Atari, Alamogordo New Mexico Landfill, ET cartridges

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Hahahahaha, true that! I've been meaning to watch Boondocks for quite some time now (gasp,I've never watched any)

[R00k]

[Mindf!3ldzX]

I'll apologize for assuming we could share something a simple as a subject of old school gaming, much like we did when I was like....


Yo dude, before the internet was a 'thing' , I used to play a BBS game called L.O.R.D.S. all the time....

And you was like....OH hey, I made a door game for L.O.R.D.S.

lol, damn bro....

[R00k]

i think you got my pov mixed up with that other guy.

saw the movie.

i think they were really trying to give tribute to the actual programmer who made the game. the media just took a would-be truth and just ran it thru the press.

I dont think ET killed atari.

consoles gave way to home computers.

arcades stopped to some extent.

video games got more popular but consumers just didnt want to learn how to do more than insert game power on... so

nintendo rose to success... etc..

[Mindf!3ldzX]

i think you got my pov mixed up with that other guy.

saw the movie.

i think they were really trying to give tribute to the actual programmer who made the game. the media just took a would-be truth and just ran it thru the press.

I dont think ET killed atari.

consoles gave way to home computers.

arcades stopped to some extent.

video games got more popular but consumers just didnt want to learn how to do more than insert game power on... so

nintendo rose to success... etc..

No I'm pretty sure I had my scope well adjusted, you being apart of this community and my sharing it with said community pretty much puts you well in that venue, I just didn't know you would put my post on blast for it.

I never got to play ET, so I can't say whether it sucked enough to warrant calling it the death knell of Atari. I'll admit I only played the games that kept my attention....

Qbert, River Raid, and Missle Command was pretty much all I ever played on it,on top of that I discovered that Atari 2600 by plundering my grandparents basement, it was a treasure trove.

[MadGypsy]

@never played ET

I played it and I seem to remember something about picking up candy (probably reese's pieces) and if you hit a button your neck got real long for a second.


Edit:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gULY34J3x0I[/ame]

@consoles gave way to home computers

My first atari was actually an 800xl (which was both)


I don't think PCs killed Atari. That PC was actually bad-ass for it's time.

The Atari 800XL, together with the 600XL, were successors of the Atari 400/800 series and the unsuccessful Atari 1200 XL in a more compact case. They could use almost the same software, just so long as the program was written correctly, because of some slight differences between OS versions.

The 800XL had 64 KB of RAM, two joystick ports and kept all the custom chips (Pokey, GTIA, Antic) of the previous models. It also featured the new Parallel Bus Interface (PBI) providing high speed access to the system bus. The new version of the graphic Antic chip offered 16 graphics modes instead of 12 for the 800.

An enhanced version, called 800XLF, appeared in summer 1984. It was equipped with the new "Freddie" chip which allowed faster memory management, especially for graphics display. This version was released in Europe with SECAM video interface.

Alongside the Commodore 64 and the Apple II, the 600 and 800XL were among the most popular home computers.
They would be replaced in 1985 with the XE series when Atari launched the ST.

@nintendo rose to success
Yep. That would be my guess as to what killed atari. I remember the Atari heydays and then they vanished in a poof of nintendo. Check out this link that agrees with us in better detail.

[golden_boy]

PC did kill Atari. I used an Atari into the late 90s and eventually the hardware was just insanely limited. There were RAM upgrades etc, but when 286s and 386s came out, they were much more extensible and modular. It was just the better design.

Even the Falcon with its 68060 couldn't touch a PC. And on the ST/Mega ST line you couldn't even play an MP3.

Things like CDs, MP3s, 1GB harddisks and eventually 3D graphics hardware and FPS games killed Atari, because the platform wasn't adaptable enough. In an Atari, everything was hardwired and difficult to replace.

Heck, the ST could only take a 19200 baud modem. No ISDN, no nothing. And no expansion slots.

Some Ataris survived for a while longer in music recording studios, especially the Falcon, because they had an internal MIDI interface and could run Cubase.

Amigas fared slightly better but eventually succumbed to the PC as well.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

I showed r00k this a few months ago, and I occasionally pop into dudes channel to see where his progress is at.


https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTB...i5nOvpEobZzMEw

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czt7IJbHD-I[/ame]

I stumbled onto it awhile back when doing a typical Quake search, pretty wild that someone's actively trying to slap Q1/Q2 onto a Atari anything.

