Check out these pages from the 1982 Club Atari Christmas catalogue.
Woody gets more wood….mmmm stylish.
I’m actually loving all of these gift items. Bring ‘em back Atari!
You better have been good this year as Santa has plenty of E.T. cartridges left 
Want!
A fun afternoon with my Raspberry Pi, Atari 2600 Stella emulator, paper, glue, scissors and a vintage Atari joystick.
Cross Force (spectravision -1982)
The great thing about early Atari VCS games is basic and casual nature to the games. You just plug in and off you go for a few minutes or a few hours for simple arcade fun. Cross Force is just one of the many 2600 VCS games i’ve been playing of late for that quick retro fix.
For zeons and zeons, the poor inhabitants of your home world have been kicked around by the evil ‘Morpuls’ from the planet Tzoris and quite frankly they’ve had enough. Thanks to the clever boffins and probably Linux users, you now get to go on the offensive with an experimental kickass weapons system called the Spectron.
So what sets Cross Force apart from other classic shooters? Well, the Spectron consists of two lasers guns, one located at the bottom of the screen and the other at the top and you get to control both. Pressing the fire button shoots a beam between each laser gun therefore to destroy the enemy you have to align the Spectron correctly so the enemy gets caught in the ‘Cross Force’…erm ‘Fire’.
Remember the bit about it being an experimental weapon, well keep that in mind as excessive use will overheat the system. Fuel is limited too although and pods are dispersed periodically to give you a much needed top up when collected. Simply shoot to collect.
Two modes of play are available (four if you include the two player options). The first sees both Spectron lasers travelling in opposite directions to each other so you can shoot either vertically and and diagonal angles. The second option has the Spectron lasers moving together in parallel therefore cross fire is always vertical.
If you’ve played and enjoyed Llamasoft’s Laserzone then Cross Force is for you as its quite similar.
Having two vulnerable objects to keep an eye on rather than just the one makes for intense and exciting gaming especially during the later levels with bits flying about all over the place. A great little title well worth playing.
I haven’t tried it yet but there’s no mention of being able to use the Atari 2600 paddles in the instruction manual. Shame, because because they’d work so well with Cross Force.
I also note that there’s a Colecovision/MSX version (Super Cross Force) complete with upgraded graphics.
If you think of great games for the Atari 2600 games, then there’s a very good possibility that Activision’s River Raid is included….if not, why not This early scrolling shooter is such a large part of many retro gamers gaming history and indeed retro gaming history itself. This wonderful interview posted on VCG with River Raid games designer Carol Shaw, is both entertaining and an insightful look back at early years of Atari and Activision.
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/800
Last weekend before heading down to the Retro Computer Museum I finally had chance to check out my new Harmony Cartridge for the Atari 2600 (see previous post http://stiggyblog.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/harmony-cartridge-for-the-atari-2600/ ) and thought it might be cool to populate the cartridge and take it down with me to show the fella’s.
Would you believe it, my new (old) Atari 2600 refused to work and wouldn’t even power on 
Pressed for time I packed up the the Atari, Harmony cartridge and my netbook containing the rom images and headed to the museum in the hope that A) I could figure out what’s wrong with my own console and B) If it has died, at least be able to see the cartridge in action on another console.
At the museum and after further testing it looks like the problem is withactual insoles mains adaptor and a loose wire. Sadly, these PSU’s are an all-molded affair so getting inside them to repair is very difficult. They’re easily replaceable so i’ll have to look online. At the moment a piece of strategically placed electrical tape appears to be doing the job!
The second problem I had that I’ve also got a dodgy power switch on the console itself. Again, repairable but in the meantime, Andy gave me another 2600 VCS to take home with me…cheers Andy!
Getting the actual Harmony Cartridge up and running wasn’t as straight forward as I’d thought, but this was mainly due to my netbook and not the cartridge itself. The Harmony Cartridge is built in the US therefore is shipped by default with a NTSC bios file. No problem when playing games on modern LCD TV as most support the NTSC format, but the old CRT TV we were using to test out the cartridge was a standard European PAL TV. With the default NTSC bios the picture on the TV screen rolled and was unuseable.
Replacing the Bios file is very easy and the detailed instruction manual supplied with the cartridge are easy to follow. Simply download the development software from Atari Age and connect the Harmony Cartridge to a PC via the mini USB socket.
Here’s were i had a few issues though. Despite the software being compatable, i couldn’t get it to show under Windows 7. Following the instructions, I had to download a set of virtual comm port – USB driver and for some reason they didn’t work the first time i tried it (bizarrely, by switching the Harmony Cartridge to another USB port on my Netbook fixed the issue).
