What Atari games are actually worth playing?
I don't have a 7800 on hand, and haven't started up my XEGS in some time, so I might remember more titles.
Many large carts (8K and larger) also don't work, at least not without the firmware knowing how to bankswitch to read the whole ROM, so a fw update may be required.
The console itself should never know the cart is not a simple ROM with some bank-switching logic. Since Flash (or an SD card) isn't ROM, the ROM image will always be loaded into the cartridge RAM by the microcontroller software. There were many different strategies back then, so the ROM would need to have a file attached telling the on-cartridge microcontroller how bank switching worked on that title.
All you'd need is some UI to make it easier to switch between titles.
This doesn't work on the Atari 2600+ and 7800+ because those systems attempt to load the entire game ROM into their own RAM on boot and run the game from there. You might get the UI, but unlike in the actual hardware there is no rereading of the ROM directly. It's all done from what the system captured into RAM on first boot. So if a new game were to be loaded into that address space, the modern console wouldn't see it.
I never tried that, so I might be very wrong in my assumptions.
In the case of the imaginary cartridge with the UI, changing the ROM that’s mapped to the cartridge space with the physical UI and resetting the console without resetting the card controller should do the trick.
Flashcarts are more of a crapshoot. They use unknown bank switching mechanisms and Atari does not want to support their use.
> In the case of the imaginary cartridge with the UI...
Not so imaginary! This is what the pack-in cart that comes with the 2600+ does, there are DIP switches for game selection on the cart itself. I don't know of any flashcarts that do even this, let alone something more sophisticated with buttons and an LCD readout like a Gotek drive emulator or something. Would be nice though...
Now even my Apple TV is significantly better than anything I can find at an arcade.
Joystick games
- Adventure
- Frogger
- Frogs and Flies
- Surround (fun with 2 player)
- Turmoil
- Joust
- Dragonfire
- Pitfall and Pitfall II
- Stampede (really good Activision game)
- Towering Inferno
- Space War (think Asteroids but 2 player combat)
- Combat (the brown levels with ricochet bullets are super fun)
Paddle games
- Astroblast (can use joystick but 10x better with paddles)
- Video Olympics (this is a 70s pong console in Atari cart form and has 4 player games)
- Warlords (fun with multiplayer)
Supercharger games
- Dragonstomper (if you like RPGs)
There's a lot of games out there with really tight gameplay loops. Much fewer with deep gameplay, though. So it kind of depends on what you're looking for.