993, probably more. In those days, the Atari Lynx still had life in it, and Atari Jaguar was coming up on the horizon. The story as I hear it was that Jack Tramiel took one look at 7800 Pit-Fighter and how bad it looked and put the kibosh on anything more for the 7800. He pulled the plug right then and there and that’s all she wrote. We know Pit-Fighter, Rampart and Toki have been found in different levels of completion, and the date on this “Riot” EPROM is newer than all of those. We will have to research to see if this chip dated 7-20-93 is the latest 7800 EPROM dev date known to exist. It may be, I don’t know for sure, but it’s got to be close. 7800 ElectroCop was shown at the 1991 CES and Juli Wade told me she had an EPROM of it on a cartridge in her desk but wouldn’t share it with me. I had hoped John Skruch would. I don’t know if ElectroCop was one of the batch of 7800 games still in development as late as 1993 or not, but the other ones definitely were. It would be cool if we could find those hidden away somewhere in my warehouse office too. It may take time to get this all sorted, but we will figure out what we have and I will report back here on my Blog with more updates as we make progress. Stay tuned! Thanks for reading, - Lance Please visit me online for more at www.atarisales.com

Not part of canon. Just for the fun of it. Here is the first episode...

I actually did it. I purchased this PAL game just because I really, really like the artwork.

Hey all! I know most of you are well steeped and established in the Atari 7800 and Atari communities as a whole, I just put out a buyers guide for people maybe looking to get into the console for the first time. It covers options for buying consoles and hooking them to different televisions, controllers to use, which games to start with and some homebrew recommendations including a game or two from atarisales.com and gooddealgames.com. It's meant to be an introduction and companion videos will be releasing for the life of the channel digging deeper into controllers etc. If you have any game collector friends who maybe ignored the 7800 in the past, share it with them and see if it peeks there interest. Oh and sorry if I've been posting this stuff excessively, I can cut back. But I truly value all of your opinions and hope to get feedback and ways I can improve. This community has been a big help in that and keeping me motivated. Ok guys let me know thanks.

Now that Atari has Accolade (who released the Bubsy series) totally BUBSY BOBCAT! 😄

Hi everyone, I'm looking for a new Atari community where we can freely share our love for all things Atari. I grew up with the 2600 of course and moved on to XE and ST computers. Plus any game for my PC that has the Atari label I also enjoy, especially the Recharged series. So I hope to be a part of some conversations here and have a good time with everyone here.

Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the second entry of what will be my personal blog, sharing small slices of life with you from within my Lab. For those of you who are just getting to know me for the first time, my name is Lance Ringquist, I’m from Minnesota, and for nearly 40 years I’ve been in the Atari business operating Video 61, one of the last surviving original retail Atari distributors. We started in the video business as a local chain of video rental stores serving the Twin Cities area with locations along U.S. Highway 61, the road that musician Bob Dylan referred to in the album and song Highway 61 Revisited. I also love classic "Drive-In" movies and spending time with my family and friends at my cabin up north. For decades I’ve gotten to know you guys as my customers and friends, buying, selling and remanufacturing Atari systems, games, software, and computers, and developing my own line of Atari-compatible Video 61 games and controllers. I’m still in my Lab working away dreaming up new creations and shipping off new original Atari products, and I thought after all these years of being in the Atari community it was time to start sharing tidbits of Atari memories and Minnesota life with you here on my blog. To old friends and new, WELCOME! This is my first BIG Blog post, and I wanted to talk about an interesting bit of Atari history that still applies today and can be helpful to homebrewers and independent developers like me: To remain profitable if you don’t have the buying power that Atari did themselves you have to look at alternative ways of packing your products. Having been in the Atari business for decades and running Video 61 as an independent company for nearly 40 years, I began selling Atari products in my video store when Warner still ran Atari. Once Atari got back on their feet during the Tramiel era, I became an officially authorized Atari distributor and service provider. In that time I’ve seen things in the World of Atari that you couldn’t begin to imagine. I’ve had good conversations with Jack Tramiel, I’ve had inside information on the development of games and products which Atari never released, I’ve talked with other 3rd party publishers, I’ve seen absolutely insane things happen in the world of Atari - I’ve even received death threats over this stuff. I’ve survived it all and lived to tell the story. All through Atari’s history, smaller 3rd party game publishers came up with alternative methods for packing their products. Did you know it was common at the time for many 3rd Party Atari developers to release game cartridges, floppies, and other accessories in simple “budget” packaging such as clear inexpensive clamshell cases and plastic baggies? Some publishers even just shrink-wrapped the floppy disk and documents! (Examples are shown below, and in my Atari I/O photo gallery). Unique, alternative packaging kept costs low for the buyer, while keeping the games profitable enough for the small developers to stay in business and continue publishing Atari games and software. The way to get the costs down is to make things in quantity. It's the same idea as shopping at Sam's Club or Costco: the more you buy the less it cost per item. Retail boxes, glossy cartridge labels and colorful instruction manuals cost much less per game when you’re manufacturing 100,000 of them at a time, as Jack Tramiel's Atari did. BUT - when you’re making 10 to 20 games at a time as an independent developer, glossy packaging drives the price up significantly. The developer pays more and you pay more. This is one reason why you see the new Atari charging upwards of $99 per Atari XP 2600 cartridge, and why many new homebrew and independently released cartridges cost so much to buy while the developer makes such little profit on their work. When Atari was still in business, during the Tramiel era, Atari would regularly provide me with inside information and Atari’s sales history. Beginning in 1985, Atari would fax me their sales history numbers for video game hardware and software and continued to do so until around 1990. These faxes were HUGE. I still have them after all these years, although the faxes are now yellowed and almost impossible to read. "Like Jack Tramiel, independent Atari game developers and homebrewers have to weigh costs and pricing, and understand that some games sell well, some so so, and some hardly at all." - Lance The sales figures provided in the fax covered the product lines for Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari XEGS, and I think the Atari Lynx. For each Atari game, I was able to clearly see how many were manufactured and how many were sold. This gave me a big picture understanding of what things looked like at Atari, and just how big of a slice of the video game market Atari still had going into the 1990s. People have no idea just how big a piece of the video game industry Atari still had in the late 1980s, in the midst of Nintendo dominating the market and Sega making moves. It was still a big slice of the pie, and certainly enough to make money. Between the Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari XE and everything else, Atari often had a bigger chuck of the video game market than Sega did with the Sega Master System. Jack Tramiel discussing "Business is War" at Commodore and Atari What I learned from the insider info on Atari sales figures, and through my conversations with Jack Tramiel, was that Atari had a very lean business model that “spread risk” over many games, and to publish a game with a fancy box, slick labels and docs, Atari had to order 100,000 units of a game to get good enough pricing to make a profit on a title. But there was a problem. Not all titles sold well! Jack Tramiel wanted to get pricing down low enough for each game, so that in case one game did not sell very well, the risk would be spread around different games, so that the successful games would more than make up for any financial loss from games that did not sell. Like Jack Tramiel, independent Atari game developers and homebrewers (both then and now) have to weigh costs and pricing, and understand that some games sell well, some so so, and some hardly at all. So you need to spread the risks out to make a profit. Do you grasp that concept? Your winners cover your losses. So for Atari to be profitable with the XEGS, which used very good packaging in the iconic “blue tile” boxes, and to cover the cost of materials and the cartridge itself, Atari put out around 30-35 new titles for the XE. That meant to get good pricing, spread risk, and make a profit, Atari had to order over 3 million+ units of video game cartridges for the XEGS. Take for example Necromancer, a video game for the Atari XEGS. Atari manufactured a standard order of 100,000 units of Necromancer, and ended up with around 50,000 units left because the game didn’t sell very well. On the other hand, Atari XE games like Crystal Castles, Airball and others were almost completely sold out. The idea was to spread risk - to create different games for different genres. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket, instead spread them around! If you create too much of the same thing - the same world, the same ideas, the same game - it may sell out or it may flop. Infinite diversity in games leads to infinite success. This is one reason why you see some independent developers and homebrewers struggling. Some of them focus all of their time and attention, years even, developing a single game, a passion project. Often it will come in an expensive box with glossy label and colorful instructions, all put together by hand. Other developers work on multiple games at once, and work hard to keep manufacturing costs down, and passing those savings on to both the customer and to themselves. Say what you will about Jack Tramiel, but he understood this simple concept. Atari would release a few games at a time, each in a batch of 100,000, and the successful games would cover any shortfall of the less successful games. Atari would order 100,000 games at a time - enough to keep the manufacturing cost low on slick docs, a nice box with that beautiful Atari XE blue box artwork, and a glossy label, which was something the Atari 7800 didn’t always benefit from. If the game sold well, another order of 100,000 games could be manufactured, should Atari believe there was enough excitement about the game to sell out a second batch. A similar story was unfolding at Activision in the late 1980s. After the video game crash Activision was a much different company than it had been during the Atari 2600 boom, when Activision saw incredible success with games like Pitfall! and River Raid. Yet they survived the crash and lived to fight another day. Now Microsoft is buying them. By the time Jack Tramiel was running Atari, Activision (and their sister company Absolute) was a much leaner operation. I used to speak with the Activision guys often, and developed a pretty clear understanding of their sales history numbers for Atari systems, and how they ran their business. Activision was smaller, and did their ordering 10,000 games at a time. To make a good enough profit, Activision and Absolute needed to sell all 10,000 units to justify a reorder of the game. The first order of 10,000 games sold would break even, and Activision/Absolute would recoup all of their money put into the development and manufacturing of the game. Then, if the game was successful, Activision would order another 10,000 units and suddenly that game would become pretty profitable! However, they told me that only one of their Atari games was able to surpass 10,000 units, which was Title Match Pro Wrestling, and that was a reason why they pulled out of the Atari market. Yet Jack Tramiel was able to sell out quite a few of their video game titles at 100,000. Even with games at the end like Alien Brigade for the Atari 7800, they were able to sell all 100,000 out, and this was with Jack not only not supporting the system properly, but competing against himself with the Atari XE. There was a reason why so many 3rd party Atari developers released games in alternative “budget” packaging like clamshells, zip lock baggies, and even just shrink wrapped the disk and docs without a box. Because if you cannot attain the high number of sales per unit as Atari still could, you could not get the price per cartridge down low enough to be profitable. This meant finding creative ways to cut back on packaging, and just about every 3rd party company did just that. Broderbund, Adventure International, Epyx, Sierra Online, Datasoft, S.S.I., as well as many others sold games with limited “budget” packaging. Those 3rd parties made up sales volume with budget packaging, cartridge labels and instructions, because they did not have the customer base Atari still did at that point. The new Atari charges a lot for their line of limited run "Atari XP" games for the 2600, many of them are priced at $99. I’m betting its because they use fancy boxes, instructions and "labels". But they do not have the same Atari market that Jack had in the 1980s-1990s, thus much smaller sales volumes and the inability to order a large enough quantity to bring the price down. The Atari XP program harkens back to APX: The Atari Program Exchange and is meant as a gift to the Atari community, and not focused solely on being a profitable, but it's not likely that Atari wants to lose money either. So when it comes to passion projects like the “Atari XP” games, the new Atari has to cover their costs and hope for a profit. To do this they have to charge a lot more for their games due to much smaller sales volumes. That’s a pretty big risk for the new Atari, and a pretty big expense that gets passed onto you, the customer. In the 1990s, some classic video game collectors called me a liar for pointing this out, and insisted that game companies like S.S.I., Epyx, Sierra Online, Datasoft, and many other well known (and not so well known) companies never offered their games in clamshells, zip lock baggies, and other forms of budget packaging to be able to offer their software at prices people could afford. In this blog post you will see lots of pictures I recently took of my own inventory, showing just that: actual software releases from said companies and more, in alternative budget packaging. I’ve never received an apology from those who were so quick to berate me and call me a liar for being so kind as to explain the truth. Today is their chance. - Lance SEE MORE PHOTOS IN MY PHOTO ALBUM:

One thing I loved about classic video is all the great advertising, you know wacky and weird stuff by Sega to hard edge "Exteeeeeme" type of advertising you got from Turbo graphics and Neo Geo and even the family-friendly Nintendo stuff or all the advertising Atari 2600 that helped you visualize all the fantastic adventures, characters and scenario's that maybe didn't translate completely with the stick figured pixels in the games, but we still loved them all. They were a work of art in themselves and you just don't see as much of that in modern-day coverage of Video games with most being on STEAM or DLC on consoles. But they always fired up my imagination or made me laugh but either way they enticed me and made me think of the possibilities seeing those print ads in Video games Magazines like Electronic gaming or even ads in my favourite comic books. Let's use this thread to share the memories of video games and Computer tech that grabbed our attention from the 70's through to the 2000's. I'll kick off with a few examples. PLEASE NO PARODY OF FAKE ADS, keep it real with Ads that actually appeared in publications (Magazines /Comics / Newspapers etc)

Hot on the heels of the 2600+, PLAION announces the Atari 400 Mini. Retro Games Ltd. and PLAION are happy to announce The 400 Mini, a half-sized modern replica of the classic Atari 400. The 400 Mini is fitted with the CXSTICK offering an enhanced and updated version of the classic CX40 Atari joystick boasting an additional seven seamlessly integrated function buttons and USB connectivity. Modern features have been enabled with The 400 Mini such as the ability to side-load games via a USB stick, Rewind and save states for games, HDMI output at 50 or 60hz, and emulation support for the whole 8-bit Atari range from the 400 to the 800XL, and the Atari 5200 home console. The system is preloaded with 25 retro games for enjoyment right out of the box. The 400 Mini is launching on March 28 for $119.

Nothing rare, but I scored a sealed Robot Tank for $11.99.

My Star Trek themed den was missing a little something, so I printed up a new switchplate for the light switch.

A little decor to the nerd cave... I've been wanting to get the Indy cartridge holder for a long time. I think I bought the loose cart last year. I finally pulled the trigger on the cartridge holder when Etsy recently offered a $5 coupon. I bought it from thetdshop. I'm a fan of the cartridge holders. A local gamer sells among other things dioramas. She 3D printed the cartridge shells and game elements.

BOOM! I got mine in the mail today. It looks so dang good! Professional. Really nice work, @Sabertooth. Thanks so much!!!

Atari 2600 Games That Never Get Old! Greg's Game Room

All, as some of you may know, I'm a contributor to Old School Gamer magazine. I'm currently writing an article looking at Berzerk Enhanced Edition and Berzerk Recharged for the magazine. We are going to be writing articles about the Atari 2600+, so I wanted to create a thread for any questions you may have about the system. I did test the system at PRGE and it does look and work nicely. I know some folks has questions about the emulator being used, legalities related to that, etc. So, just add your questions/concerns here and I will gather these for use in the magazine to try to get answers for everyone. Thank you!

For me it's Yars' Revenge and Asteroids. Those will always be my go-tos.

I want to take a second to thank everyone again for your kind words and encouragement. This was made with the community in mind and I'm thrilled that folks seem to be enjoying it. I also want to note something that might have been missed above in the first comment, and that's this: If you have an idea for an article or want to contribute to future issues, message me here or send an email to clubvcs@protonmail.com. This is our fanzine. We were lucky to have great contributors/collaborators like @Mockduck, @RickR and @Podan for Issue 01. If you enjoy writing, have a great idea for an article or have a flare for design, consider this an invite. 😉