With the software loaded and the Harmony Cartridge detected, I could reprogram the cartridge and load any one of the three regional Bios files – NTSC for US/Canada, PAL50 for European or PAL60 for Brazil etc. It only takes a few minutes for the transfer of file.
This time the menu remained stable but it disappeared after a few seconds
Refering back to the manual, it indicated that this may be normal on some older TV’s and advised to reboot the Atari and set the toggle switch from Color to Black and White.
Much better on this attempt time and the menu remained stable (and in color) and we were able to use an attached Joystick to browse through the games I’d copied to the SD card.
Moving the Joystick left or right enables you to scroll per page and holding the fire button in addition to moving the joystick increases the scroll speed. Two very handy features for very long file lists.
The game list is in a bit of a mess at the moment because I’ve dumped everything in the root directory (folders are supported). In time I’ll group these into separate folders such as Games, Homebrew, Prototypes etc etc. File names can be quite long, but the menu will only display the first 26 characters per file.
Back home, the electrical tape fix has failed so I’ve not been able to use it since to get some more photos.
During this week I’d ordered a new PSU and it arrived today. I’ve only had time for a quick test this evening and now that everything is working as it should I’d be back at the weekend with more pictures and maybe a video or two.
Don’t you just love getting home from work to find that postman has stuffed something fun in the mailbox for a change instead of endless amounts of snail mail spam, take out menu’s and bills. This latest package, all the way from Oregon, USA is certainly not spam and is one I’ve been easily awaiting delivery for the past fortnight.
My new Harmony Cartridge for the Atari 2600 VCS by Fred Quimby
In a nutshell, the Harmony cartridge is a flash storage device for the Atari 2600 that let’s you store and load games directly from SD card. The entire Atari 2600 game library can fit on to a single 1GB SD memory card and files are presented in menu system accessible via joystick.
I don’t think anything can compare to owning and collecting the original cartridges (if not only for Atari’s wonderful game box art) but having backups on one cartridge is an extremely useful device to have for any Woody fan.
..but best of all, with this cartridge, it’ll let me play modern home brew games as well as various fan based games and hacks. One such title I’m particularly looking forward to playing is an update of Berzerk that has been changed so that it closely matches the original arcade version and also includes the missing sampled speech…speech, on an Atari 2600!
I’ll be back with pictures and videos as I setup and test drive this little beauty.
In the meantime, to find out more about the Harmony cartridge and to place your own order information, please visit –
H
For the past month or so I’ve been enjoying a revisit to the golden age of video games and one system I keep coming back to is the Atari 2600 VCS. In it’s extensive library are some pretty damn fine arcade conversions and home to some original classics lime River Raid, Pitfall, Hero and many more.
I owned one of these consoles many many moons ago but it was soon relegated to the loft when my first computer arrived. It’s not that i didn’t enjoy the VCS, it’s just that at around £45 per game back in the 1980′s was way out of reach for a young kids pocket money as opposed to the £1.99 budget titles that had swamped the stores for home computers. That particular 2600 console is long gone and yet despite all of the old consoles and computers I now have in my collection they sadly omit a good ol fashioned Woody….until now.
I picked this one up on eBay for about the prize of a pizza. Most can be quiet expensive (some even ridiculous) but more often that not, examples in good condition can be picked up for a bargain price.
This six switcher model came with two classic Atari Joysticks, two analogue spinners (which might also be useful for another project I’m adding to my list) and four game cartridges. It might be nearly 30 years old but is still provides hours of fun.
Although it a six switch model, the straight cornered wood grain effect on this one shows, as opposed to curved lines, that this isn’t the rarer ‘heavy sixer’ model. No matter, as long as I can play Space Invaders
Gotta love the VCS’ retro styling of black, wood and orange.
These spinners are great for games like Pong and Breakout. This particular one sounds like it’s got some thing loose inside though so I’ll may need to take a closer look/raid my spare parts bin.
The four games included are -
Yar’s revenge – my favourite amongst all of these.
Demons to Diamonds – never heard of this one before.
Pac Man – classic game but this early 2600 port isn’t great. Ms Pacman is the one to get.
Space Invaders – perfect.
Most game cartridges can be brought reasonably cheaply too as they’re quite robust in design and so many are still around since the 80′s. Hopefully I can start adding more titles to my collection and include some of the classic coin op conversions and a whole host of Activision greats. I’m also a fan of those wonderfully painted SciFi box and cart artwork so I’ll be looking out for titles like Moon Patrol and Gravitar.
I’ve also ordered a Harmony cartridge fro AtariAge which will allow me to play lots of modern home brew games and hacked versions of originals titles.One in particular I’m looking forward to trying is the speech enhanced version of Berzerk.
Until then, it’s back to the eighties!
