Hacker News Reader

Comment by madengr | Hacker News Reader

At least they can blame the Coronavirus (which they did). I think you’ll see a ton of insolvent companies doing this.

If you want an Atari, buy a real console. Better yet, build a MAME cabinet. You can run all the 2600-7800 games in there, with much better controls. CRT emulation (raster and vector) is pretty impressive on a 4k monitor.

View on HN

Another approach: I picked up an Atari Flashback 2 from Goodwill a while ago for about $6. It can be modded with a real cartridge port to play actual Atari 2600 games, plus uses Atari-compatible joysticks (side note: the joysticks that came with the Flashback 2 work out of the box on my VIC-20).

Real hardware consoles like the Flashback 2 are great!! The later Flashbacks are inferior (IMHO) as they use software emulation and lack the cartridge port solder points. :(

Of course you need a real CRT also. The Flashback also works with paddle controllers (which are necessary for several built-in games) although they can be hard to find.

Or just run Z26. There's was joke going around a long time ago that if Z26 is doing something wrong it's probably an error with the Atari hardware.

I’ve always wanted to build a MAME cabinet. Do you have any good resources you could share on how to build one?

http://www.slagcoin.com/joystick/introduction.html for building joysticks.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cade/ has a lot of people building/rebuilding cabinets.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com