So I hinted about this in another thread elsewhere, but though it might be good to give it is own post. So a new challenger has emerged online under the website AtariRepairParts.com and as the name implies they provide replacement parts for Atari stuff. However, as they are very very new, the parts available is basically limited to just a few things. But, perhaps the most interesting is their replacement mylar and membrane buttons for the standard OEM 5200 controller (CX-52). Similar to another well known vendor, AtariRepairParts has created their own mylar and button replacements that are also gold plated. The main difference here is that they cost for a complete set is about 50% less of the other well known vendor. They also don't have any limits on the number of items you can order and have PayPal so payments are easy to make. I ordered two sets of these replacements for just under $50 shipped. That might seem like a lot for something so old, but again for the price of 2 sets to install into one controllers from AtariRepairParts compared to that same price for just a single controller from the other vendor, it is a good deal. I received them in yesterday and only ordered them a few days prior, so they arrived very quickly! Here is my initial impressions of these new replacement rebuild kits.. First lets talk about how everything arrived. It was delivered in a bubble mailer using a section of card stock and envelope to protect and prevent bending of the mylar flex. The membrane buttons were just loose in the padded envelope but as this is all very light weight and small, I don't have any issues with this packing. The first thing you notice is that the mylar is a very matte black finish in color overall. But you can still see the traces etc. Ever contact point on the flex is gold plated including the fingers that insert into the controller wire harness connector. Additionally, it could have been the way it looked, but I believe that section with the fingers is a tad longer than the stock mylar so they seat in further and more secure as a result. The mylar overall is also a little thicker than the stock mylar and more rigid as a result. But I don't find this to be a negative at all since it means it should be able to withstand the flexing and bending it has to go through much better over time. The mylar also has preaffixed adhesive pads so that it can attach to the keypad support plate, and each of the arms for the fire buttons on the mylar will attach to the vertical supports on the controller properly. In the past I've had to keep double sided tape on hand with replacements so this is a welcome thing to have! I do think another strip should be included for the top row buttons as it doesn't have one for that part. But if you consider the fact that the membrane buttons sit on top of that section, I guess it isn't as critical. The membrane buttons appear to be new and look and feel like the originals. This is good and bad because a lot of folks don't like the mushy feel of the original buttons and these will retain that original feel. However, similar to the mylar, each contact on the membrane has a gold plated disc that is secured to the buttons. So gold on gold contact will minimize any corrosion over the years from occurring. Installation is a breeze since everything is of the same size as original parts so it just all fits in place where it should. Even the small holes on the keypad to line it up on the support tray are present and in the correct location. So yeah provided you know how to take the original controller apart properly, installing a set of these should only take a few minutes time. I played a few games of The Last Starfighter to break it all in and I have to say that everything worked great! My only criticism is that the top row membrane buttons seem to sit a little lower than the originals and as a result I found them difficult to actually press and make contact. But they do work it just requires a little more direct pressing than I'm used to with my older buttons and foil taped contact pads hehe. Still, the quality of these replacement parts are very nice and I imagine the controller will not require much if any maintenance in the future since the only real failure point now would be the cabling or potentiometers inside the controller itself of which, there aren't any replacements for yet at this time. AtariRepairParts.com

Hi all. Sorry for my long absence. Short story, I got busy. Longer story, I was juggling a lot, and in many ways, still am. One thing I did a while back was basically stop using Facebook & AtariAge for the most part, just to help simplify life. Atari I/O was not the plan, is just sorta happened by accident, and that accident turned into a habit. I'm not saying you'll see me everyday, but I may drop by from time to time and I am still a fan of the I/O.

⑆ On August 15th we celebrate MUTINY INDEPENDENCE DAY with the launch of MUTINY COMMUNITY! You'll see it in the purple navigation menu where chat used to be. Mutiny is an homage to the communities of the early Web, and at a glance gives us a top-down view of our community, emphasizing our grassroots that bring us closer as we once were in the chatroom. Mutiny highlights trades and swaps, Blog discussions, news, chat, High Score Squad, Clubs and so much more. Mutiny includes a classic Yahoo! Search Bar to make surfing the net a breeze, and Swapmeet aggregates recent topics from For Sale, Wanted, eBay and Trading Post, so you can see at a glance what's up for grabs. Special attention is given to the Clubs and Squad Challenges, and encourages you to build your own I/O Blog. New YouTube and Podcast posts are displayed in the sidebar. Mutiny evokes the friendly, quirky vibe of the early web, and replaces our chatroom with a living webpage that is in a constant state evolving and cuts deep into to the heart of our community - and I hope you consider making it part of your daily routine as your new homepage for every time you log onto the Web. Let's go! ⑆

If you guys like one of these, would wear one, and can spare the change, ordering one might be a nice way of showing Atari our support and gratitude for their efforts - especially if more expensive items like the Atari VCS and Atari 2600+ aren't on your shopping list. Just a thought

Hi, I'm TMOP. Some of you knows me from AA, TI99 sub-forum in particular.

I was disappointed that we didn't get Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story on the VCS, but I had to have it. I had a spare Team Group SSD lying around, so I installed it on my stock Onyx 8GB VCS and changed the boot order in the BIOS. Viola, a Steam machine that feels like Steam Deck or Big Picture Mode. The game ran beautifully. Then I tried titles that crashed on a stock system from a Windows bootable USB. These include Minter's Moose Life, Balls of Steel, the Lunar Lander demo, etc. They all ran fine. ChimeraOS also has RetroArch baked in, and support for Epic and GOG. In addition to Steam. Anyway, this may be a window into second life for VCS owners once Atari pulls the plug. Have you tried ChimeraOS on the VCS?

