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All Atari Games

voxodyssey.com

In case you want to play any of them I made a thing a few years ago for that https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmacAqRVhJX9eS7YJX1vY3ifFKF...

Did you make this, so good can I add it to the website or link over to it? I am being careful with ROMs as people have been in a bit of trouble for adding them onto their website

I have no idea about the legal situation of distributing ROMs and an emulator for Atari 2600.

And you have BASIC! I had this on the original system, and it came with a special controller. How can I type on your emulator?

WOW...great job!

No speed limiting on >60FPS displays is a bit of a problem, but neat project!

The keys don't seem to work for me. Chrome/Windows. Trying to play Combat. I see the key mappings under the Gear icon. Clicking seems to bring up the menu items but the game never starts or I cant make it start.

Ahh I just discovered this website, anyway I am the owner of the website and yes its only up to M so far but I have a list of almost all the games to add the place to see all the systems so far is https://voxodyssey.com/game-consoles

Its a work in progress I do this alone one person and have got the website to 688 next update will be around 710 or so games this is not spam either I really appriciate feedback and looking to get more exposure to the website but trying not to over push it

Just discovered this Forum so this website ycombinator.com

Welcome! I don't think you will find a more appreciative and constructively critical crowd of your work from a technical and usage perspective. Please keep coming back with more of your work as we love to see it!

Haha what the hell wake up this morning get coffee thinking to myself let's check if this has any impact on my google analytics, login to account rub my eyes, over 5000 increase in traffic, my results are so screwed now huge spikes, great problem to have.

I assume you are already aware of the active community of video game historians and preservationists involved with the retro arcade and console emulation movements (ie MAME/MESS, etc). If not, here's a link to get you started: https://www.progettosnaps.net/dats/

What is this ive not seen this before emulators can get you in a bit of issues if you give over the roms though no?

The retro preservation community is focused on documenting and archiving these historically significant creative and artistic interactive digital works for the long-term future.

The preservation community is careful to steer clear of shorter-term legal and commercial issues. Copyright typically expires in less than a hundred years which is brief on art history timescales. Commercial interests in monetizing intellectual property are even more ephemeral. Even for immediate purposes, there are broad exemptions to copyright for non-commercial fair use including educational, scholarly, editorial and creative purposes throughout most of the world.

This is well-trodden territory. Over the years the issues have been discussed at length in the preservation community. By searching terms such as "MAME", "MESS", "emulation", "preservation" and "fair use" you can find official position statements as well as detailed legal analysis and individual commentary (example: https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2013/12/28/archive-org-covera...).

Excerpt from the linked 2013 post by a long-time MameDev:

> I feel it important to once again point out that MAME (and MESS) are NOT projects about playing free games and that we do not condone or facilitate large scale piracy.

> What we provide is factual references, and emulation of hardware components. Our aim is to make these as good as possible, and be able to emulate ANY possible piece of software that might run on them; emulating and documenting more software allows us to improve our hardware emulations, improving our hardware emulations allows more software to run, naturally we reference what we have used to make this progress, but at no point do we actually provide it.

> In terms of project goal you’ve only got to look at the MESS part of the codebase (that we now ship with the MAME source) to see there are emulations of random devices like EEPROM programmers, Car Computers, Digial Clocks and Homebrew computers etc. This hopefully shows that the project is about something much more important and with a much wider scope than what some people assume (that they’re simply projects about playing games for free). Even in MAME we emulate things like Firmware update programs, and have skeleton drivers for Coin-operated Jukeboxes (and in the most recent update, an electronic Darts board) none of which would be included if it was merely a project about playing games. FWIW this has always been one of my arguments for fully combining the project binaries by default, it makes this position a LOT clearer because most of the cases that demonstrate this well do come from MESS.

> I should also stress that popular systems in MESS are also often handled differently to other emulators, there are reasons we document the proper content of cartridges, and require real rom dumps for things like NES where possible (rather than simply using .nes files which lose this information) Design choices like this might make things more inconvenient for users (and has zero benefits in terms of playability) but does result in our history being better documented which is more important when it comes to the goals of the project and again emphasizes that this isn’t simply a project about ‘free games’

MAME is likely ok but the ROMs of course not even if you pretend to be a museum.

