I didn't know that there are homebrew games for Atari 2600.
They also assembled a tutorial for beginners: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/33233-sorted-table-of-conte...
They also assembled a tutorial for beginners: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/33233-sorted-table-of-conte...
(See http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150game...)
We got Space:1999, 1337 (Elite clone), SchoolDaze, Impossible Mission, Oricium, 4K Kong .. a lot of really awesome titles .. in the last few years. Also, new techniques have been discovered and continually refined by the core die-hards, meaning we're seeing things on the platform that we in the 80's could only ever have dreamed of seeing .. new color modes, new ways of handling animation, etc. It really is astounding to return to these platforms, 30 years later, and see new titles being pushed out by the ever-eager hackers who are keeping the platforms alive. Heck, we even got new hardware for the Oric-1/Atmos platform in the form of a dedicated disk emulation system, whose microcontroller alone, itself, is more powerful than the Oric ever was, but which nevertheless is being pressed into the disk-emulating duties that makes the Oric-1, at last complete. ;)
So if you've got an old 8-bit machine in your closet, get it out, wire it up, dust if off, and get out there on the 'net to find the elite groups keeping these systems alive. And remember: old computers never die - their users do!
For my part I made a pretty nice high-level assembler and IDE for the venerable Chip8: http://octo-ide.com
On a modern PC, this takes seconds; my fingers and brain are the bottleneck, which is how it should be.