THE UNAUTHORIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ATARI DISTRIBUTOR Tuesday, March 26, 2024 Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the eighth entry of what will be my personal Blog, sharing small slices of life with you from around the Twin Cities and from within my Lab. For those who are new to Atari I/O let me introduce myself: My name is Lance Ringquist, I’m from Minnesota, and I am the world's oldest surviving Atari dealer. You may have heard of me before as Video 61 Atari Sales which I have consistently operated since 1983 and I have been at it now for over 40 years! Before we jump right into the story of the Atari XE Mario Bros. cartridges, let’s take a giant step back and see the big picture of how Atari was ran in those years. Have I ever told you about the 400 400 computers? Well, in one of Atari’s warehouses around Sunnyvale they stumbled upon 400 Atari 400 computers they still had brand new in the box, that they had inherited from Warner. This was in the early 1990s during the time of the Atari Lynx when Jack Tramiel ran the show with his three sons. When this happened, Jack’s people at Atari called up and wanted to know if Bruce, Brad and I wanted to go in on this together and buy out their remaining inventory of 400 400 computers. We said “YES! We’ll be there to get them the next day.” - But that’s not what ended up happening. More on that one in a minute… It had come down from Jack that this was the only way they would sell to us. Let me tell you how expensive it was for Atari to process an order - it cost them about $125 to write out a single invoice. And you have to understand, even under what Jack had done to Atari, his austerity measures, cutting down their workforce by over 80%, it was still a huge company. Efficiency experts had figured out that for Atari to write out one invoice and ship an order, it was $125, regardless if it was one video game cartridge or 100. This wasn’t the shipping expense, this was Atari’s time and labor. So when you’d send in an order to Atari for one 2600 game or one 7800 game, a new joystick or something like that, it cost Atari $125 to fulfill the order in time and labor - for someone to write out your order, for someone else to find your game in a warehouse, for a worker to pack it, label it, and ship it to you. For it to cost them $125 to fulfill an order for a $15 cartridge, Atari went in the hole. They’d lose money, and Jack wouldn’t have that. That’s why when you’d pick up the phone and call Atari in those days for a cartridge order or service repair, they sluffed that off onto me because it cost them too much money to do it themselves, although it shouldn't have. It was much easier and much less expensive for them to just answer the phone. It became a very expensive thing. "Many of the people who try to pry information out of me, like the Vice guy who ran the hit piece on Brad, have this idea in their head that Atari only had one warehouse. NO THEY DID NOT. They had MULTIPLE warehouses around the world, and it was expensive to have all these employees and insurance, air conditioning and electricity, property upkeep, taxes, everything needed to keep those warehouses going day in and day out. It's expensive for me too." @Video 61 Jack Tramiel never looked at video games as a premium. He looked at games as too costly, too much money to develop, publish, warehouse, retail. And of course that’s how he made money, but he just didn’t understand it. He thought it was all hardware sales and games were up to third party developers who were left all on their own. "Here's a Jaguar and a dev kit, you go do it." Jack would do everything he could to sluff off sales onto other places like Federated electronics stores, which Jack Tramiel owned through Atari Corporation from 1987 - 1989. Jack used Federated as a way to directly retail warehouse loads of Atari merchandise almost into the 1990s and beyond, especially overstock remaining from the Warner Communications days: “Business is war” Jack said. I’m sure every little boy or little girl buying Mario Bros. understood that. They were so eager to make me a distributor - “We need somebody in the midwest to help us out, we made a lot of mistakes” - and me not having been a distributor before and not knowing the ins and outs, of course I said YES. Boy, I had no idea just what I was in for. "I didn’t realize they were setting me up to be not just an Atari Distributor and Service Department for them, but also a public relations sort of thing for them too. You wouldn’t believe how many invoices I wrote for $9.95 power supplies and TV switch boxes. $10 orders that would’ve cost Atari $125 or more to fulfill. So just think about all the money I saved them, and I think that’s one of the reasons why they looked so fondly on me and didn’t want to burn me, because if they had burned me then I would’ve been just like everybody else. Everybody else got burned but us." @Video 61 Just to give you some sort of idea how Jack managed things and micromanaged almost every aspect of the business: This one time, one of the developers who was working on one of the Jaguar CD games (I can’t remember which one) needed more blank CD-Rs for testing the game. This was a game that Atari had over $1 million bucks tied up into developing. This was before CD-Rs were in peoples' homes and spindles of CD-Rs would not have been commonplace yet in stores like Office Max, CompUSA, or Sam's Club, but they should’ve been available within a place like Atari. The programmer went up to the office manager and requisitioned more blank CD-Rs for testing and development, expecting that there’d be a spindle of them somewhere. “We don’t have any” the office manager told him. The programmer thought the manager didn’t understand what he was asking for. “What do you mean, this is a million dollar game with a deadline and I’m under pressure to get this done. When are you going to get them in?” Manager said “I don’t know, Jack’s waiting for a sale.” So he held up production on these games waiting for one of his suppliers to have a sale on blank CD-ROMs, and only then would he okay the office manager buying them. That’s called micromanagement, and it’s not something the President or CEO or Chairperson of a company that size should be doing. POW! Losing Sleep Over A Plumber And A Trucker So the Mario Bros. story: There was another time when there were 1,500 brand new Atari XE Mario Bros. cartridges sitting at Atari new in the box, being offered to me and I wasn’t able to get them. I’m still sick over that one. I had accepted Atari's offer for me to purchase the Mario Bros. cartridges and they slipped through my fingers like sand. You really don’t know what “pinching pennies” means until you hear this stuff Jack Tramiel used to do. He did this sort of stuff all the time. I still lose sleep over this XE Mario thing. This is a story that should be told, though. Atari had me as a distributor supplying foreign Atari dealers. I was told it was cheaper for Jack to have me deal with these Atari dealers in Latin America and Europe than for Atari to do it themselves. But if you knew some of the reasons why, you’d be stunned, because he’d probably have made more money directly dealing with these people. "I was on the phone with Atari as much as ten to twenty times a day, if not more. It was a constant barrage." @Video 61 You see, one of the ongoing things was Jack didn’t like dealing with all these dealers and distributors - he just wanted to deal with a couple of them. I don’t know why. It's how Jack did business. So I had Atari’s inventory and I was watching it GO-GO-GO. It sold well, and of course I had access to all of that stuff and the ability to buy more directly from Atari. But I couldn’t buy it all, because of course there were millions of cartridges. So I was trying to buy up the cartridges that were going faster because I knew those were good games. And Mario Bros. was one