I limit myself to his youtube video's,but here is a forum discussing what he is doing...

Then again maybe I'm just being gullible everywhere I go. Iunno

[MadGypsy]

@Mindz

Atari was the first console company to release a 64 bit system, long before nintendo. There are arguments with this that the system was still using 32 bit instructions but, the system was 64 bits no matter how you slice it.

The Atari 2600 is what Atari is most known for but that was also their most bottom of the line system option (overall). Atari made a bunch of systems that were better than their competitors.




At the same time nintendo made gameboy ("black" and "white") atari had the ambidextrous (and full color) Lynx. The Atari Jaguar smoked Nintendo. It's actually interesting to see where Atari kept making these amazing consoles that supported truly amazing games (for their time) and people were buying nintendo's and segas that couldn't compete in comparison.

Part of the problem was the price. Atari stuff was really expensive (cause it was cutting edge). Another problem was titles. Mario was already huge when the gameboy came out. Atari had Pac-Man but Pac-Man wasn't really a star anymore. When gameboy was released there were already a decent selection of titles for it. When the Lynx was released there was practically nothing. People chose the cheaper yet more "supported" gameboy over the cutting edge, pricey, less "supported" lynx.

citation: It was the Atari Jaguar that had limited games upon release. The Lynx was trampled by gameboy cause Atari screwed up in providing their wholesalers with units to sell.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

@Mindz

Atari was the first console company to release a 64 bit system, long before nintendo. There are arguments with this that the system was still using 32 bit instructions but, the system was 64 bits no matter how you slice it.

The Atari 2600 is what Atari is most known for but that was also their most bottom of the line system option (overall). Atari made a bunch of systems that were better than their competitors.




At the same time nintendo made gameboy ("black" and "white") atari had the ambidextrous (and full color) Lynx. The Atari Jaguar smoked Nintendo. It's actually interesting to see where Atari kept making these amazing consoles that supported truly amazing games (for their time) and people were buying nintendo's and segas that couldn't compete in comparison.

Part of the problem was the price. Atari stuff was really expensive (cause it was cutting edge). Another problem was titles. Mario was already huge when the gameboy came out. Atari had Pac-Man but Pac-Man wasn't really a star anymore. When gameboy was released there were already a decent selection of titles for it. When the Lynx was released there was practically nothing. People chose the cheaper yet more "supported" gameboy over the cutting edge, pricey, less "supported" lynx.

citation: It was the Atari Jaguar that had limited games upon release. The Lynx was trampled by gameboy cause Atari screwed up in providing their wholesalers with units to sell.

That controller was god awful (including those card inserts for them haha)
A friend of mine owned a Jag, but not the CD addon, but it didn't stop me from reading heavily about them in gaming mag's. I was relegated to Nintnedo/Sega hardware.

GameGear had portable color too,but battery life IMHO is what set the stage for Gameboy to dominate.

Whether that console was a true 64bit system is up for debate, because I remember they did some wonky ass "lets add the bits together of multiple chips to reach a 64bit count".

The only purchase I ever regret was the SegaCD, because at the end of the life cycle the price dropped dramatically and when it reached the scope that my parents could afford to plunk the cash down, it didn't dawn on me that I was effectively asking them to buy me a dust gatherer.

eek!

[R00k]

my progression in computers went atari 2600 then C64
then Amiga then finally a 386 40mhz which was a lot more limited than my 7mhz amiga 2000

[Mindf!3ldzX]

my progression in computers went atari 2600 then C64
then Amiga then finally a 386 40mhz which was a lot more limited than my 7mhz amiga 2000

My first pc was a 4x86 dx33 with turbo dx66 haha!

Did any of you ever get a chance to mess around with Cyrix 5x86/6x86 cpu's?? I was a Cyrix supporter,I owned both, bought the 5x86 first hand and the 6x86 2nd hand!

I didn't buy Intel or AMD because I was and forever will be a cheap bastard about my computer components, I require bang for buck ratio to be securing as much bang for that buck...

Some of my buddies laughed at me for that move haha. I suppose they kinda had good reason to, since Cyrix is now belly up o_O but at the time, they was just so fn fast

That should also tell you how long I held on to my lowly 4x86 motherboard, but back then I pinched even more pennies than I do today when it comes to computer hardware investments.

[MadGypsy]

Trs80 to trs80 pocket to Atari 800xl to 286 to 386 to random modern computers from that era on.