Atari 5200 Guy

Wow. I made it on time after all? I hadn't played this game much since I bought it about a decade ago. I put it in, made sure it worked, played a few rounds, back on shelf it went. Amazing scores by all! This was a fun challenge. I'm only sorry I didn't get to join in on the last few challenges. Wasn't feeling well and when I got free time I took advantage by sleeping away my illness. Any time I can join in on a challenge that I can use real hardware on I'm all for it.

I could only imagine how that would go if the phone ringing was a landline with the phone way over someplace on a table or, in my grandmothers house, nailed to the wall between the kitchen and living room.

Getting close.

AAARRRGGHHHH!!! Almost.

Birds! Grrr!

Slight improvement.

Stupid birds.

I also wrote the pattern down. 2 down, 2 up, 2 down, 3 up, 1 down, 3 up, 1 down, 4 up, 2 down, 1 up, 1 down, 2 up, 2 down, 2 up, 1 down, 3 up, 1 down, 3 up, 1 down, 3 up, 1 down. Hope this helps. Sorry, I think I corrected the pattern this time.

Slight improvement but I did that without using the boost button.

At least I'm on the board.

I'm joining in.

In all honesty I wouldn't sell the ST. Those are getting hard to come by these days. Hang on to it a while longer. Maybe we can find a few games to try to play. For me the ST is an open palette. Most of the games that were not on Nintendo, Sega, or PC might be interesting to try out. Whether I find excuses to play my ST or not I will not part with it. It is a part of my collection and I'd most likely miss it if it was no longer there. I would be interested in knowing what ST games you have on disk.

I think Sega got sued once for using the ST technology in the Genesis but I'm not 100% sure so please don't quote me on that. As for the commercial games which ones.do you have?

Long story short, I've had my Atari 1040 STe for a few years now but I've never had the urge to do anything with it. Over the last few days I've attempted to find something to spark my interest in it of which I have found a few things. Most of which are games but at least I found something. As a music machine it simply can't be beat in my opinion. The native MIDI feature of the Atari ST line is very solid and I use Sweet 16, a program I'm very familiar with from the Windows 98 days. This much has kept my interest in the machine. I only wish I had a more capable music keyboard to take full advantage of the ST and software. Games? I have found many but I own only two published games; Space Station Oblivion and Super Cycle. The rest have been dependent on the images I found online. Most of those don't play well on a NTSC system so I have had hit and miss results. Nevertheless I have found a small library of games I enjoy playing or have tried, liked, and plan to dig into deeper sometime. A few I was already familiar with from the early MS-DOS days on a 386 system which helped. Populous was a nice find but the ST gets bogged down a lot as the game progresses...something I can tolerate but also something I am not use to happening in that game. Railroad Tycoon I spent countless hours on during my 386 days and while I have the images of that game for the ST I have yet to find one that wants to play. SimCity is a classic and fun on anything that can handle it and the ST is no exception. There is no difference between the PC and ST versions that I can find. Really well done. New contenders I've found are Super Cycle a fun Hang-On style game, Buggy Boy has become a favorite, Nitro is a neat racing game, Spellbound is a beautifully done adventure game but it will make you pull your hair out, and I found a bunch of popular Sega arcade hits. Some good, some not as good as they could have been. And I've only started my journey. Which brings me to a somewhat puzzled conclusion: I love my Atari STe. But I've never ran into a computer that was all over the place before. That is when it came to game software. I'm trying to figure out why the ST seemed to be a short fad in the US while it dominated in other countries. If you viewed ads in ST magazines games were plentiful. But the games I downloaded are mostly for PAL systems even when the same title was ported over to American Atari ST owners. Where are those images? I browsed ads in lots of START magazine publications as a guide to find what games actually made it over here and 9 out of 10 times the game images I have found are for PAL systems. It's been fun trying to find them but hectic to say the least. And some images are in the STX format only which I have not found a way to put those images back on a disk. It's not that I'm making these disks to sell them...I just want to play them in real hardware and this is the only way I have found most of the games made.for the ST computers. It's been said that software publishers didn't trust Atari once Jack Tramiel took over because he would stop supporting a system without warning. Whether that is true or not who knows. I can understand that but in the computer world a publisher had full control over their product. It would be like no one making software for the 386 because the 486 was a couple of years away from a public appearance At the end of the day the ST has grown on me. Some games were weird but then again those 386 days were no different. Hidden gems? I'd have to put Spellbound on that list so far. It's a side scrolling adventure puzzle solving game where you can play at your own pace but it is unforgiving. You only have one life. The only thing about my STe I've noticed is a lack of support for the features it had including the Jaguar controller ports. I have yet to find any games that used those. Otherwise my STe and I are getting to know one another. My next adventure? Finding a C development environment so I can make my own games on it. If you have an Atari ST I'd like to hear what your favorite apps and games are on it. Maybe discussing those games someone is stuck on can bring back those days when help was a school yard away.