of them, especially the version that had been released for the Atari XE. Atari wisely made this Mario Bros. for the XE, and there was still a huge userbase for the Atari 8-bit computer from before Jack took over that would love to have a Mario Bros. game for their Atari XL computer too. So I put an order in for a couple of master cartons of Mario Bros. cartridges for Atari XE. That’s 72 cartridges to a master carton. I receive them at my warehouse and they sell through quickly. I come back later to order more from Atari, and another huge chunk of XE Mario Bros. cartridges are gone from their inventory. They were going fast! One time I went to order some and there were only 1,500 left. “I’ll take them all...” I said to the person from Atari the phone, "...everything you have left." Atari came back and said “Well there’s something here you might be unaware of about those Mario Bros. cartridges.” I said “Well, what are they?” and they said “Those games are locked up in semi truck trailers in our lot.” Okay, fine. I asked that they open the semi truck trailers up and take them out - “We can’t do that” she said, “because they are parked against each other, bumper to bumper, so you can’t open them.” Hmm, okay. I said “Well get a truck and move them.” Atari responds: “Oh we can ’t do that.” I asked why. “Oh Jack won’t let us, that will cost money.” Me: “Well how do I get them then?” Atari: “Well you’ll have to hire a trucking company to come in and do this. You’re just going to have to do this on your own. Once the trucking company comes in and moves the trailers apart and we can get into them, then we will call you back and tell you what cartridges we have, but for sure we have 1,500 new Mario Bros. for the XE game machine. What else is in there we’re not exactly sure.” "Yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation. Here I am on the phone ready to buy 1,500 Mario Bros. cartridges directly from Atari, who wants to sell them to me, but are held back by Jack’s penny-pinching policies. Spend a dollar to save a penny. This is just how things were ran. This is the reality of things that I dealt with day in and day out." @Video 61 So to get access to the Mario Bros. games in the semi trailer, I have to go and hire a trucking company myself, to go do the work for Atari. Remember the $125 it cost Atari per invoice to fulfill an order? Not only was Atari not paying for the trucking company to come do the work, they were having me do all the legwork with making arrangements with the trucking companies, so that Atari didn't have to pay their employees to do it themselves. That's a cost saving measure. I called some trucking companies here in Minnesota to see if they had anybody out in California who could do this for me. Yeah, some of them had some guys available out there near Sunnyvale, CA - but this wasn’t over yet, it would take some time. The trucking companies came back and said YES, they could do the job of going out to Atari, hooking their truck up to the trailers and pulling them apart - but I’d have to pay for the licensing and insurance, yada yada yada, pay for the truck drivers to go in there, move things around, unhook the trailers, and then let Atari go in and take inventory and wait for DAYS. So I would have to pay for the truck and the driver, for all of those days, until they are done with Atari going through everything and taking inventory. For every minute of every day they are doing that, I would be charged by the trucking company to sit and wait. So you can only imagine how much that was going to cost me. This took some doing, but I got it all sorted out. I called Atari back, and said the expense of the trucking company could cost me $5,000 - $10,000 dollars. In those days that was the price of a nice new American car. Atari said “Don’t worry about it. Jack got mad and we just trashed it all. We sent the semi trailer full of games off to the scrappers.” I said “Well then you had to hire a trucking company to come in and do the work.” Atari: “Yeah we did. But the thing about it is we didn’t have to have any of our Atari employees inventory anything. The truck drivers just pulled the trailers apart and hauled it away. We didn’t have to spend money on employees doing inventory.” You got to remember those trailers were rented also, so by throwing the Mario Bros. games in the dump not only did they avoid having to pay the expense of employees inventorying the games, they also didn’t have to pay the rental on the trailers anymore or the taxes on the inventory. That was "Jackthink". "When I say 'Bruce and Brad' I'm referring to my old colleagues, Bruce is Bruce Carso of B&C ComputerVisions, and Brad is Brad Koda of Best Electronics. The three of us have operated independently in the Atari business for many, many years, and we dealt directly with Atari every day. Yes, Bruce and Brad are my 'competitors' but not really, we each have a speciality: Mine is games, Brad is parts, and Bruce is mostly computers." @Video 61 People think the E.T. in the garbage dump in New Mexico story is bad. This was insane, I still can’t believe it. Jack would rather manufacture cartridges to just sit unsold, parked in a hot trailer in a parking lot, and then throw a truckload of brand new Mario Bros. games in the garbage - than to spend a few extra pennies inventorying the games so he could sell them to me and have plenty of room for him to make a profit in the end. This is how this guy thought, it was just beyond unbelievable. In the end, Brad, Bruce and I managed to get all the 7800s out of Atari and we managed to get what was left over of the Lynx stuff except for 10,000+ units sitting in Hong Kong that needed to be repaired. I may have gotten some of them, I don’t remember it’s so long ago, whatever happened to the bulk of them. Brad doesn’t have them, Bruce doesn’t have them, and I don't know what happened to the rest of them but, that will be a story for another day. Oh, and what happened to the 400 400 computers you ask? Well when we went there the next day ready to buy them and load up the truck, Atari had already tossed them into the dumpsters and the dumpster divers and scrappers got them for $ZERO. Most of the Atari 400 computers went to the scrappers because if the dumpster divers had gotten them we would’ve known immediately. Many of the dumpster divers at Atari would call us up immediately, because they knew they could only sell them to flea market type things one or two at a time, and it was easier for them to call me, Bruce, and Brad, and try to get money out of us because they knew we’d buy a bunch of them. And they were right. This was Jack saving money. Instead of waiting a day or two for me to get everything organized, it was “Well we don’t need the labor, we don’t need the added expense of paying more employees to do more work, just get rid of the computers now.” That’s the way things operated under Jack. It was ran as a feudal system with Jack as King and his three sons as Princes. They wouldn’t wait five minutes, they’d just ask if you wanted it or didn’t. Sometimes Atari wouldn’t even ASK if you wanted it or not, they’d just ship it to me. Things would arrive on trucks to my warehouse that I didn’t order, or ask for, or knew anything about. Jack would decide to get rid of something and use Lance as his dump. That’s how I ended up with so many random things out of Atari that I’m still uncovering and have to make heads or tails out of. (See my recent series of Blog posts titled “Raiders of the Lost EPROMs”.) That was the frustrating problem - there’s quite a bit of Atari stuff that I have no idea what it was or asked for, and some of the Atari stuff I wanted bad went to the scrappers or the dumpster. Had I been able to purchase them back then, today they'd all be in the hands of loyal Atari players out there like you, instead of in the dump. Thanks for reading, - Lance Please visit me online for more at www.atarisales.com

