#atari 8-bit

[humor-y-videojuegos]

Ms. Pac-Man 🏢 General Computer Corporation (GCC) 📅 1982 🖥 Apple II, Arcade, Atari 8-bit, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Atari Lynx, Commodore 64, Commodore VIC-20, DOS... #videogames

[arconinternet]

Timelost (Book, Kris Austen Andrews, Adrian Keith Andrews Sr. & Joseph C. Giarratano, 1983/1984)

You can read this sci-fi graphic novel, which includes a BASIC program listing for six games, one for each chapter, here.

You can use the programs with this in-browser C64 emulator. Read the introduction first to understand the shorthand used.

[mingos-commodoreblog]

RECOIL 6.4.0 - Retro Computer Image Library decodes Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Atari Portfolio, Atari ST/TT/Falcon, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Commodore 16/116/Plus4, Commodore 128, Electronika BK, FM Towns, HP 48, Macintosh 128K, MSX, NEC PC-80/88/98, Oric, SAM Coupe, Sharp X68000, Tandy 1000, Timex 2048, TRS-80, TRS-80 Color Computer, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum picture formats. The project contains a simple viewer, plug-ins for general-purpose image viewers and editors, and an everything-to-png converter.

[old-web-dreams]

Games i played in my childhood - Alley Cat (PC-1984)

[viciogame]

🎮 Adventure in Serenia (PC MS-DOS)

Complete Gameplay: https://youtu.be/TpLe-rUHkA8

#AdventureInSerenia #WizardAndThePrincess #PC #IBM #MsDOS #KingsQuest #ウィザードアンドプリンセス #OnLineSystems #RobertaWilliams #AppleII #Atari #Commodore64 #Fantasy #Adventure #RPG #dosbox #PcGamer #scummvm #OldGames #policequest #lucasarts #sierra #Viciogame #Gameplay #Walkthrough #Playthrough #Longplay #LetsPlay #Game #Videogames #Games

[everygame]

Gridrunner (VIC-20, C64, Atari 8-Bit)

This post, in which I write about the three (original) versions of Gridrunner included in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is for subscribers only! You can subscribe for just $1 a month at https://ko-fi.com/mathewkumar, but if you don’t fancy that, you can read or re-read my review of the release as a whole. And don’t forget there’s years of articles in our archive, and physical issues of exp. 2601 are still available for pre-order until the end of the month.

[billloguidice]

THE400 Mini Complete Game List - All 25 Games!

THE400 Mini Complete Game List - All 25 Games! #the400 #the400mini #atari #atari8bit #gamelist

Thanks to this AtariAge thread, we now have the complete list of 25 games found on the THE400 Mini, which is just $199.99 on Amazon. Here’s the list of 25 games with links to screenshots: Airball Asteroids Basketball Battlezone Berzerk Boulder Dash Bristles Capture the Flag Centipede Crystal Castles Elektraglide Encounter! Flip and Flop Henry’s House Hover Bovver Lee (aka, Bruce…

[zentendo]

Bruce Lee: A Vintage Martial Arts Odyssey on Atari 8-bit - Exploring the Classic Gem of the '80s

In the annals of classic gaming, few titles hold the nostalgic weight and martial arts flair quite like Bruce Lee. Released in 1984 for the Atari 8-bit family, this platform game, penned by Ron J. Fortier and brought to life by Datasoft, remains a timeless gem. Let’s embark on a journey through the chambers of a wizard’s tower, exploring the graphics, gameplay, and lasting impact of Bruce…

[gaykarstaagforever]

I want to live in the world where Atari won the computer war, and every tower is still a massive molded plastic chassis with vents that you can only mod with cartridge cards the manufacturer designed for it.

...Wait no I don't, that would be a nightmare.

Cool aesthetic, though.

[70sscifiart]

I love the intricate 1984 box art for Atari's Dimension X game - art by Timothy Charles Boxell.

[thefugitivesaint]

Alan Craddock, 'Druid', 1986

[mingos-commodoreblog]

RECOIL 6.4.4 - A viewer of pictures in native formats of 20th century computers: Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Atari Portfolio, Atari ST/TT/Falcon, BBC Micro, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, Commodore 16/116/Plus4, Commodore 128, Electronika BK, FM Towns, HP 48, Macintosh 128K, MSX, NEC PC-80, NEC PC-88, NEC PC-98, Oric, Psion Series 3, SAM Coupé, Sharp X68000, Tandy 1000, Timex 2048, TRS-80, TRS-80 Color Computer, Vector-06C, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum.

