Ballblaɀer

My collection: Atari C-100 Pong Atari C-380 Video Pinball (brown/woodgrain model) Atari 2600 / VCS - Sears Tele-Games Video Arcade (Heavy Sixer) Atari 2600 / VCS - Atari 2600 Jr Rev A. Atari 2800 Atari 5200 (4 port, lowest currently known serial number) Atari 5200 (4 port, my original from growing up) Atari 7800 (w/ useless expansion port! ) Atari Lynx I (currently non-functional) Atari Touch Me (currently non-functional) Atari CC91G ExecuCard calculator Atari CC192 calculator GCE Vectrex Nintendo DS Lite Sony PS3 (Slim) I do the majority of my gaming these days on my PC. I have a still-working Macintosh LC in storage. We plan to pick up a PS4 in the near future. My largest collection of games is for the VCS, by far. My most complete library (not counting multi-carts, of course) is for the 5200, though -- currently two carts away from complete!

Starting to wish I'd ordered the standard version, as I'm in the same boat as you, Greyfox. Amazon claims I'll have it on Monday or Tuesday... I guess I'll just read my interview again.

Congrats, and best wishes for at least 15 more!

You know the 5200 is my first love -- I'm interested in anything that extols the greatness of the system. Looking forward to seeing what you have in store!

Welcome! Fan of coffee, Battlestar Galactica, both, or neither?

Hi Scott -- glad to see you come by! Your site has been invaluable to me more times than I can count, and the 2600 carts I purchased through your site a while back were great -- many thanks. Now that my Art of Atari interview/article is in the rear-view I can once again focus on the new information I learned about Foxbat. On the advice of the author I also tried contacting one of the film's producers (i.e. one half of "Dark Horse Productions") with the hopes that he might be able to share more information about an Atari licensing agreement, but it's now been a long while with no reply. So I think I'll just go with what I have. No doubt I'll be citing your correspondence with Keithen Hayenga, too -- it'll be great to be able to include some of his insight into the project as well!

Welcome! You can get access to the exact same games that are on the two volumes of Atari Flashback (PS4/XB1) by purchasing Atari Vault (via Steam) and pay a fraction of the price. Or, buy the Deluxe Edition of Art of Atari and get a free download code for Atari Vault! In my opinion, every compilation/anthology is missing enough must-have VCS games (just to name a few: Pac-Man, Berzerk, Defender) that they're not worth the cost and/or space that they take up. Combine that with my opinion that using original joysticks/paddles is a large part of the gaming experience, a number of the games are not authentic reproductions of the originals (Space Invaders, Frogger, etc.), plus a number of other gameplay issues, and I feel like they become almost entirely skippable. This is obviously more of a generic review than one of the two volumes you asked about, but I think it still applies. That said, this is a good time to unveil one of my infosheets-in-progress -- a comparison of what is included on Flashback Classics Vols 1 & 2 with previous VCS compilation releases -- I'm including all of the Flashback consoles, and other cartridge/disc compilation releases that include 50+ VCS games. I have a few things I need to sort out (I'm not sure I have the Battlezone and Millipede versions listed correctly, for example) but it's largely otherwise accurate.

Glad to hear that many of you have enjoyed my interview with Tim -- I was incredibly pleased with how thoroughly and thoughtfully he answered all my questions. Pretty much every review I've seen so far has indicated that this same thoughtfulness and attention to detail is evident in the quality and presentation of the book itself. Unfortunately I'm still awaiting my copy (AGH, HURRY UP, AMAZON!) but I expect to have it by early next week. Tim has mentioned the possibility of joining us for a Wednesday night chat in the near future -- stay tuned for details!

With the Art of Atari book release now right around the corner (tomorrow!) I'm pleased to present an interview that I did with the book's author, Tim Lapetino, on behalf of the site. Huge thanks to Tim for his participation and his willingness to give thorough and informative answers. We hope to have Tim join us for a Wednesday night chat in the near future -- stay tuned for details on that. I'm now watching my post office box like a hawk for my copy of the book! I intend to post a review once I've had the chance to read it cover to cover -- I don't imagine it will take me long, as this has been circled on my calendar for months. Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts about Art of Atari!

Here's one of the Taiwanese carts in my collection: "Winter Vocation". M. Bison has apparently traded his cape and hat for a rifle, toque, and ski mask! Hmm, wouldn't Ski Hunt be a better title for this? In fact, that's what Home Vision's game is called -- there's a label *underneath* the Winter Vocation end label that says "Ski Hunt". Why the re-sticker job? Your guess is as good as mine. Home Vision games are not pirates/bootlegs -- they're unique PAL games that are always interesting, if not always good. Here's a link to a video of Ski Hunt -- it's got some good things going for it! The alternating skiing and hunting levels keep things from getting monotonous, and the graphics are far and away better than those found in a lot of the bottom-of-the-barrel games that were made for the VCS. I recommend trying it (you can grab the ROM from AA), but heads-up: I don't think there's currently a dump of the ROM available that doesn't get unplayably glitchy in the higher levels. Coming up next, two SpaceVision carts...

