exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hellraiseruk wrote: 31 May 2025 22:58 Pah, I could still take you on Exploding Fist :)

Congrats :)

JD

And with my arthritic fingers you'd probably win :)

HigashiJun wrote: 01 Jun 2025 06:49 おめでとうございます！

:cheers:

ありがとう

I hope I got that right :)

:dualthumbup:

Well done Jon! :D

mrbombermillzy wrote: 01 Jun 2025 14:05 Well done Jon! :D

Thanks 😁

Bought myself a small 'well done' gift for passing my grading yesterday:


I do love a bit of Berzerk!!!

This Enhanced Edition adds new features such as:
- Robot voice phrases - INTRUDER ALERT! and others
- Robots fire diagonally for more challenging gameplay
- New explosion animations
- Minor bug fixes from the original

Got to say it plays very nicely, even for the 2600 :)

OK, so I thought I'd add this a a note to folks tempted by the new 2600 games carts you can now buy.

If you're intending to use them on an original PAL 2600, be aware that whilst the do run, they are NTSC carts and are black and white only in original PAL 2600's. Picture quality is a bit out of tune too.

Of course if you only ever intend to use the 2600+ it doesn't care if your carts are PAL or NTSC and will happily play either.

Although the PAL/NTSC thing is annoying, it's not the end of the world and both new carts I bought, so Berzerk and Mr Run & Jump (Both are great games) work just fine in the 2600+.

I'm expecting the same of the new 7800 carts as well, but we'll see. I have Tiger-Heli on pre-order for the 7800 so I'll find out once that arrives, allegedly in August.

One thing that is a must do is to upgrade the firmware, if you don't the 2 button joysticks and pads for the 7800 will only see a single button which will cause issues in games that need both buttons.

I have tested normal Atari CX40 joysticks, original CX78's and wired/wireless CX78+ controllers plus the CX24 Pro Line controller and paddles, all work just fine so far.

One final word. If you want to play Star Raiders on the 2600+, well, you can't, because it doesn't support the Video Touchpad, without which the game is unplayable. I think this was a mis-step on behalf of Plaion, but I got short shrift from users on 'Another Atari' forum who basically said who cares, it's only one game...

It might come with a later firmware update, but for now my OG 2600 light sixer is where I play it.

Another interesting note I thought I'd add, and this time it relates to the Atari 7800 Berzerk cartridge, which is effectively a 'new' release cart written (AFAIK) by the same guy who wrote Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest for the 7800.

I'm a bit of a Berzerk fan and picked up this cart to add to my collection recently, only it holds a secret...

If you hold down the SELECT button when the game is in the title screen for about 10 seconds, the screen will flash and show you the Frenzy game screen. From now until you turn it off, you get to play Frenzy rather than Berzerk :)

As I understand, the same is true of the Frenzy cart, only holding down SELECT gives you Berzerk instead.

I have only tried this on Atari 'PLUS' hardware, but reportedly it also works on the real thing too :)

All these A8 'easter eggs' are cool.

I also loved the 'screen saver' type thing you and @PhilC were discussing about the (IIRC?) Atari 400 if you left it alone for too long.

Its nice to know that coming in to work without wearing shoes/smoking pot/etc at Atari in the late 70s-early 80s created some unique stuff. :lol:

mrbombermillzy wrote: 03 Jul 2025 15:28 All these A8 'easter eggs' are cool.

I also loved the 'screen saver' type thing you and @PhilC were discussing about the (IIRC?) Atari 400 if you left it alone for too long.

Its nice to know that coming in to work without wearing shoes/smoking pot/etc at Atari in the late 70s-early 80s created some unique stuff. :lol:

You do remember correctly. In fact all my Atari 8 bit machines do this, my 400, 800, 600XL, 800XL's, 65XE and XEGS. Very simple colour cycling is all it is, but very effective against screen burn in on CRTs.

I don't know of any other machines of that era that did this. It also works in some games, for example Star Raiders II.

The original 2600 does a similar thing if you leave it just powered on with a cart in (If the cart doesn't have an attract mode) The PLUS hardware does this too.

I think the shoeless/pot smoking/etc Atari crowd needed that freedom to create games that worked in tiny 2KB ROMs with just 128bytes of RAM to play with, I don't think it would have been possible otherwise :)

They must have had their minds blown once carts got bigger and included bank switching and even RAM.