[80sheaven]

Atari 400 and 800 home computers

[starborn-scene-demon]

if anyone has a real atari 8-bit, could you test this program? preferably a stock machine! on my ntsc machine (800 XL) it makes some weird distortion, but on my friend’s pal machine (65 XE) it makes a TON of weird distortion. dunno if altirra behaves the same way and I haven’t had time to check

[everygame]

Koronis Rift (Atari 8-Bit / C64)

Developed/Published by: Lucasfilm Games / Epyx Released: 12/1985 Completed: 13/06/2023 Completion: Skipped my way to Rift 20 and blew up the base. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Accompanying The Eidolon as the second game in Lucasfilm’s now obscure “second wave” Koronis Rift, if anything, has a greater weight of expectation on it. While The Eidolon was created by the largely unknown Charlie Kellner, Koronis Rift is designed by Noah Falstein (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis) and co-developed by Ron Gilbert (The Secret of Monkey Island) (though it’s worth noting that Charlie Kellner did help on this too, let’s not talk the guy down too much.)

It’s a deeply unusual title, one that emphasises a point that I’m constantly banging on about when I talk about the games of the 80s and earlier: genre is so fluid, and there are so few settled design tropes, that games end up going in very weird directions that feel totally unintuitive to modern eyes–and it’s not like Koronis Rift goes out of it’s way to explain itself. Right down to the manual, in fact, it’s rather the opposite.

I mean, at first glance, you’d assume this was simply a more detailed version of Rescue on Fractalus where you’re flying around a fractal landscape, shooting enemy ships and landing to access derelict hulks to increase your score. But you’re not! You’re actually driving around the landscape in a rover! I mean, I’ll be honest, the game has like, a rover on the cover and think that’s supposed to be on one on the title screen, but it wasn’t until I was actually playing this that I actually grasped what was going on.

What’s going on is this.

You’re a space adventurer looking for hot junk to sell and get rich, and you’ve stumbled upon the legendary planet Koronis, where ancient beings tested powerful weapons in twenty of the planet’s rifts. They’re all dead now, but the remaining expensive space junk is all just sitting there waiting to be ripped off apart from the fact it’s protected by dangerous automated guardian saucers and un-surivivable radiation.

Starting on the first rift, you lower yourself down to the planet in a rover, and drive around using a radar to find the hulks. When you find one, you send out your little repo-robot to steal anything good from it at which point you can either attach it to your rover to improve it, or store it to sell later.

These things you’re picking up all have different uses: new shields, lasers, batteries, generators and so on, all of which come from different alien races. Everything costs energy, too, so you can’t just stick all the best stuff on your rover and expect it to work.

While you’re doing this, of course, you’re being pursued by guardians saucers which you have to kill to loot hulks or escape the planet. Saucers have different colors and different laser colors, and shields offer a varying protection against different lasers, and your own lasers are better at destroying different saucers via a fairly complicated system of priority (purple lasers are best against yellow ships, etc. etc.)

You can leave a rift whenever you like to dismantle and sell the junk you’ve collected (and it also allows you to learn some stuff about what you’ve picked up, but, as far as I could tell, nothing especially useful) and go to future rifts, but if you go back to the same rift it helpfully drops you off back exactly where you were.

You can play this quite straight, by just going through all the rifts, upgrading your equipment and trying to get the highest score, or you can be using each playthrough as a recce, trying to work out the most efficient way to get the best stuff and be able to survive the final level, finding and blowing up the guardian saucer base, which will cement your ownership of the entire planet and “win” the game.

Well, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? And I’ll say this for Koronis Rift: some of the decisions made give the game an otherworldly, mysterious and honestly quite… lonely feeling that makes it very captivating. Trudging around a barren landscape, picking up things you don’t understand… after my first night playing, I kept thinking about it. There’s so many things unsaid that it can’t help but set your imagination alight.

The problem, unfortunately, is that it’s also a 1985 video game. I’m not quite sure if there was some kind of edict at Lucasfilm that games had to be played with only the joystick (although The Eidolon did require the space bar as well) but Koronis Rift is very quickly hamstrung by that. Perhaps Rescue on Fractalus had too many keys, but Koronis Rift makes everything reliant on essentially a cursor that you have to move with the joystick (blecch). Want to move the rover forward? Bump the cursor off the top of the viewport. Want to stop the rover? Bump it off the bottom. Want to loot a hulk? Awkwardly move the cursor to the bottom of the viewport and hope pressing fire works.

