Recent content by MartyGoldberg

Lizzy, honestly I don't understand what kind of research you did with this article. It's like you took every already disproven myth in passing and dumped it into this. Fist, unlike what the URL states, it was a New Mexico landfill not Arizona (and I'm aware the article itself states New Mexico...

Again, not accurate as far as the development and certainly not accurate as far as the released product. The one man programmer was a certain era of 2600 development, by the early 80s that included additional programmers and artists (Atari Inc. was the first company to start a graphics group to...

There seems to be some more basic myths being repeated here. What was being asked for was more than just a signature on a game, there were other costs involved as well (they felt they should be making more plus there was the issue of bonsues). And both parties were right as far as the credit...

Not sure where you got that idea, there were around 130 publishers world wide for the Atari 2600 alone. That doesn't include the six or so other consoles on the market and their third party publishers, plus all the video coin companies and the even larger amount of game publishers for computers...

ET literally had nothing to do with causing a crash, that's continually regurgitated on websites for some reason and it's a myth. The issues that caused Atari Inc.'s (and ultimately the industry they were 80% of) downfall were already hitting before ET was even in development. ET was more of a...

1) PONG was not the first commercial video game, not sure where that came from. If we're talking about arcade games then 1971's Computer Space was the first. If we're talking about consoles, the Magnavox Odyssey also predates the PONG arcade game (the idea of PONG came from the Odyssey's Tennis...

The Centipede and Asteroids coin-ops also had some hidden "easter egg" code in the form of embedded morse code to thwart other companies releasing knockoffs of the those arcade games. Basically whenever a company was taken to court, all Atari (and the original coder Ed Logg) had to do was show...

Robert, that's just not right. Adventure was not the first easter egg, just the first well known one. Several cartridges for the Fairchild Channel F (1976) had easter eggs, including the store demo cart, and Video Whizball. Likewise there were earlier east eggs than Adventure at Atari itself...

Seems you guys are a bit confused, this is just a brand now, not the original company. The original Atari (Atari Inc.) went under in '84. It's Consumer Division was sold to Jack Tramiel to start up Atari Corp., which was itself closed in '96. After that it purely became paper assets and a brand...

Well on the 2600, the cartridge port is the expansion port. It's the only way to expand the hardware of that system. It doesn't have to be a game cartridge to expand the system's ability, just fit in to the cartridge port. For example, they were also at work (with a 3rd party that had been hired...

Other than being removable, no. The ROM in ROM memory means "Read Only Memory." What's there is there, and is not rewriteable - no different than a program distributed on CD or DVD. What was also being discussed was some manufacturers also added RAM onto a cartridge, but that was RAM to be used...

What's the original quote on 4k from the article referring to? Certainly not the 2600? That only has 128 bytes of memory (RAM), not even one K. However, the 2600 is a non-bitmapped system, it works via building a single raster display line in real time for the television, and both the playfield...

Shamus, unfortunately I find that most people who point to the crash of '83 actually do so as a populist warning than any sort of familiarity with it, that Wikipedia link included. First, the crash started in 1982 and not in 1983. Starting with Atari's adjusted earnings report on December 7...

darksakul: No, they're not still around. This is Infogrames SA, which renamed itself Atari SA. They purchased the brand name and IP from Hasbro years ago.

Funnily, the glory days of Atari and the 2600 that everyone fondly remembers (1980-1984) occurred after he left Atari (December of '78) and because of the sale. Warner is the one who pumped cash and management in to it and brought about those days (and of course pumped so high until it burst...