AtariAge and Atari
forums.atariage.com
forums.atariage.com
AtariAge Forums were a great resource for gathering all things of retro computing, some of which ended up contributing to collections such as BitSavers and Trailing Edge.
It's where I initially discovered wonderful work by volunteers to create an archive of scanned BYTE magazines:
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/167235-byte-magazine/
Now there are a number of sites that have BYTE collections, and the Internet Archive is a natural place for them. But the Internet Archive is constantly attacked by copyright holders, and it's quite possible it could be taken down at some point in the future.
So AtariAge added robustness to the collective Internet as an archive. I don't expect that to continue, now that it has been acquired.
for any other brand this would be exciting news to see the original developers get invested in homebrews, but in atari's case i just see this as yet another desperate attempt by whoever's in charge at this point to try to find a way to monetize a brand name which is both extremely iconic and entirely lacking in products, services and customers.
Last I checked they were trying to launch a chain of hotels which would cater to game conventions and e-sports events, guess that one didn't pan out. Kinda curious if the problem was launching during COVID, or just having a fundamentally dumb idea.
It just seem like this brand gets passed around a lot between investors/VCs because it seems like the name recognition alone should make it a goldmine and yet it doesn't. I'm actually surprised Elon didn't buy it to be the new brandname for Twitter in lieu of X.
Anyways, if the corporation that currently calls itself "Atari" is going to get in the business of distributing "official" carts of homebrews for classic Atari products I think that's really neat and it might actually be viable as a small business as long as they keep their ambitions in check and don't try to compete with the likes of Nintendo[1].
A few years ago I wouldn’t believe we’d ever see the last Swordquest game, or a Minter-ized Akka Arrh, yet here we are.
Fact is if anyone wants Atari ROMs they are massively easy to find online, though. Heck, you can even find them on archive.org at this point.
[0]. https://web.archive.org/web/20190503205052/http://atariage.c...
M.U.L.E. is best on the Ataris.
What hurt Commodore was technologically clueless management. Just one example - they didnt update Audio/Floppy controller chip for 9 years because original designer Glenn Keller left (maybe even fired, you never know with Commodore) in 1988, nobody else knew how to and Commodore didnt want to hire/pay competent people. As a result Commodore was shipping computers with 720KB drives all the way to 1994 while on PC 1.44MB was standard since 1988.
> What hurt Commodore was technologically clueless management.
That, too, but all the bus timings on the Amigas tied to NTSC (it sprung out of a gaming console, after all), the complexity of the custom chips (they'd all need to be iterated to keep up with new Motorola processors AND what was being offered in PC clones), resulting in multiple buses, fast/chip RAM, and so on. The Amigas were incredibly capable for their time, but were not elegant computers and did not evolve, in part, because it'd be too costly for Commodore to do so. A lot of the features of the Amiga made sense in games (planar graphics), but made none for a general purpose computer. What's obvious now (hindsight is always 20-20) is that they should have segmented the line, have a gaming platform at the low end, and a general purpose computer, running the same OS but with things like VGA ports and preemptive multitasking with memory protection and virtual memory. And they SHOULD have taken the Sun proposal of selling 3000's as low-end UNIX machines seriously.
As for the floppy, I have no idea why they didn't just adopt a market standard FDC and let the original's floppy side rot. The audio part was quite impressive but I doubt anyone was using the FDC side without the OS in the middle.
Another thing that always surprises me is that both made PCs with little or no commonality with their "proprietary" lines. Using the same chassis for Amigas, STs and their PCs would save money, as well as putting Amiga and ST keyboards on PCs (this was all before the PC-101 layout).
Atari made moves in 90, 91 to get more serious about their OS development, hiring Eric Smith fulltime to work on MultiTOS, etc. Smart move, but too late.
The low-end Unix workstation thing was a meme that just didn't work out in practice. Both Atari (with the TT running SysV) and Commodore tried at this market and failed. There was no buyer for it. I still remember the snarky little headline on a snippet in UnixWorld about Atari's TT & Unix: "Up from toyland."