The Eidolon doesn’t quite manage to be a first person shooter, and Koronis Rift does an even worse job than it. There’s a version of this where you are moving the tank with the keyboard and moving a cursor around with a joystick (or better, a mouse!) but clearly no one could imagine this in 1985, so you’re stuck with something unbearably slow and awkward. 

And what’s worse, too, is that you’re in a terrestrial rover facing off against airborne flying saucers with no way to look up, or turn around with any speed. With saucers attacking every fifteen seconds or so, the game very quickly becomes a frustrating experience where you swing the cursor around to rotate your rover around, sometimes for multiple revolutions because there’s no way to tell where you’re being shot from, and then have to shoot a flying saucer at the top of the viewport without accidentally driving forward (because you’ve had to stop driving to even slightly give yourself a chance to find them in the first place.)

It’s very tedious, and what makes it a hundred times less fun is that the game is unbelievably vicious. I was sure I was playing a broken version because I never seemed to have any shields, and it’s simply because you have to play so deep into the game to get any useful shields that you’re dying after a few shots otherwise, and the saucers move around so quickly compared to your sluggish cursor that it’s a nightmare trying to hit them. Certain times playing this I’d die before I’d looted my second hulk!

In addition to this, there’s “an air of mystery” and “what the fuck am I doing/why the fuck is this happening???” and Koronis Rift strays too far into the latter. I could not workout how much energy my ship had, nor how much batteries and generators helped (my best guess is that you have to add up efficiencies to make sense of it.) I also couldn’t believe that a player is expected to clock what color a ship is and then be able to work out what laser is best to use in the space of time they’ve got before they’re obliterated–never mind that you’ve only got six slots, so I’m not sure how you could hold more than one laser along with everything else you need anyway.

It’s just not… fun. It’s awkward to control, you die too often, and even playing it for hours, with the one set of maps I could find and having poured over as much information on the internet I could find (very little) it’s still totally obscure to me how you’d be able to play this “properly.”

In fact, I’ll admit right now: the only way I was able to beat this was on C64 because I was able to find a cracked copy with a trainer allowing both invincibility and one-hit kills (along with, astonishingly, the entire manual in the intro. I didn’t realise pirates could be that conscientious.) Interestingly, while the Atari 8-bit version looks nicer with longer draw distance and so on, the C64 version feels a bit more survivable even without the cracks due to less aggressive saucers. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Amstrad CPC version is every bit as good as the C64 version in speed and quite a bit more colourful–couldn’t find a trainer though, so I was stuck playing the C64 version.

Anyway. There’s really no point in finishing this–on the Atari 8-bit you just get a black screen with your score, and the C64 just gives you a short text scrawl, and in order to do so I had to wander the last level for easily an hour trying to find the base (I’m no proud, but I resorted to copying a speedrun video on youtube, and it still took forever!)

Will I ever play it again? Not unless I ever talk to Noah Falstein and he explains exactly how you’re supposed to play this properly.

Final Thought: For everything I’ve said about how downright unpleasant this can be to play, the weird thing is that in my mind it remains a beguilingly lonely experience. I can imagine, were the game tuned a little easier, the upgrades a touch more intuitive (if still mysterious) you could want to play this again and again, digging deeper and deeper into it. I mean, I’m not surprised to see a game like Scavenger SV-4 on Steam transparently inspired by this with the very clever twist that your rover is remote and the feed is degraded due to radiation, and I almost want to play it to get the same feeling Koronis Rift gave me, just in a slightly less… aggressively brutal way. Anyway, things get even more interesting for Lucasfilm Games next…

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[billloguidice]

The Wider World of Atari Complete Game List - DLC for Atari 50 - 19 new games!

The Wider World of Atari Complete Game List - DLC for Atari 50 - 19 new games! #atari #atari50 #arcade #atari2600 #atari5200 #atari8bit #atarilynx #atarijaguar #recharged #history

Atari just announced Atari 50: The Wider World of Atari (the Expanded Steelbook Edition will be available around November 8, 2024), the first DLC for the multi-platform Atari 50 collection. What follows is a list of the 19 new games, as well as the list of games included in the original Atari 50 collection containing Atari arcade, Atari 2600 VCS, Atari 8-bit, Atari 5200, Atari Lynx, Atari Jaguar,…