Sentimental value. The 7800 was found completely by accident and ended up being a Christmas gift for a once teenage boy. While I felt it was lacking in games the NES was getting the 7800 did have an equal amount of value from an arcade perspective. While they were getting old the arcade titles it was receiving were way better made than what the NES received and they did give a nice break from the NES games. Many endless nights I spent playing Asteroids, Ballblazer, and Ms. Pac-Man. Mom played the Ms as well as Centipede although she didn't like it as well as she did the 5200 version. I don't hold the 7800 as close to my heart as others here but it still has sentimental value to me because of who it came from. That's probably also why I am very passionate about almost all of my game systems pre XBOX. They came from long lost family members at one point in my life. Only the imported consoles I have lack that sentimental value but they do hold a high value because of where they came from. Getting back to the 7800 the reason why that machine continues to impress me is because, for its time, its probably one of the most powerful 8-bit game consoles there was. We just never got to see what it could really do when it mattered.

Man, I'm glad I wrote this tutorial. I was not expecting to need it for myself but the Dell PC I had setup took a crap on me. I have repurposed an old, slightly damaged motherboard to take its place. I could not find the files I was needing and almost forgot about placing those here. I'm glad I did. Trying to Google search for them was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Most of the issue was not being able to remember what I grabbed by name. But, I have another Frankenstein-ed computer going for the time being. Its an old Compaq with an AMD Sempron 3200 CPU and 256 MB of RAM which is more that enough for what I am going to use it for. The only thing that was wrong with it was the AGP port was destroyed. I removed the exposed pins there and fired it up, installed XP, and its working for now.

Weird. On my phone I can access the site by simply typing atari.io. Today I'm trying to view the site on my tablet and I get this: It's an Amazon Kindle but the stored recent visit icon as soon as the browser loads does that. I'll try something different.

I enjoy reading things like this as I do repairs myself as well. The most troublesome spots I've had with faulty7800 systems is poor solder joints at the power supply jack and the 7805 VR. With power supplies I have had more bad experiences with, I assume, broken wires inside the insulation right at the end that plugs into the jack. Some of them if I bent them a certain way the 7800 sprang to life, once allowed to stretch out straight the 7800 lost power. This is why I would rather have non working systems to add to my collection over working ones. I get a certain satisfaction out of fixing them that I can't get any other way. I don't know if it is a sense of pride or the excitement that I accomplished a repair job or both but it is something I enjoy doing and it helps keep my skills in check. Although I still have a lot to learn.

I forgot how mentally and physically challenging those endurance races can be. To sit there lap after lap, concentrating so hard you get in a zone and sort of become a zombie. Everything else around you becomes blocked out. Nothing else matters except finishing those races. That's why I don't do endurance races that often. Thank you!

It's been a while since my last update so here it is. It has taken me time to remember a few tracks and races. It also took me a while to earn my IA license. I forgot how tough those were for me. I didn't care about getting all gold in the tests, I just wanted the license so that everything was available. Tonight I ran my Skyline 280 in a 50-Lap endurance race on Autumn Run. After a few pit stops and almost 1 hour and 16 minutes later I crossed the finish line. FIRST PLACE BABY!!! Yea! And the prize? 500,000 credits and a new car added to the garage. My current standings. Not too impressive but, hey, not bad either.

Most people don't like them. I wouldn't play a 5200 without them 😉

I don't get it. I wouldn't call it a mistake. Were mistakes made? Yes. It was released to the public even when R&D said it wasn't ready. It was trying a couple of new concepts with the first being a computer converted into a console. The 5200 was the first to try this. The second was the analog controller. The movement of address locations made sense; to avoid the unauthorized games that plagued the 2600. It was a means to keep that from happening again. Atari didn't want just anyone making games for the 5200. The 5200 is not limited to 32K. It can handle up to 48K before bankswitching is required. That is printed in the field service manual for the system. The adapter would have been cool but it would have had to do a couple of things: 1) remap all #D0 access to #C0 access on the fly, 2) provide support for the analog controllers or have joystick ports for using 2600 controllers. I've had all three: 5200, Colecovision, and Intellivision. After owning and spending a decent amount of time on each one I can say the 5200, IMO, I like much better. All three have fun games, no doubt, but the Intellivision controllers were too small and the ColecoVision controllers were a bit too large and off balance.

I miss analog broadcasting. I'd rather try to pick up a snowy channel than have a hard time getting any kind of digital signal. Those indoor rabbit ears even did wonders at times.