Think these are all pirate Famicom/Famiclone carts: lightest blue cart (top) = Ninja Gaiden III middle blue cart (middle) = Robocco Wars darkest blue cart (bottom) = (Fist of the North Star) / Hokuto No Ken 4 red cart LG15 = (Knights of the Zodiac) / Saint Seiya: Ōgon Densetsu Kanketsu-Hen white cart = Mario IV (hack of Armadillo, with graphics from Dian Shi Ma Li and Super Mario Bros. 3) yellow cart LD09 = (Fist of the North Star) / Hokuto No Ken 1

Apparently this video has been online since 2011. It was new to me! The video was made by Atari Explorer Online, an internet newsletter founded by Atari Corp. They eventually were re-named Jaguar Explorer Online.

There's a lot of gameplay demo footage one can skip over, but yeah, the interview segments are pretty cool.

If I had to keep one I'd probably keep the color mismatch. There are a bunch of no-controller-info carts one can collect, but Video Checkers is one of the relative few that had different color end labels. But... keep whichever one speaks to you more.

Nice -- don't see the label color mismatches like that too often. Now you have a great example of them screwing up the controller info in '86 and just deciding to take it out entirely in '87.

A few more classic versions you could add to the rankings: 1983 - Apple II 1983 - PC/IBM 1984 - Fujitsu FM-7 (Japanese home computer) 1984 - MSX There's also the unreleased 1981 "Muncher" for the Bally Astrocade. It's Pac-Man, just with a changed name due to Bally only having the arcade rights to the game. If you want to stretch to 1991, there's the Game Boy version as well. Put me down as another vote for the 5200 being my favorite. I'm biased because it's what I grew up with, of course. The one big issue I always had with my copy was a bug in the higher key levels where the energizer doesn't behave as it should. You eat one, the ghosts turn blue, and they never turn back as long as you leave them alone! As a kid I didn't realize that this was a bug, although I certainly thought it was strange. It wasn't until much later that I learned that Atari fixed it in later production runs of the game. FWIW, IMO a scrolling Pac-Man is sacrilege and/or a work of the devil.

Time for something new... Brazilian 2600 carts! As I understand it, the Atari 2600 started to catch on in Brazil around 1983-1984, just as the video game market started to crash in North America. A number of game companies started manufacturing cartridges for sale there, including one company officially licensed by Atari -- Polyvox. Companies like CCE (Comércio de Componentes Eletrônicos, recently acquired by Lenovo) put out a vast array of titles, some of them unique to the region. The best news for North American collectors is that Brazilian-made cartridges are NTSC format and can be played on NTSC consoles with zero issue. Atari 2600 consoles sold in Brazil utilized some kind of internal transcoder that would output the correct color palette for their PAL-M televisions. PAL-M uses the same number of scanlines (525) and frequency (30fps) as NTSC, it's just the color carrier that differs. I may eventually post a more in-depth review of the unique games that I picked up, but until then -- have a look at some of these carts! First, five of the unique games. Pizza Chef was a game programmed by Zimag, but Zimag never released it. Immies and Aggies and A Misterious Thief are more or less the same story, though Immies and Aggies was released by Suntek (Taiwan) with the title Spectracube Invasion. Bobby is Going Home is a Bit Corp. game and is globally not all that uncommon, but picking up an NTSC version proves to be a bit more challenging. Stone Age plays a little like Pengo, and was apparently originally a TechnoVision/CreatiVision (VTech) release. Mission 3000 A.D. is a space shooter that's kinda similar to the arcade game Bosconian. The labels for these are all pretty cool IMO. CCE labels came in at least three styles over the years -- the first style was a really colorful one with Portuguese title translations (like "Missão 3000 A.D.", above). These games sometimes came bundled with CCE's 2600 console clones, as I understand it. There were nine total titles with these colored labels; Mr. Postman is most common since it was the pack-in game for some time. Mission 3000 A.D. is one of the more rare of the nine titles; Dancing Plates is apparently the rarest by far. Another CCE label style featured the same artwork for every game (e.g. see Pizza Chef, Immies and Aggies, and above, Zaxxon). Pretty uninspiring to have all the carts look the same, but at least the artwork is kinda nice. The CCE games with gold-colored labels can apparently be harder to find, even in Brazil -- there are nine of those titles as well. CCE may have created this series of gold labeled carts to help offset their charging a higher price for more expensive games to manufacture (all of the gold series carts are games more than 4K in size). The last CCE label style uses game-specific artwork, some of which has to be seen to be believed. In addition to the three titles in the second photo, above, check out Pac-Man's super odd-looking blue Brazilian cousin being chased by green apple jelly beans... plus bizarro Q. Bert! (Wait, is 'Q' his first initial? Quentin Bert? Quincy Bert?) At least he's somewhat more Q*Bert-esque than the... thing... in CCE's catalog. Finally, one of the rarest Polyvox games: Mr. Chin. Almost all of Polyvox's titles are either Atari or Activision games, and I believe all of them come in Activision cart shells. I don't quite have the full story on how Polyvox ended up with the license to produce cartridges from both companies, but regardless... Mr. Chin is neither an Atari nor an Activision title even though both companies' names are featured on the label! It's essentially the same game as Dishaster, a (lousy) 2600 game released by Zimag. HAL Laboratory seems to have ported the game to MSX in 1984. For more about Atari's history in Brazil, I recommend checking out the History page at Atari.com.br -- it's very readable with Google Translation. There's also the excellent "80s Gaming in Brazil" article in Issue 51 of Digital Press (page 24).