It's just tolerated by owners of the copyrights:

+ they don't know how to make money with it anyway because nobody wants to pay for it (except with physical arcade machines). + it can support the license credibility (e.g. Pac-Man). + the copyright owners may not be around anymore.

Generally it's just not strategic to sue.

"it's legal to distribute pirated copies of games if it's to preserve them", is a bit like the Disclaimer here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Privacy_Act

> "it's legal to distribute pirated copies of games if it's to preserve them"

Perhaps you meant to reply to the poster I was replying to. To be clear, I would never say nor imply "it's legal to..." <anything>, as predicting the legality of some specific scenario is essentially impossible with any degree of confidence.

Even expert lawyers, judges and law school professors are frequently incorrect in such predictions. In the U.S. legal system, what is and isn't "legal" varies wildly based on the particular jurisdiction, context, defendant, plaintiff, defense, prosecution, judge, jury, etc involved.

And even predicting a given ruling (guilty/not guilty) doesn't tell us on what specific counts, how they were charged or what the sentence or damages may be nor any possible settlements or appeals. Intellectual property law in general and copyright in particular is notoriously complex, nuanced and situational. Especially so for civil actions. That's why I was so careful in my post not to state any opinion regarding legality at all. I only noted that exemptions like "fair use" exist and some copying in some situations is permitted. The answer to anything else is both a) "it depends", and b) "it's complicated."

There was some kind of rule that allows The Internet Archive to maintain (but not distribute) data that it has acquired without the party the data came from having a license to copy it to them. I don’t remember the name but as far as I remember it was tested in court.

Yes. But sometimes they sell the roms. If they’re not…

For example Atari does for a raspberry pi sd card as a bootable Atari emulator. It’s using the emulators produced by the retro game community.

https://www.microcenter.com/product/618709/atari-games-sd-ca...

I immediately searched for Missile Command, and did not find it. Thought maybe it wasn't 2600, but it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Command

Sibling comment points out AtariAge, which does have it.

https://www.atariage.com/software_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=3...

My understanding now is that this is "All Atari Games up to ma..." so far, an early work in progress.

As someone who was just the right age for the 2600, I have an almost visceral reaction to seeing the old Activision and Atari typefaces and artwork. It recalls the excitement I felt for playing these games, although I never had a 2600. I'd have to go to my friends' houses who had one (there was always that one kid who would host everyone) and try and get him to play the game I wanted.

Also I remember all the excitement around the E.T. game release, and what a major letdown it was, as the gameplay and graphics were so ill conceived.

I remember playing ET, it was really challenging to understand the goal of the game, but solving the phone puzzle and seeing ET flying on the UFO for the first time was incredible, it took me weeks of daily play. Also restarted the Asteroids score counter, and used to play at full volume to piss off the neighbors.

Holy shit there was an unfinished game based on a Residents album. Being written by someone AT ATARI. https://voxodyssey.com/atari-2600-mark-of-the-mole

More here: http://www.digitpress.com/archives/cc_markofthemole.htm

That is completely bonkers! I had no idea. The Residents were legendary. Heck, they still are. But surreal art rock never really took off, unless you consider their protege Primus (or the modest success of Negativland).

There was a Journey game for the 2600, though my friend thought those were hotdogs in the screenshot. There was a pretty rad arcade version as well:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1037411366/journey-arcade-flyer...

The big deal about the Journey arcade game at the time was that it had some of arcade video gaming’s first “photorealistic” pictures of the band’s heads for the game characters… which I’d estimate were probably like 32x32 3 or 4 grayscale colored sprites minus the rest of the characters’s body.

1980. My first 2600. Fighting with the family over our one TV set to watch the Lake Placid Olympics, Reagan's Inauguration, and play Atari Combat.

My interest in computer video was actually started from the gadget that connected the coax cable to the screw tab antenna connectors on TVs. Such a strange thing to think was the start of my curiosity, but that fascinated me just as much as the games. Been tearing things apart ever since.

Those devices are known as baluns.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balun

Great article about Yars Revenge and one of my favorite Atari games:

https://www.polygon.com/2015/3/9/8163747/yars-revenge-is-a-j...

Several years ago, a friend of mine read how Yars Revenge was originally intended to be Star Castle and took the "impossibility" of the task as a challenge. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/698159145/atari-2600-st...

