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General discussionRelease: Atari 50: the Anniversary Celebration(106 posts)(106 posts)
(106 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted November 11, 2022
Everyone, and we mean absolutely everyone knows this video game titan. And while there is no point in introducing them, celebrating their 50 years in the industry is the whole other thing!

Atari 50: the Anniversary Celebration is available on GOG taking you on an interactive journey through 50 years of video games via interviews with designers, developers and industry leaders, documentary footage, product design documents, high-res original artwork, and a curated list of awesome playable titles - all of that put into one cohesive experience. When you encounter a game in the Timelines, you can immediately play it without losing your place.

The massive selection of over 100 games spans seven different platforms: Arcade, 2600, 5200, 7800, Atari 8-bit computers, and, for the first time ever on modern consoles, Atari Lynx and Jaguar! Play the classics like Tempest 2000, Asteroids, and Yars' Revenge, or dive into some deeper cuts.

Behind every game are the stories of Atari, what was happening at the company, and what went into the creation of the games and the hardware on which they ran, all told by the people who were there.

And in addition to all that, Atari 50: the Anniversary Celebration also includes six new games:

Swordquest: AirWorld – a new entry in the legendary Swordquest series, inspired by the design concepts of original Swordquest creator Tod Frye. Who will be the first to solve its mysteries – and finally complete the quest?

Haunted Houses – The original “survival horror” game for the Atari 2600 gets a modern 3D voxel-based sequel, featuring more houses, more spooky situations, and more urns.

VCTR-SCTR – This mashup celebration of the vector era of gaming combines the gameplay from Asteroids, Tempest, and other vector-based arcade classics into a single, continuous challenge.

Neo Breakout – An amazing and addictive two-player competition that combines the best features of Breakout and Pong, with a modern graphic style

Quadratank – The first new entry in the classic Tank series since 1978 combines features from the original games with four-player fun in team or free-for-all modes.

Yars’ Revenge Reimagined – The Atari 2600 masterpiece gets a whole new look. Swap between original and modern graphics at any time!

Join in the celebration!
Posted November 12, 2022
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gandalfnho: Sadly most of the best Atari 2600 titles where from Activision...
And the saddest part about this is, if Ray Kassar (Atari's CEO after Warner Comm. took over) hadn't been such a dick towards the programmers, all these "Activision" games could have been in-house Atari games.

Heck, "Activision" would probably never have seen the light of day, if the programmers had gotten their fair share of the revenue.
Posted November 12, 2022
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dtgreene: Not to mention that it may be possible to find a computer with integrated graphics more powerful than the ATI Radeon HD.

(Has anyone actually tried to run the game with integrated graphics?)
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ssling: Usually it just means they didn't bother to test on such hardware and in case of problems could refuse support. At least I had few games with such annotation and there never was a problem with running them.

Unless possibly it could be something with this Jaguar emulator that requires dedicated GPU.
It could also mean that the game checks to see if it's running on a dedicated GPU, and if not, refuses to run. (I believe one of the modern Fallout games, I think Fallout 3, does this, but there exists a mod to bypass that check and apparently the game runs fine on modern integrated graphics if you do that.)
Posted November 12, 2022
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dtgreene: It could also mean that the game checks to see if it's running on a dedicated GPU, and if not, refuses to run. (I believe one of the modern Fallout games, I think Fallout 3, does this, but there exists a mod to bypass that check and apparently the game runs fine on modern integrated graphics if you do that.)
In one of the Linux threads here (possibly adamhm's wrappers) we discovered a game (possibly soldier of fortune 2) that patterns matches "generic" in the graphics card's driver name and refuses to run on match. This is a problem on some Linux distros since they label their "normal" kernel generic and that shows up in the name. Running sed -i s/generic/sofsuxx/ or such on the binary was a working fix.
Post edited November 12, 2022 by clarry
Posted November 12, 2022
Is the regional price correct?
Posted November 12, 2022
Quick reminder that Atari owns the BLOOD ip. And they cut the funding after the first major patch on the remaster.