TECH TIME Saturday, November 11, 2023 Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the fourth entry of what will be my personal blog, sharing small slices of life with you from within my Lab. For those who are new to Atari I/O let me introduce myself. My name is Lance Ringquist, I’m from Minnesota, and I am the world's oldest surviving Atari dealer. You may have heard of me before as Video 61 Atari Sales which I have consistently operated since 1983 and I have been at it now for more than 40 years! If you want to know why the Atari XEGS cartridges rattle, it’s because Atari used hot glue in at least three to four places within the cartridge to hold the PCB firmly in place and properly in the shell. When some of the hot glue comes loose, it floats around inside the cartridge, and that is the rattle you hear. Here is a picture of an Atari XEGS ribbed super cart disassembled with the glue in place. In this example, you’ll see that one piece has came off that caused a rattle. The piece of glue is circled, and where it came from is circled also. Now this brings up why Atari designed a ribbed shell for most of their Atari XEGS cartridge releases, and basically abandoned the handle on the back shells. The handle on the back of the cartridge was really made for the Atari 65XE, and the 130XE. Both had the cartridge port on the back of the machine, just like Jack Tramiel’s Commodore 64, really intended for combining the cartridge port with other ports, to utilize external devices. This design choice was of course born for cheapness. Then, no need for two separate ports, just one port. The cartridge handle was to give some sort of support for the cartridge not to sag from gravity, and also make the game easier to remove from the back of the machine. However, the problem with the handle cartridges is that they were not as easy to install, let alone extract in the Atari 400/800 cartridge well, and the 1200XL once installed, was not so easy to remove at all. So, redesign time. The ribbed cartridge shell, with the ribbed design taken directly from Regan Cheng’s design for the Atari 5200 cartridge. This ribbed Atari cartridge design solved all of those problems, and then some. The ribbed sides made the cartridge substantially easier to remove in the Atari 400/800s and 1200XL computers. Yet the ribbed cartridge was snug enough to help defy gravity in the Atari 65XE and 130XE computers. Not perfect, but good enough. Keep in mind, this ribbed design also was cheaper in terms of the plastic cartridge shell and the printed circuit board that was inside. On the handle shells, the cart was held together with a screw, while the ribbed cartridge no longer needed a screw, as it was held together very firmly with clips on the side of the shell. Plus, the handle cartridge board used four capacitors and four resistors, while the ribbed cartridge board used only three of each. With Atari ordering games 100,000 units at a time, saving one resistor and one capacitor per cartridge really added up, and Jack knew where to cut corners to save the additional cost of 100,000 resistors and capacitors. Here are my Tower Toppler and Vanguard prototype cartridge boards. You see the Tower Toppler handle board is bigger, and has more support electronics, while the ribbed Vanguard board is smaller, and has less support electronics. The ribbed Atari XEGS cartridges were all-around cheaper, and solved some problems. And really, the glue was not needed, but was a “just in case” sort of thing. Now, you can take cheapness just so far. Once, Atari sent me a shipment of new Atari XEGS cartridges. I opened them to see if any changes had been made before I started to sell them, because with Jack, you just never knew what was coming next. When I opened them up and held them you could feel that the plastic was so soft, I could eventually crush the cartridge shell with my bare hand. I sent them back to Atari as unsellable. That never happened again. Thanks for reading, - Lance Please visit me online for more at www.atarisales.com