Looking back at these games, several of which I spent many hours playing and loving as a kid, I can't help but notice the striking disparity between the box art/game backstories and the actual screenshots of gameplay. I think the box art was much more than just a marketing tool - it also helped fuel our childhood imaginations into believing we were taking part in amazing adventures instead of only seeing the literal pixels on the screen. Ah, simpler times.

Title should specify (2600)

I got excited thinking this would be for the 400/800 system...

You’d think there would be a list for that too somewhere..

The AtariAge database of 2600 games is more complete but the more the merrier.

Indeed, Atari Age is great, has more games and rating: https://www.atariage.com/software_search.php?SystemID=2600

Although, the gallery view on voxodyssey is fun to browse.

404. Pretty sure you meant https://voxodyssey.com/atari-2600. How did this get upvotes with the wrong URL?

I would guess people just love Atari games and assumed what it contained and didn’t really click the link.

That + I would imagine a lot of people upvote items to remember to read them later

HN has a new feature that changes submissions from the linked url to the pages canonical url, and the bugs are still being exterminated on it.

https://voxodyssey.com/atari-2600-adventure

From what I understand, this was the first game with an Easter egg that actually changed the gameplay. Sometimes there were walls that you could walk through (intentionally) that let you skip parts of the game.

im making a list of all the Atari games that I could find I can not track down information on these four titles so far can someone help me Bank Heist (Action Hi-Tech) The Fly (US Games) Golf (Sears) – 1980 Intuition (Tigervision) – Prototype

I have the Sears version of Golf sitting in front of me as I write this. It's the same game as Atari's Golf, just with the Tele-Games branding on the manual and the box.

At the time, there were millions and millions of people who were loyal to the Sears brand, and would choose something from Sears over something from Atari.

This extended into all kinds of products. For example, many major appliances from Sears were actually Whirlpool appliances with Kenmore branding. But people would rather buy them from Sears than Whirlpool, for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of an HN discussion.

Thank you so much I really appricate this

As I recall, Sears also had their own Atari VCS console branded with the Sears name. Must have been a great licensing deal for Atari. Maybe I'm mis-remembering.

You are correct. I play my Sears carts on a Sears machine.

It's branded "Tele-Games" at the top, in green on silver. On the front wood grain it reads "Video Arcade" instead of "Atari."

We never had a 2600. We started our computer/video game adventures with an Atari 400 and boy do I have fond memories of Frogger and Defender, and typing up Basic programs on that ‘keyboard.’

Me too. The 400 was my first and favourite--even like the keyboard, got it broke-in pretty soft. I learned more on it than I have perhaps since. I was playing Pacific Coast Highway and Galactic Chase.

De rigeur link to https://archive.org/details/atari_2600_library

It's a nice list that goes up to "M", though I can't figure out how to look for titles after "Master Builder". Also, no "E.T."?

OTOH, I was surprised there was a LOTR game for the Atari VCS https://voxodyssey.com/atari-2600-the-lord-of-the-rings-jour...

E.T. is in the "VIEW ALL" list but it doesn't seem to show under "E", for some reason.

It kind of looks like the descriptions of the games are plagiarized from Wikipedia, but no attribution is given.

Plagiarized... Mmm I have copied some of the text from Wikipedia for old titles and have kept it factual as I want to list factual information. Others use web scrapers to achieve this I prefer good old copy and paste, but it takes time and I just try to take and stick to the facts. I'm not sure how else to list the 500 plus titles and also write it all myself as its taken such a long time to even be at the letter M

You don't provide any links to your sources or any attribution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

That's what is making it plagiarism. "It's too hard to do so many articles" is not an excuse. A lot of people have put a lot of work into those wikipedia articles, too. All they've asked in return is for people like you to link back to the article when you use their work.

Ahh yes I can achieve this Ive built this function for other titles but not old titles. I'll build an attribution field and include this over the weekend. I agree with you, have been so deep into it I did not think this. Thank you I appreciate it and please forgive my mistake it was not intentional

I thought about what you are saying and have built in this function I will activate it over the weekend, new additions ive started to add it for and I will slowly go back though historic content and amend. I wanted to thank you for this feedback.

That's a great site! Is there anything similar for the Atari ST?

Shameless plug: https://www.atarilegend.com/

Our sister site also has other Atari platforms: http://www.atarimania.com/

Why is your username name green for me?

Newly created account.

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