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AtariAge and Atari

forums.atariage.com

1–10 of 72 posts

Re: AtariAge and Atari

#3
I hope someone archives the site, because fan sites with this kind of history get butchered when a commercial interest has a change of mgmt, and companies have a shorter lifespan than the fan interest. Good on the site operating turning it into some income though.

Re: AtariAge and Atari

#5
post #2

It looks like all the game ROMs now 404. Does that have anything to do with being acquired by Atari?

Probably. A friend of mine who is a big user of atariage.com told me they'd been “cleaning” a number of things up for months which all makes sense now ahead of the acquisition.

Fact is if anyone wants Atari ROMs they are massively easy to find online, though. Heck, you can even find them on archive.org at this point.

Re: AtariAge and Atari

#6
post #2

It looks like all the game ROMs now 404. Does that have anything to do with being acquired by Atari?

Don't think so. Quick check on the wayback machine shows it has been showing a 404 since June 2019. May 2019 snapshot had a live page [0]

[0]. https://web.archive.org/web/20190503205052/http://atariage.c...

Re: AtariAge and Atari

#7

Wow. Time to bring my 130xe out of storage and see if it boots...

Get a FujiNET for it.

I bought one of these. About $60.

The FujiNET is amazing. It works via the standard SIO subsystem provided by the Atari system OS ROM. Device independent I/O.

D: DISK P: PRINTER ETC...

Now has N: for network.

This device makes Atari Basic Internet capable. People have written 10 line programs to do all sorts of Internet tasks. Multi player online games are possible and have been done.

There are app servers hosting disk images.

I got mine, connected it to my home wi-fi and was playing Zork over the internet in about 5 minutes.

It has an SD card slot for local storage and the onboard CPU has all sorts of capabilities aimed at making the Internet useful to existing Atari software and permit easy new development.

That device is a lot of fun and replaces having a disk drive and some sort of modem or serial interface to work online.

Re: AtariAge and Atari

#8
Wow.

AtariAge Forums were a great resource for gathering all things of retro computing, some of which ended up contributing to collections such as BitSavers and Trailing Edge.

It's where I initially discovered wonderful work by volunteers to create an archive of scanned BYTE magazines:

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/167235-byte-magazine/

Now there are a number of sites that have BYTE collections, and the Internet Archive is a natural place for them. But the Internet Archive is constantly attacked by copyright holders, and it's quite possible it could be taken down at some point in the future.

So AtariAge added robustness to the collective Internet as an archive. I don't expect that to continue, now that it has been acquired.

Re: AtariAge and Atari

#9
post #7

Wow. Time to bring my 130xe out of storage and see if it boots...

Get a FujiNET for it. I bought one of these. About $60. The FujiNET is amazing. It works via the standard SIO subsystem provided by the Atari system OS ROM. Device independent I/O. D: DISK P: PRINTER ETC... Now has N: for network. This device makes Atari Basic Internet capable. People have written 10 line programs to do all sorts of Internet tasks. Multi player online games are possible and have been done. There are…

As a Commodore person, FujiNet (and thus SIO) is one of the things that I envy about Atari. https://np.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/10cktls...>

Re: AtariAge and Atari

#10
How many different Atari corporations have existed during the atari-age forum's lifespan?

for any other brand this would be exciting news to see the original developers get invested in homebrews, but in atari's case i just see this as yet another desperate attempt by whoever's in charge at this point to try to find a way to monetize a brand name which is both extremely iconic and entirely lacking in products, services and customers.

Last I checked they were trying to launch a chain of hotels which would cater to game conventions and e-sports events, guess that one didn't pan out. Kinda curious if the problem was launching during COVID, or just having a fundamentally dumb idea.

It just seem like this brand gets passed around a lot between investors/VCs because it seems like the name recognition alone should make it a goldmine and yet it doesn't. I'm actually surprised Elon didn't buy it to be the new brandname for Twitter in lieu of X.

Anyways, if the corporation that currently calls itself "Atari" is going to get in the business of distributing "official" carts of homebrews for classic Atari products I think that's really neat and it might actually be viable as a small business as long as they keep their ambitions in check and don't try to compete with the likes of Nintendo[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision_Amico

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