The comparison point for the ST should be the IBM PC or the Apple Mac, not the Amiga. Productivity computers that were many multiples the cost. In 1985, 1986 there was nowhere else where you were going to get that much memory and clock rate for the price Atari was charging.
That plus the crisp paper white monochrome monitor (no dubious interlaced flicker), the Mac-like UI, PC compatible floppies. They had potential for a real winner, but he problem is that Atari failed to effectively iterate. At least not until it was too late. The Falcon was a great machine.
The inverse color scheme? Not so great... which people are finally admitting 40 years later.
The 2600 though, I just could never be excited by. I feel it could only be truly appreciated by someone in the actual late 70s, before anything better had ever been experienced. Once that ship sailed, with the NES especially, it could never really go back. But I'm sure people with fond memories of those days would disagree with me! (And youths these days will probably call NES and SNES barbaric and no fun!)
I think that would be a nice summary.
;-)
People this side of the Atlantic will also mention BBC, Spectrum and Amstrad.
Oh. Oric, Dragon, and a few others as well.
I was surprised when I learned the Apple II+ couldn't do lowercase when my very first II+ clone could.
I was even more surprised when I figured out a clone I owned was so close to the original II+ that it also couldn't do lowercase.
However, these substitutes usually aren't completely interchangeable with the original tools. It also does not cover some of the more difficult bits to replace, like a toolchain for the custom RISC cores, which have lots of errata that the one toolchain not lost to time doesn't seem to compensate for (http://www.3do.cdinteractive.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=3356...).
While I'm not a member of the Atari Jaguar homebrew community, I'm currently tinkering with an experimental reverse-engineering technique that might be of use to them (https://forums.atariage.com/topic/354341-porting-the-origina...). Basically, I'm developing tooling that allows one to delink executables back into object files. In the near-term this should allow relinking these a.out executables into ELF executables and stave off obsolescence for a while, in the long term this should allow them to decompile/reimplement these object files one at a time until they Ship-of-Thesesus themselves out of trouble.
It's a bit of a side-quest for me since I originally developed that tooling for delinking PlayStation 1 video games in an effort to decompile Tenchu: Stealth Assasins, but these proprietary executables happen to be a fairly decent and well-rounded set of test cases to try it out on.
I've been a member there since almost the beginning. The site builder really did a great job with AA.
I hope it runs well for a long time yet.
What is the current Atari company actually doing? They seemed to have scrapped their crypto casino, their VCS seems to be a complete failure that made even less money than the Ouya, so that leaves the $1000 limited edition cartridge set, merchandise, and compilations of old stuff for current systems (Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is really good!)? Nothing wrong with being a nostalgia company, but I really wonder if they have anything new going forward, or if they are just going to maintain the brand to re-release old games?
The old company is long gone. Even if it was around, the people/skillset are no longer relevant to game development. There's no engineering/developer continuity, tech continuity, etc.
So it makes no sense for Atari to attempt to compete with other AAA game studios on state of the art games. Compete on what merits? At best they're just a publisher of other dev houses games.
In essence Atari is nothing but a name, and a gaming legacy attached to that name. And what a legacy for a killer retrogaming Nostalgia brand. It seems they're focusing core business around this concept.
I suppose the idea is that they become a publisher of games specifically tailored to retrogamers, heavily leveraging the classic Atari games lineup. A lot of heavy hitters in there. Atari 50 nailed that perfectly, showing that they've figured out how to package gaming nostalgia in product form. They can reboot/reimagine classic games franchises, introduce to modern audiences, etc. Throw in some retro inspired hardware, limited edition cartridges, and other swag on the physical items side of the business.
It seems a more sound strategy than what they've been doing with the brand up till now. Retrogamers may be a limited market, but it's a real market that's currently not being serviced by large companies in any consistent way. They might be able to create a new market segment in the casual gaming space as well. Mr. Run and Jump shows that this idea of arcade/twitch gameplay with casual gaming might have some legs. It certainly feels like Atari.