Atari 2600+ Cartridge Slot Dust Cover from RetroTech3D.

I had to get a new clock for the living room. It was cheap, but it looks good.

UPDATE: My issue arrived within the past 30 minutes! How it got through LA traffic so quickly...we may never know lol. The magazine was shipped in a sturdy envelope. I will show it off during this Wednesday's show!

I don't know who runs this account, but apparently they have some inside info. 😅

HOLY SH@T! I can't stop saying it because LOOK at what I've found. Rarity of rarities, it's the Commodore Educator PET-64. It is somewhat broken (it freezes a few minutes after boot) but I'm hoping I can repair it. First step is a nice, careful, thorough cleaning. And yes, I have the broken "5" key.

I totally relate to this. With the exception of the VCS I can't remember the last time I played a "modern" game. Literally a few years I think. Turbo Duo and Jaguar are about as modern as I get.

Asteroids is in my top 10 definitely. Asteroids was very popular in my area. I do remember the 2600 Asteroids flying off the shelves rather quickly when I would look at those shelves behind the counter, wishing for an Atari. Fast forward to the NES era and every 2600 bundle mom and I would find at yard sales had Asteroids and Space Invaders guaranteed. The 2600 got really good ports of both games IMO. Missile Command was one game that didn’t really matter which Atari system you played it on. The 2600 got just as good of a port of that game as the 5200 and A8 got. Really well done.

Oh dear. Atari 2600 games that never get old? I could make a small list. Top five? Would that work? Space Invaders Jr Pac-Man Enduro Midnight Magic Berzerk

A few more...

Earlier this month, I made a 4-day trip to Los Angeles. Dinner on the day we arrived was my favorite meal there (and we had a lot of fabulous meals) -- variety of side dishes to be mixed with the barley (no white rice) bibimbap style along with grilled fish and marinated pork ribs. This was at Borit Gogae in Koreatown.

This magazine is incredible! Obviously a labor of love and a great throwback for lovers of Atari! Back to the days of flipping magazines to learn about new games, etc. I haven't read everything and I only just found out about it but I really enjoy it so far! I can't wait to finish reading it but thank you so much @Sabertooth and any other contributors for making something so cool.

Tough one Steve. I don't have a top three but I've quite a few things that I think might qualify? My two Parker Bros protos for the 2600 I got about 20 years ago. My proto cart for the Jag that has the 2600 emulator on it with a few games that Bryan Edwaard created in the 90s. I believe this is a repro Bryan allowed to be made for a contest that I won this in. My Dreamcast KIOSK My Galaga cocktail cabinet My little VFD table top games of Lupin and Tron from Tomy, and my Zaxxon from Coleco. Heck most of them I have I think are pretty cool! My Ti-99 version of Dragon's Lair that I got as part of a deal with @- Ω - here in our forums. It would go on and on dude...

Hello. My name is Wumperdinkle Sniy (I wish!) For 17 years, I was known as "atari2600land" over on AtariAge. I am also "GameGearGuy" on VideoGameSage as well. I decided to not appear as atari2600land again because I hardly ever update my website any more.

What are my thoughts? Don't like it for numerous reasons but mostly due to lack of answers that quite a few are asking. So going around visiting, seeing what other discussions exist and finding quite a few on other forums and social media. Hello all ! 😄

Good points! I think it is an acknowledgement that Atari recognizes AA has been carrying the torch properly for the last 25 years.

Pre-orders open today ($499.99) https://atari.com/products/arcade1up-atari-50th-anniversary-deluxe-arcade-machine?_kx=DvPCjsHzpB01zDUwRNWoImIscxgT64-PWwMYdNIgn_E%3D.Vvtdy7 It has 50 classic games, including many arcade classics. Is that a track-ball I see? I have wanted a mini-cab version of Missile Command for ages, but haven't ever been able to find one. I may just splurge on this instead.

Something about her tone of voice and pious demeanor reminds me of Kai Winn. I think our Star Trek fans will appreciate what I mean 🖖 "...But the Atari Jaguar got COMPLETELY DESTROYED ®, my child. Just as the Prophets had wished it. Like and subscribe for more." - Winn Adami

This is the correct take @Jinroh. I posted this video because I wanted to put a spotlight on it and allow Jaguar players to respond, correct disinformation, and make their voices heard. I grew up with the Atari Jaguar, I got it as a pre-order for my birthday and a week later I became the first owner in my state to have an Atari Jaguar. It was already being unfairly attacked - I guess because it was cool to hate Atari in 1993? From day one the Jaguar has been swamped and smeared with misinformation. I posted the video in our forums encouraging knowledgeable Jaguar aficionados to correct misinformation in her video and comments section about the Jaguar. A major objective of Atari I/O has been to "change the narrative" where Atari (and other games and platforms) have been unfairly maligned. For example, @btbfilms76 has a nice video explaining why the classic trope of attacking the Jaguar by comparing Trevor McFur to StarFox is apples and oranges and not an honest comparison to make. Hold these YouTubers accountable for their words. They are like assassins in a drive-by shooting. They take shots at their target (in this case the Jaguar) and speed off before help can arrive or they can be challenged in what they're saying. By then they're already onto their next attack for click$, ca$h and c£out.

Hi RickR I'm Andrea Cucchetto, the programmer of the Atari version of Space Taxi 😊 Thank you for your comment... I'm really glad to offer this port to all Atarians!

Cheers everyone! Just found this thread here and wanted to say thanks for spreading the word! And while I am at it: I just uploaded the second edition onto the Internet Archive. It includes corrections and additional information after a conversation with Rob Lodes, composer at Atari at that time, as well as an appendix with all press releases I found about the Jaguar. The page preview on the Internet Archive is not updated yet, but if you download the PDF, you will get the newest version. https://archive.org/details/clipped-claws/