Package from nosweargamer! - another Atari Corp. cart missing controller info (plus an end label with the Sears pic label font -- really strange) - the rarest cart in my beginner 7800 collection so far - bonus trading cards! "Kids Playing Batman" is not quite as good as "Dogs Playing Poker", but it's close. Crossing Adventure off my list means I'm now down to eight carts without controller info remaining. Thanks!

My added junk: Atari 2600 - Grand Prix box + game, weird Game Boy Color toy that NSG snagged, Atari 7800 - One on One Basketball, Atari 2600 - Basketball, Game Boy - Dr. Mario, Game Gear - The Majors: Pro Baseball*, Game Gear - Poker Face Paul's Poker, Atari 5200 - RealSports Football, Atari 2600 - Bowling box + manual (with PAL cart to follow). *For a good laugh listen to how the umpire calls balls, strikes, and outs in this game!

Sweeeeet! Enjoy jumping 32 (Sears-branded) buses in your living room!

Recently completed 2600 set: M-Network. Check out those amazing, exciting, labels! *crickets* Favorite three to play are Bump 'N' Jump, Dark Cavern, and Kool-Aid Man. Frogs and Flies is super simple but super awesome to play every once in a while -- don't let anyone tell you otherwise! Air Raiders is the only entirely original game; all others are related to an Intellivision release (even if in name only, like Kool-Aid Man). Star Strike is no doubt the hardest to find, but it's not so rare that you never see it. Not much to say about the carts themselves. Minor cartridge shell variations are nothing to write home about! INTV white-label versions (released after Mattel nixed M-Network) exist for twelve of the games, but, again: yawn. I'd like to know why He-Man didn't get the same kind of special logo/font treatment that Kool-Aid Man and the Tron games got. Or why BurgerTime has the arcade logo, but Bump 'N' Jump doesn't. Final country of manufacture tally: Singapore: 13 / Korea: 2 / Philippines: 1 / USA: 1

Glad to see someone finally make use of the invisible antigravity I put in the RJB! jmjustin6: the box/manual for Bowling that you picked out was sent to me from Australia (hence the Made in U.S.A. sticker on the bottom flap). Whenever we do our next trade/sale I can add the cart (PAL) that was with it (for free) if you want to have the original CIB -- just let me know if you want it.

Mail call! First, a package from RickR with... travel documents?! That's right, you and a guest will be taking a trip around the world with VIKING CRUISES! First you'll cruise on up to the Great White North, where you'll score a Hat Trick with Wayne Gretzky in chilly Edmonton!* After dispatching those pesky Flyers in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup, pack your skates... and your skis! Because we'll be steaming on over to Calgary* for the 1988 Winter Games! But don't get too caught up in conversation with Brian Boitano and Katarina Witt -- because your world tour comes to a conclusion in... historic Cairo! But you won't be walking like an Egyptian -- you'll be flying like a Desert Falcon as you search the Sahara for the Pharaoh's treasures! All of this can be yours, IF... The Price Is Right! *Don't worry about how a cruise ship gets to Edmonton *or* Calgary, we'll figure it out later. Somebody get Gordon Lightfoot on Line 1... Not to be outdone, Rowsdower70 sends along the first Starpath Supercharger game in my collection: Dragonstomper! And as if stomping dragons wasn't enough, we can also vanquish some more dragons with Jeb and Jake as we all play AD&D for INTV. Thanks to you both!