One of the earliest computer games to come to the home is the Atari VCS game console. Long before Nintendo, IBM or Apple came to the scene, Atari was racking in millions.
Now, nostalgic fans can relive the good ole days without fear of their consoles breaking down or needing repairs.
Although there was a ready supply of original ROMs (445 at my last count)
for a long time, programmers were unable to write a program fast enough to run these ROMs.
Activision took the lead in producing 3 Atari action pak series, using the originial ROMs. By subsituting some of the ROMs with these emulators, some of the games actually work!
Then came a slew of almost-playable emulators. The VCS was one of these that runs quite a few ROMs in silent mode. The A26, a fully-assembly language written emulator was the first to offer sound and speed.
It is still the only emulator that runs the two all-time favorites - Breakout and Super Breakout with keyboard controls. Just the thing for a notebook.
The best emulator for the Atari is written by John Dullea which runs the most ROMs with great sound.
The great attaction with the Atari is the classic games like Bezerk, Circus and Pitfall. Personally, I am impressed with the quality of the programs like Frogger, Defender and Galaxian.
Try chasing Atari links with internet search engines and relive yesterday's arcade today!
A book, "Ken Uston's Guide to Buying and Beating the Home Video Games" by Signet Press (may be out of print) is a useful resource. Here
I find not only the rules, functions and features of the game but useful tips. I discovered that
there is a one-player mode (2) for Basketball; a kid's mode (4) for Defender which I badly needed and
hundreds (count 'em) of variations for Space Invaders, Breakout etc.