RickR

game cases make nice accessories for handhelds. Jack Tramiel cut corners wherever possible but the lynx pouch and carrying case were very high quality and most of them still hold up today at 35 years old. this looks like a nice organizer for game boy.

thanks @Justin and yeah I want everybody to do well and the future is unknonw right now for many. its not just independent developers and homebrewers but the people in the atari community who buy these games also. its my hope this Blog post gets the word out to all atari developers that there are ways to do this and succeed and stay in the game for a long time delivering good games at good prices.

hi @Jinroh yeah! thanks and im glad you remember the days when they did that! I mean here’s my thing about packaging today: when i release a new game for an Atari system I keep prices down to make it affordable for me to make and you to buy. some new games are $50-$60 dollars if not more and not everybody can afford that. Jack Tramiel would say they make computers "for the masses, not the classes". And when I put out a game and keep the costs low, they scream about my boxes and scream about my clamshells but what about a CD rom jewel case? that thing's under a buck. It’s got a little glossy thing in it but it’s real small. Some manufacturers only have a glossy picture of the game on the front not on the back. This obsession with fancy glossy boxes and packaging, its fine and looks nice but you have to have the numbers for that, a lot of numbers sold, to keep the cost down. otherwise people are paying $50 and there's not much left for the developer to survive.

hi @RickR yeah! the cassette games were great, many times you could break into them and list out the source code and learn about them. but yeah that’s how they made a profit they didn’t have the huge numbers atari had and that’s how they remained in business. if you want to get in there and make a big library of games that give you some sort of cash flow you just have to do things like that, ziploc baggies and very inexpensive packaging is just the only way you could do it.

Same here, this blog post is awesome.  I remember riding my bike to a computer store as a kid.  I was a VIC-20 owner at the time, not yet Atari.  And I was astounded at all the games available on tape in a ziploc baggie!  I think I bought a few that looked like fun, but was pretty disappointed with them when I got home and tried them.  Well, the good news was that my disappointment turned into "I could do this better".  And the best thing about tape games was you could actually see the source code.  So I ended up learning a ton. 

Very cool item @RickR! Now that I see this I remember selling these Nyko cases at Toys R Us during the Game Boy Color era. When I first saw it in your post I thought it was a TurboGrafx-16 Turbo Booster Plus, and remembered these cases always used to remind me of those even when they were new.

Oh yeah!  G-Loc!  Who could resist?
Even those silly "hunting" games with the arcade shotguns were pretty dang sweet. 

ANY game with a real-looking crossbow controller was going to get some serious attention from us kids!  Lets be honest, the games with sweet custom controls were the best games of all.  Sit-down Pole Position, Battlezone with two sticks and the periscope, Stunt Cycle, even Tron with its black-light enhanced controls.....
 

Oh yeah!  G-Loc!  Who could resist?
Even those silly "hunting" games with the arcade shotguns were pretty dang sweet. 

Same here, this blog post is awesome.  I remember riding my bike to a computer store as a kid.  I was a VIC-20 owner at the time, not yet Atari.  And I was astounded at all the games available on tape in a ziploc baggie!  I think I bought a few that looked like fun, but was pretty disappointed with them when I got home and tried them.  Well, the good news was that my disappointment turned into "I could do this better".  And the best thing about tape games was you could actually see the source code.  So I ended up learning a ton. 

Great info as always @Video 61 I always love reading about your tales from the trenches. 😉 I remember the days of ziploc backs pinned to the board at the computer store too with a photocopied sheet with a 5.25" floppy in there. I really lilke your packaging. 🙂 It's unique and fun. 

@Video 61 This is really good advice for indie developers and the entire homebrew market - especially right now as we move toward an unknown future. I hope everyone developing new games for retro platforms will give your Blog a read. Including the most loved homebrew guys, and new Atari themselves.
"Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."
Lance, I said in your status update that this is an epic win for the entire Atari community - worldwide - to have you Blogging. I've known a number of people who worked at Atari, both under Warner and under Tramiel - programmers, execs, MBA types, designers - but none of them in that building were ever on the ground selling Atari games and systems at a retail level, let alone still doing it today after almost 40 years. You have such a unique story and experience - so much knowledge and stories and legends - that all needs to be shared.
I'm so grateful you're here posting and interacting with the community. Atari users worldwide will benefit from this, and I will make sure that these Blogs and your knowledge stays online and gets passed on long after we're all gone. We're all so glad you're here doing this 

Thanks for sharing these fantastic insights! I wonder if the 100k rule held true for Atari under Sam during the Jaguar's run? With such a limited installed user base, that's nearly a 70 percent attach rate for each sold out title based on 150,000 Jaguars sold during its commercial life. I've read AVP was the best seller at 85K.

