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> > gadgets & apps Gadgets & Apps: Web Gadgets | Atari 2600 | Radio Shack MC-10 > > atari 2600 video computer system Introduction 
This video game console really needs no introduction. The pioneering Atari 2600 Video Computer System is the most famous and beloved console in video gaming history. It popularized home gaming units in the late 1970's and singlehandedly spawned an industry. The Atari name itself is synonymous with the 2600, even though the company made additional, more powerful consoles. Even more than 30 years after its debut, the Atari 2600 still enjoys a huge, loyal fan base through new homemade games, emulators, eBay sales of vintage consoles and most recently a retrogaming revival in the mid-2000's through the Atari Flashback classic game consoles. "Have you played Atari today?" If not, welcome. A "Video Computer?" The Atari Video Computer System was introduced to the American market in the fall of 1977. Atari had already made home gaming consoles earlier in the 70's with the Home Pong systems, but while they and competitors such as Radio Shack and the Coleco Telstar units had all their games built in and could not be modified, the VCS was among the first with interchangeable game cartridges, a pioneering concept at the time. It was called a "Video Computer System" to have a promotional one-up over the Fairchild Video Entertainment System, a similar cartridge-based console. The VCS was a simple, inexpensively made console with only 128 single bytes of RAM memory, absolutely no video memory, two oscillators to create two channels of audio, and a maximum on-screen display of two player graphics at a time without flickering. Did I mention it had only 128 bytes of RAM? Not 128 megabytes or kilobytes—128 single bytes, far less information than even the letters in this paragraph. Back in the 1970's memory chips were very expensive to produce, and the VCS was really designed for simple games like Pong and Breakout. Its interchangeable controllers consisted of two joysticks, four rotary dials called paddles, and two numeric keypads called keyboard controllers that could be paired together side-by-side to program simple demos with the Basic Programming cartridge. It initially had nine games, including Combat, the tank-aircraft war cartridge that was packaged with the console. It sold well at department and toy stores as it could play home color versions of Atari arcade games such as Pong, Breakout, Night Driver and Space War. But the VCS entered gaming superstardom in 1980 when Atari won the home gaming rights to the arcade smash hit Space Invaders. Consumers bought the VCS in droves just to play Invaders on their home TV's. In 1982 the VCS was officially renamed the Atari 2600, in reference to its manufacturing number, CX2600, as the more powerful Atari 5200 console was rolled out that same year. It also released the long-awaited, heavily-hyped home version of the arcade phenomenon Pac-Man—a sales hit but a critical bomb. Amid rumors that it was rushed to market after only a few weeks in development to take advantage of its popularity, the horrible 2600 translation of Pac-Man shattered Atari's sterling reputation and the company never lived down the mass disappointment, despite far better home versions of Ms. Pac Man in 1983 and Jr. Pac-Man in 1987. Beyond Limitations Despite its technical limitations, difficulty in programming and relative obsolescence compared to other consoles, the 2600 enjoyed a long and robust life as programmers from Atari and third-party publishers such as Activision, Imagic and Parker Brothers created literally hundreds of titles including Demon Attack, Pitfall, Freeway and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Hardware plug-ins expanded the console's capabilities, such as the Supercharger module, which added 6K RAM to play more sophisticated games via cassette; the Compumate, a keyboard unit which turned the 2600 into a simple home computer with the ability to write, save and load programs in the BASIC programming language on cassettes like the Supercharger; and Atari's own trackball, lightgun and wireless joystick controllers (the latter actually developed by a third party). The 2600 was designed to handle only 4K of programming code, but a programming trick called bank switching, which branched program instructions onto more than one 4K ROM chip, allowed larger, more complex and graphically superior games to play on the console. It also made the cartridges a little heavier, but that was never really an issue. Among the larger titles were Centipede, Pole Position, Ms. Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Crystal Castles, Track and Field, Polaris and Fatal Run, a multi-level game with auto racing, codebreaking and text elements. On some cartridges, additional RAM was included with the ROM chips to handle the larger code and better graphics, such as the so-called Atari Super Chip which added an additional 128 bytes for a total of 256 bytes of RAM (I'm having one of the Sanford and Son "big ones" just thinking about it). It Just Keeps Going and Going... Atari officially retired the old faithful 2600 in 1991, fourteen years after its debut and the longest life of any gaming console ever. Yet it keeps going like the Energizer bunny. Hobbyists create new games, nicknamed "homebrews", for sale at classic video gaming conventions and over the web. Several emulators exist to replicate the 2600's operating system on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers—and even on cell phones. And in the ultimate replication, Atari itself (now a division of European software publisher Infogrames SA) released the Flashback Classic Game Console in 2004, and the Flashback 2 in 2005, each with dozens of classic 2600 titles built in. The Flashback 2's microchip was a replica of the original Motorola 6502 chip wired into the 2600 and could be modified to play actual game cartridges. > > emulators and tools Z26 — Atari 2600 Emulator Batari Basic > > programs If you are fortunate enough to own an actual Atari 2600: You can play these programs if you have a specially designed cartridge that will download the binary code from a modern computer via cable connections. One such cartridge is Cuttle Cart, a rather expensive but very useful device that can be purchased or searched for at the Atari fan site Atari Age.
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