I'll admit I'm guilty of throwing them money just to get the Fuji logo on some items. I bought the VCS, speakerhat, etc. I love my new 2600 joystick with USB port. So I, for one, welcome our new Atari overlords.
I could definitely see them being a great Indie publisher, and I just saw that they bought Nightdive Studios earlier this year (at least I assume that's the same Atari) - so they seems to be setting themselves up for that kind of "Triple-I/Double-A" stuff. Heck, I hope they still own the Star Raiders IPs and make another remake of it, hopefully a better one than the last.
And they bought Stern IPs. They could do a new Berzerk game as a frantic twin-stick shooter - get inspiration from Robotron 2084 which too inspiration from Berzerk.
Okay, seems like Atari actually has potential ahead of them, that's cool!
Agreed. The most potential they've shown since Jaguar.
Here's to hoping Atari doesn't grab defeat from the jaws of victory again.
I do wonder how compatible it will be with expansion chips (like the DPC in Pitfall 2). I assume they have an internal list of recognized games, but I wonder what happens if someone wires up their own homebrew game with one of those chips and plugs it in?
But you're right, I should have mentioned it because it's a good idea to do and a legit product, I just had it purged from memory because I wasn't interested in it.
As you suggest, one way around that is to fingerprint the cartridge and then to load a binary into the emulator from internal memory (if they're using Stella then the emulator is capable of emulating the processors on those chips) but I don't believe that is an option provided by the 2600+. And if it was, it's a very limiting option for the end user because new homebrew games wouldn't work.
I think we need to be reasonable about how much magic we really expect them to put into this thing, since running Atari and Activision cartridges, like the 2600 (and 7800!) of old, is what most people would expect the machine to do. On the other hand... if they make the machine easily hackable, that might be pretty great, and earn this version of Atari a little respect.
If the market for this product is people who only want to play the older ROMs on a HDTV then I'm sure the 2600+ is a fine product.
Maybe I'm projecting from myself, but if I'm that kind of enthusiast that held on and wants to play their actual cartridges, I'd expect compatibility with any cartridges I might still buy in the future.
(Then again, both the RetroN and Polymega seem to do well enough, so what do I know, apart from not liking the idea of these systems as half-baked in-between solutions.)
It seems to me that compatibility with any cartridge would require a recreation of the actual VCS hardware. That sounds expensive to me and is probably why Atari haven't gone down this route. But as you say, that leads to a half-baked solution.
The other option is an emulator that can communicate with the cartridge in real time - but that doesn't exist and I doubt Atari have gone to the trouble of making one (we're all assuming they're using Stella at this point, but I don't think that's been confirmed).
IIRC there was a bit of scandal involving the AA mods censoring criticism of the Amico. Not sure if there was an actual conflict of interest or just fanboys getting drunk on hype, but it was only a couple years ago and to see them getting into bed with yet another company trying to capitalize on a retro gaming brand is bound to draw comparisons.
I bought one of these. About $60.
The FujiNET is amazing. It works via the standard SIO subsystem provided by the Atari system OS ROM. Device independent I/O.
D: DISK P: PRINTER ETC...
Now has N: for network.
This device makes Atari Basic Internet capable. People have written 10 line programs to do all sorts of Internet tasks. Multi player online games are possible and have been done.
There are app servers hosting disk images.
I got mine, connected it to my home wi-fi and was playing Zork over the internet in about 5 minutes.
It has an SD card slot for local storage and the onboard CPU has all sorts of capabilities aimed at making the Internet useful to existing Atari software and permit easy new development.
That device is a lot of fun and replaces having a disk drive and some sort of modem or serial interface to work online.
https://fujinet.online/2023/06/28/fujinet-and-meatloaf-at-vc...
