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Saturday, May 27, 2023

Atari 400 Rising

Sylvia and I spent some time cleaning up the garage this weekend, and in the process I found the old Woods family Atari 400 plus most of our cartridges for the system and a few manuals. At least three of the best games--Pac-Man, Tennis, and most tragic of all, Star Raiders--are missing. 

None of our joysticks, either Atari branded or third party, survived. I guess we were pretty hard on them. I don't think we ever had paddle controllers, and we threw away all the peripherals a few years ago, after they stopped working. 

But as far as I know, the computer itself still operates--at least, it did the last time we tested it, which was, to be fair, at least a decade ago now. 

I also found an Intellivision Space Armada cartridge in the box. That's weird, because we never owned an Intellivision, and I don't think any of my friends or Sean's ever brought an Intellivision over to our house. 

I'm tempted to find some joysticks and hook this up to the TV, but I'd have to find some kind of converter to make that possible; the inputs the Atari used don't exist on most modern television sets. 

3 comments:

Sean Woods said...

We absolutely had paddles. For Super Breakout (which is also missing).

Earl J. Woods said...

Super Breakout is there, thank goodness! (Brown cartridge, middle of the top row.) But thanks for the reminder that we had paddle controls!

Sean Woods said...

Oops, ha ha!