@Sabertooth I was just about to ask @Video 61 a similar question. Lance has told me before that he saw sales figures for Jaguar games, and I think it was Fight for Life or Ultra Vortek had only manufactured, or only sold somewhere around 6,000 cartridges. I see in his Blog post Lance is talking about faxes from 1985-1990, mainly 2600/7800 and 8-Bit computers, with the Lynx towards the end. I think we all have a sense that the Jaguar was likely a different story with numbers closer to what Lance was talking about with Activision. Makes me wonder if Atari made any money on the Jaguar at all. 

I played the hell out of the full sized ride on Hang-on game and don't even get me started on G-Loc.  At least I think that was what game it was.  Full motion ride, spin, turn, rotate, twist...I honestly believe it was the only game I ever seen with that much movement.

ANY game with a real-looking crossbow controller was going to get some serious attention from us kids!  Lets be honest, the games with sweet custom controls were the best games of all.  Sit-down Pole Position, Battlezone with two sticks and the periscope, Stunt Cycle, even Tron with its black-light enhanced controls.....
 

Crazy, the actual arcade cabinet was semi common when I was kid and I always drawn to it. And you know it was different because games like Operation Wolf and the later other Gun games never interested me, but anytime I saw a Crossbow cabinet I had to play and see how far I could get my friends. But like all arcade games back then, it was much more difficult than home versions and I think I was only able to get them to the ice caves before getting wiped out. Might have made it to the jungle screen, but again just way more difficult compared to the home versions.
So yeah, I was very familiar with the game and it was actually Crossbow and Xenophobe that made me want a 7800 when I was younger in the late 80s. I never was able to get Xenophobe as I don't remember being able to find it, but I remember seeing it on the Sears wish catalogs back then. But Crossbow I was able to get and I'm pretty sure I got it from Toys R Us at that time.
 

I will have to find it for the 7800.  So far I love the game.  But, it's true, Crossbow I have never heard of until I started collecting video games a decade ago.

I'm really surprised to hear you say that 😱 It's hard to be inside The World of Atari for 30 years and not have heard of Crossbow. Give the 7800 version a play and let us know your thoughts on how they compare.
 
Same here! I might be a bit partial to the Atari 7800 in general, but I always preferred that version. Then again I usually prefer most 7800 versions to the XE / 8-Bit with the exception of Karateka.
 

I might be a bit partial to this game myself...hehe. Only I play the 7800 version which, I find to be smoother game play overall.
 

I was able to do the same to a 2600jr console over the weekend. It required having to first breadboard up the wiring so I could try different value resistors before dialing it in, but finally settled on 2k being the magic number. Bu this will depend on where you tap the audio from and might still have some variation from console to console. But anything more than 2k, and the AVox gets lots in the TIA audio. It is still heard just way lower and kinda hard to make out. Less than 2K and it seems to start to kill the TIA audio instead. Anyway, here are a few pics of my 2600jr in the lab where I did this.
Here is the internal shot. You can see the wiring that runs along the back. This is to provide the audio input. The 3.5mm on the left rear of the console in this pic is the new audio input, and the original RCA for the RF and small 3.5mm next to it is my composite video output and audio out I had in place already.

 
And here is what that looks like from the rear of the console. In this pic, you see the RF output and small 3.5mm next to it that is again the audio out. The singular and slightly larger 3.5mm on the right rear side, is the audio input.

Last night I did the same thing to my daily driver 7800. As I have the RF modulator removed from that 7800 completely, I used one of my studio grade quality 3.5mm jacks for this and epoxied it to the 7800 main board in place of where the RF was since that was empty and the hole was already there in the case shell. 



 

I also just remembered that my Vectrex Audio Tap or V.A.T. for short I have installed in my Vectrex, actually has a 3.5mm jack on it for audio input for use with the Avox+ in Veccy mode! So really this has been done in this fashion several different ways in the past. I wish I had thought of this before working on all of Al's consoles last year as I'm sure this would make his PRGE setups much easier. He actually uses a separate small audio mixer for each of the consoles to mix the Avox speed with the console audio through a new audio output from the mixer box that he then plugs into his commodore monitors.
 

That would work quite well provided it is loud enough and or close enough to the player to be heard clearly over the rest of the audio. Likely pretty simple to do and there might even be one of those premade project boxes that could be used for that. I've not tested this yet, but I don't see why it couldn't be done... but...
I should plug my Sony digital walkman into it LOL! I mean, I don't see a reason why it wouldn't work provided I adjust the volume?
 

Bob printed that case for me as a thank you for services I've provided to him a few years back. He has one he made for himself of course and also made a custom case shell for Albert for use with one of his 7800s during PRGE and other convention events.
Bob released the STLs for this case I believe yesterday for those that might want to do check it out. There are a few caveats on getting everything to fit and I don't know if his STL includes the holes already done for the RCA and s-video jacks as he did when he printed mine.