Unless I understand it very wrong, in the base C64 OS, you run an "ls" by opening the floppy device and asking the drive to read it.
OTOH, while autobooting or running unmodified software is not an option, nothing prevents the modification of existing software to run with the Fujinet’s extra features. The very basic stuff, the ability to load software off a disk image, is there.
https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Device_number.
Fujinet on the C64 supports modem comms - the implementation is based on the Meatloaf project:
I watched the Meatloaf videos; thank you. Does this mean that FujiNet hardware for the C64 will connect to both the serial and user ports? If so that would solve both the backward compatibility and throughput issues, at the cost of more hardware (but understandably so, given the C64's hardware).
PS - What is the upper throughput limit on the Commodore serial bus? I know it's a serial version of IEEE-488, but I assumed that the upper limit is lower than what is required for modem access. But now that I think about it, the throughput for disk access (even if brokenly slow by default) must be much higher than that of contemporary modems, right? To put another way, is there anything—whether throughput, or signaling/traffic—inherently preventing modems on the serial port à la SIO?
From what I understand, the C64 product requires one to use BASIC to kick something off, just like everyone does for the disk drives.
But, after that it's looking like the overall features and experience are going to be there. The video shows command line access working. A more friendly client won't be far behind, and that could be in BASIC and perform reasonably in most cases.
Yes, this is what I was alluding to. I know it's no big deal to type `LOAD "*",8,1` or whatever to start the FujiNet main menu, but there is still a qualitative difference between that and being able to turn the Atari 8-bit on and have the functionality automatically be available. That's possible on C64, too, but not if the hardware is connected only via the Commodore serial port; it would require the cartridge port, or a ROM change. As mentioned, I am also unsure of how the throughput would compare.
EDIT: I forgot to mention the lack of functionality with telecom software. Commodore modems don't connect to the serial port, so terminal emulators and such won't work out of the box with FujiNet the way they can on Atari.
The serial port is a bummer! What is used? Cart port?
I am getting one for my Apple, and want to get a C128 sometime in the near future.
Was all Atari for a long time, and then a while back, I bumped into an Apple //e and realized just how much fun all these machines are!
The C128 is next.
And, in short order, we could all write programs that talk to one another over the Internet via FujiNET devices. Good times ahead.
And yeah, SIO is pretty cool. Atari got that right. The one thing I envy about the C64 and friends is full 320 pixel color resolution. The Ataris are 160 pixel. And I am not talking about size. Both machines can deliver 320 pixels, but Atari machines can only specify a difference in lumanance between pixels at that resolution.
In the last 10 years, that difference has proven itself with some damn cool demoscene productions on C64 and friends. Plus, the 128 has a real 80 column display. My Apple has that too, and I really miss it on the Atari.
Anyhow... have fun.
In the early '90s I wanted to get some drawings I did with the Atari Touch Tablet into my Windows computers. So I looked at the specs for the BMP format and learned enough 6502 assembly language to do the conversion on the Atari. Then I hooked the Atari modem and a Windows computer up to phone jacks in my parents' house, fired up TinyBBS (if I remember correctly) on the Windows computer, and uploaded all the graphics from the Atari over the household phone lines.
Felt pretty clever after that.
People moved data in many ways didn't they?
Print it out. I moved some code and data that way. Just type it in again.
Some people made cables and toggled lines in the controller ports.
Audio.
Who knows what else?
Of course with only 32ish K available, you weren't sampling much. I think I probably still have the first one I captured: "White Horse" by Laid Back. Now there's a timestamp.
BTW, one of the drawings I converted from the Atari wound up in the documentation for a multi-million-dollar manufacturing system sold by Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in the '90s.
Was a great resource, especially in the older machines that had 4 ports.
I say they can rent spectrum from someone. It's not like the people who are doing those kinds of volume need yet another free gift. And mooching off amateur spectrum is exactly that.
Life has taken me away from radio for a while now, but I could jump back in anytime. It's great tech.