Atari is not Atari. They are Infogrames.
Posted November 12, 2022
Expensive nostalgia.
Posted November 12, 2022
Mandatory video about the topic, presented by one of the staff members of Digital Eclipse:
"It's Just Emulation!": The Challenge of Selling Old Games
Posted November 12, 2022
I've never seen a Lynx in person. Only ever saw the ads for it back in the day, so it's nice to get to see what some of the games were like without sacrificing a gajillion AAs. ;)

That volleyball game is pretty fun, even if I suck at it. I also quite like the Lynx version of Missile Command and Super Asteroids.
Posted November 12, 2022
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allope: I think Defender has been missing in a few (if not all) of the other collections I've seen in the past
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JeniSkunk: The arcade original of Defender was Williams Electronics, not Atari.
What makes this 50th anniv release, something that I won't be wasting money on, is it's missing three Atari arcade games that I loved. Battlezone, Marble Madness, Kangaroo, so for me the collection is just shovelware I've no interest in.
Battlezone I believe was sold to Activision a good while ago - one of those shortsighted decisions previous ownership made that the current company has to live with. Marble Madness was made after the company was split and I think it's one of the Midway/Warner-owned games now. Kangaroo was a Japanese game Atari licensed for overseas distribution, similar to stuff like Pole Position. It's a tough situation because so many of the most memorable Atari games were licensed deals.
Posted November 12, 2022
Just for a change there is no subforum for this game.
Posted November 12, 2022
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P-E-S: While it certainly is true that old Atari drove the early rise of video games, they were also kind of responsible for the video game crash of the '80s. ;)

Nice to see this here. While some of these are probably too old and simple for me nowadays and there are a bunch of duplicates with newer versions...

TEMPEST 2000, baby! ... I must have played the DOS version we had to death, but this is the superior Jaguar version. :)
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Sulibor: If you like Tempest 2000, you can check free remake Typhoon 2001:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBv4lFu6k54
Ultra (by Rollcage/GRIP coder/programmer Robert Baker, also responsible for Rollcage Redux and Rollcage Extreme) is another good one.
Posted November 12, 2022
And to think, if the Composer of Advent Rising hadn't bought and PERSONALLY desecrated the Intellivision Name, people who loved Intellivision could have had something similar to look forward to.

Instead of just having people like me making fun of Intellivision for being a third rate has been that was forgotten before Gorbachev was out of office.

Edit: Who me? No, I was born after 1990. Anything from this era is at best a mystery, and at worst seen as laughably quaint. Super Mario Bros was a true gamechanger and trying to go to anything before just isn't fun.
Post edited November 14, 2022 by Darvond
Posted November 12, 2022
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cmclout: That is absolutely hysterical. Imagine being the person (or people) who decided that it would be reasonable to require a 3.0 GHz processor, 8 GB of memory, and 8 GB of storage to run a collection of games that originally ran on a 1.19-1.79 MHz processor with a maximum of 16 KB memory and a maximum of 64 KB storage per game. Those unsupported integrated graphics cards are thousands of times more powerful than anything on which these games were designed to run.
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Trooper1270: If you read post 4, you should notice 9 Atari Jaguar games are included in the collection. Those will obviously need to be emulated, and the Jaguar was slightly more powerful than 1.79 Mhz, without even considering its graphic hardware...
Fair enough, my mistake. Let's look at the Atari Jaguar -- "Tom" CPU (26.59 MHz) + "Jerry" CPU (26.59 MHz) + Motorola 68000 CPU (13.295 MHz); 2 MB RAM; and storage of up to 6 MB per ROM cartridge.

Given the extreme discrepancy between the system requirements and the original hardware, that addition really doesn't make the system requirements look any better. Even when we consider the Jaguar games, Atari is requiring a 2-core 3000 MHz CPU, 8096 MB RAM, and 8000 MB of storage to run games that -- at most -- required a 2.5-core 27 MHz CPU, 2 MB RAM, and 6 MB storage per game.

It seriously begs the question of whether or not those are actual requirements or if someone just said "I don't feel like testing it, so let's just pick numbers on which we think it should run successfully".
Posted November 12, 2022
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cmclout: It seriously begs the question of whether or not those are actual requirements or if someone just said "I don't feel like testing it, so let's just pick numbers on which we think it should run successfully".
I'm guessing you know what (system/hardware/machine) emulation is ?, and understand that the requirements needed (by the host machine) to run such a game, and an entire software version of the original hardware (an Atari Jaguar in this case) underneath that, is vastly higher that just running a ported or compatible version of said game ?.

This is the current (Sept 22) state of Atari Jaguar emulation according to this wiki page below. Not very good considering the age of the machine...

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Atari_Jaguar_emulators
Posted November 13, 2022
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Trooper1270: This is the current (Sept 22) state of Atari Jaguar emulation according to this wiki page below. Not very good considering the age of the machine...

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Atari_Jaguar_emulators
Yeah, who would have guessed that having to emulate three disparate instruction sets would be a complete gong show?

But getting it wrong does sometimes produce better results.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionRelease: Atari 50: the Anniversary Celebration(106 posts)(106 posts)
(106 posts)