Best Atari 8bit games?

[Gryzor]

So, with my MiST FPGA on its way back from repairs, and with the new 8-bit core for it, I'd like to ask: what should I play? Never had or was into the 8-bit Ataris, hope I can change this!

[beaker]

Star Raiders
Rainbow Walker
Rescue on Fractalus
The Eidolon
Yoomp

[redbox]

So, with my MiST FPGA on its way back from repairs

How did it break?

[Gryzor]

Oh.. USB connector fell off It appears it was not correctly soldered at factory. Lotharek took it back and fixed it at no cost, but I've missed it!

[MacDeath]

if I remember, they really had issues for a long time to offer better than a 4colours mode0 on those machines...

[BluesBrothers]

Beer Belly Burt was good on Atari, Alley Cat I thought was lots of fun too.

Can't think of the top of my noggin what Atari exclusives where up there but if I remember I'll let you know. Got alot of love for the Atari but tape loading times were really bad, though pack a load of newfangled gismos in there now and it's a really lovely platform

[Bryce]

Attack of the Mutant Camels - Jeff Minter.

Bryce.

[robcfg]

There's also new games for the Atari 8-bit computers, specially from Poland.


It's worth to get a memory expansion to be able to play Crownland, for example:

[SyX]

You are going to love these machines, Gryzor, the experience is so different to the CPC and the a machine complement very well to the CPC.

For me is a perfect mix of...

Prehistoric games as Super Breakout, Star Raiders (both from 1979... yes, the machine is from the end of 70s), Beyond Castle of Wolfstein, The Lone Rider (a super simple game, very early 80s, but something not typical in the CPC catalog, because were old ideas when the CPC appeared), ...

Old CPC classics from the 80s, and except in the case of Donkey Kong (at least for me), the Atari versions are better as Rescue on Fractalus (and the rest of early games of Lucasfilm, Ataris were the base machine for them), Bruce Lee, Bounty Bob Strikes Back!,  Jet Boot Jack, International Karate, Arkanoid (the graphics can not be better, but being able to use paddles makes all the difference ), ...

Nice magazine/basic games as Dandy (this game was the father of Gauntlet and aside of using "ascii graphics", it's a superfun game when you play with more people, i have lost a lot of evenings playing with with my nephew and my cousin, jejeje).

Games never ported to CPC as Black Lamp (and better play to a mode 0 friendly than the horrible black and yellow speccy version ), Dropzone (another great classic that the CPC lacks), MULE (other one), Encounter (and other), Pole Position (Come on! Why the CPC had not this arcade classic???, jejeje), Conan (the last datasoft game using the same engine that Bruce Lee, Goonies and Zorro), Tiger Attack (a nice mode 0 clone of Flying Shark), Zone Ranger (Time Pilot - Bosconian clone), Mirax Force (a nice Uridium mode 0 clone), Cavernia (a nice mode 0 platform game,yes i´m a nice person that likes nice games xDDD), ...

And the new generation of games, after c64 (high quality with a lot of genres: alternative indie games, old consoles conversions, arcades, puzzles, ...) and zx (thanks east europe speccy people for the amazing games in the Retro Games Battle 2014 and all those original and different games for zx, instead of those borings 16x16 sprites tedious and unoriginal platform games) scenes is the most active. A few of my favourites from the last years are Jetboy (a jetpac conversion), Chopin 2010 (a n* puzzle, jejeje), Dr. Mario (another conversion), Ridiculous Reality, Yoomp! and Assembloids XE (i like this version more than the c64 and the kind of game perfect for a minicompo).



And demos, there is a lot of nice demos for this machine, if you love the "amiga poland style", then this is your scene machine

You can find the news about new games published in the site of fandal and if you want to get nice disc compacts with games (similar to Atari ST) go to Homesoft (but be nice downloading too much from there).

[Gryzor]

Hey, thanks for the suggestions, guys! Been very busy this past week so I didn't even turn MiST on (heck, haven't been on here much either), but I'll try to load all of the suggestions this week


@Robcfg: no worries, the A8 core supports 4MB - though compatibility isn't 1005 yet. I'll give that one a try though, looks very nice!


@SyX: thanks for the great write-up mate. Also, I did discover Homesoft's page, and actually leeched the whole archive. I don't usually do that, TBH, but it's kind of a dick move to force you to download 440 separate packages that amount to a mere 30+MB. I uploaded the whole archive to my Rapidgator account, if anyone wants it.

[SyX]

@SyX: thanks for the great write-up mate. Also, I did discover Homesoft's page, and actually leeched the whole archive. I don't usually do that, TBH, but it's kind of a dick move to force you to download 440 separate packages that amount to a mere 30+MB. I uploaded the whole archive to my Rapidgator account, if anyone wants it.

I did the same when i got my sio2sd, and yes, i think is absurd those days not put a full package in dropbox or some similar cloud storage, but i imagine that Homesoft must have a reason for that...

[Gryzor]

Yeah, thought so too, but the fact that he didn't say anything plus the design that looks pretty dated suggested that it was just an old page... could be mistaken, though. had he said something, in any case, I wouldn't have leeched it.

[SyX]

The funny thing is that is not an old page, at contrary, this person make a new disc compact practically every month, making one of the best and easy ways of testing the new games.

[robcfg]

One rapidgator link for me, please! 

[Bryce]

One rapidgator link for me, please! 

For me too

Bryce.

[BluesBrothers]

This doesn't sound good

rapidgator - get the latest news at TorrentFreak

[Gryzor]

The funny thing is that is not an old page, at contrary, this person make a new disc compact practically every month, making one of the best and easy ways of testing the new games.

Huh, imagine that. Then one *really* wonders why he offers the files the way he does. It took me all of a minute to create a list in Excel and pass it over to jDownloader - contrast that to how much time and effort it would take to get all 440 files individually...


@Robcfg,Bryce: here ya go, it doesn't need an account, but if you run into any issues let me know and I'll upload it to the wiki or something for you: Download file Atari_XL_disk_menus.rar


@BluesBrothers: what about it? The only recent article is the one about Google, but it doesn't really matter...

[Bryce]

The download link worked fine for me.. but the rar file is corrupt.

Bryce.

[Gryzor]

Just downloaded it twice, and it worked both times... Might be a chance it needs Winrar 5 to decompress though.

[Bryce]

No idea what version of winrar I have, but I definitely can't open it

Ok. I have 4.0. Why can't you just use Winzip like everyone else ?

Bryce.

[Gryzor]

Erm... Help->About?


I'm reupping a zip. God, back to 1995

[Bryce]

At least Winzip doesn't break compatibility when the version changes (Is that just a 90's thing). I mean it's not like they've just discovered some way to crunch the data even smaller, there's no reason it shouldn't be compatible.

Bryce.

[Gryzor]

Actually RAR5 does support better compression and also better encryption. Lamentable to break compatibility, if you ask me, but it's not that hard to upgrade as if you have to log onto some BBS and start looking for it

[Bryce]

Officially installed full version on company PC. Not something I can upgrade.

Bryce.

[Gryzor]

That's another story And if it was indeed a RAR5 archive then my bad, must have done it by mistake, as I never choose that except for my personal backups... Sit tight, still uploading (dammit!)