Atari 2600 Memories
Latest news, programming info, tools, and more.
batari Basic Pages
If you always wanted to make your own Atari 2600 games, but Assembly Language was too hard to learn, your dreams are about to come true. Now you can finally make the games of your dreams with an easy-to-use BASIC-like language called batari Basic.
Learn about Visual batari Basic, the bB IDE. VbB has all kinds of useful tools that make creating games with batari Basic more fun and speeds up the process so you can get your game from idea to reality faster than ever before.
Play real Atari 2600 sounds online and create data for your bB programs.
Quickly convert hex, decimal, binary and more with the programming equivalents tool. There's also an improved playfield toy and a magic Firefox spell check box for REM statements.
General Atari 2600 Programming
Includes an NTSC/PAL color conversion tool and Atari 2600 color compatibility tools that can help you quickly find colors that go great together (possibly saving you a lot of time and energy).
Atari 2600 Music and Sound Page
Adapted info and charts related to Atari 2600 music and sound. Includes and adapted version of the Atari 2600 VCS Sound Frequency And Waveform Guide by Eckhard Stolberg.
The official Atari 2600 Game Standards and Procedures document from 1987 with errors corrected.
Personal guidelines and player advocacy.
Atari's Promise Means it's Not Cheating
The Atari 2600 is a permanent part of a home entertainment center.
Assembly Language Programming
Atari 2600 programming tutorial by Andrew Davie that was originally posted at AtariAge.
Assembly language programming lessons by Robert Mundschau that were originally posted at AtariAge.
The easy way to deal with a few of the timing issues of the 6502 and TIA. By Nick Bensema.
Covers concepts of program flow on the Atari 2600, as well as an in-depth look at a simple display routine. By Nick Bensema.
Memories
What is the Harmony Cartridge?
The Harmony Cartridge is a simple, affordable, time-saving, space-saving, hassle-free way to play hundreds of games on your Atari 2600 console.
To What Degree Do You Love E.T.?
This is a 5 page subsection about E.T. with opinions, tips, videos, manual scan, and a map.
A list of my favorite games.
Miscellaneous
I owned a Bandai Packri Monster handheld game around 1983 and stupidly sold it a couple of years later when I grew tired of it. I regretted getting rid of it for many years because it was my most important and only handheld game at the time. I no longer have to kick myself thanks to the Packri Monster Simulator (freeware). It's as close as you will ever get to the real thing without hunting down a used one. No emulator needed. Just download and play. Real images, real sounds, and close attention to every move and cut scene.
Scanning Tips
Have you ever scanned in a page from an Atari-related magazine or game manual or an ad in a magazine or newspaper and had the other side of the page show through? To fix that ugly problem, slide a piece of black construction paper behind the page when you scan and it will usually make the ghost image disappear like magic. You don't have to cut anything or use tape. Just slide a piece of black construction paper behind the page you want to scan. It's nondestructive, very easy to do, and it should give you a nice clean scan.
Another thing some people get are ugly patterns throughout their images. That's pretty easy to fix too. Just use the built-in Descreen filter that comes with your scanner software. If you don't have that filter, scanning the image at a high resolution, then resizing the image to a smaller width and height with your favorite image editor should get rid of the pattern.
I use a Descreen filter and scan at a high resolution, then resize to make sure my scans look as perfect as possible.
Descreen to remove Moiré Interference
The Fortress of infinitude
This section of my web site is an extension of a silly little Atari 2600 VCS club that I created for me and a couple people I knew back in 1982. That club was called The Fortress of infinitude. I made club membership cards, a few posters, and some T-shirts.
In 1983, The Fortress of infinitude was transformed into a future arcade idea for a school project. The slogan I made up for it was, Warning: Once You Enter, You May Never Want to Leave. The Fortress of infinitude was to be a sanctuary for older games with an infinite supply of new games adding to the list. I liked the idea of a fortress that protected the old games, but had new games coming in all the time. No game would ever be lost. This new F of i was a giant futuristic castle with walls that looked like old stone. The basement would look like a huge cave with realistic looking cave walls and would have indoor miniature golf and a mini-amusement park, including my favorite ride, the Tilt-A-Whirl. Since most people like the look and feel of original arcade and pinball games, The Fortress of infinitude would have many floors dedicated to the games of the late 1970s through the 1980s. It would probably have 2 years of games for each floor.
Not only would there be arcade games on the other floors, but there would be a library of home video games and computer games that people could select from an arcade-game-like control panel. Each player would have credit card sized memory cards that would remember all of their individual game playing information. For example, If you were in the middle of playing a game and you had to leave, the card would remember your place so you could continue playing another day.
