Atari Flashback

The Atari Flashback and Atari Flashback 2 are dedicated video game consoles marketed by Atari in the mid-2000s. They are preprogrammed with classic Atari 2600 and Atari 7800 console games from the 1970s and 1980s built in, and do not use cartridges.

Both systems are powered by an AC adapter (included), come with a pair of joystick controllers, and use standard composite video and monaural audio RCA plugs to connect to a television.

Though much smaller in size, the Atari Flashback 2 resembles the original Atari VCS console from 1977.

Atari Flashback

The Atari Flashback was released in 2004. The console resembled an Atari 7800 in appearance, and came with a pair of controllers which resembled those of the Atari 7800 but were slightly smaller. The system had twenty games built-in, all originally developed by Atari for the 2600 and 7800 game systems. The games which originally required analog paddle controllers were made to work with the included joysticks.

It was designed by Atari veteran Curt Vendel, whose company Legacy Engineering designs other home video game and video arcade products. Atari gave Legacy Engineering ten weeks to design the product, produce its games, and ready it for the 2004 holiday season. The Atari Flashback was based on "NES-on-a-chip" hardware, not resembling either of the Atari systems which the Flashback was supposed to represent. As a result, the games it contained were ports and differed in varying degrees from the original games, and therefore the Flashback was unpopular with some purists.

Included games

One game, Saboteur (originally designed by Howard Scott Warshaw), was advertised as "unreleased"; though never part of the Atari lineup, it was sold at the Philly Classic 5 convention in 2004.

Atari 2600

Adventure
Air-Sea Battle
Battlezone
Breakout
Canyon Bomber
Crystal Castles
Gravitar
Haunted House
Millipede
Saboteur
Sky Diver
Solaris
Sprintmaster
Warlords
Yars' Revenge

Atari 7800

Asteroids
Centipede
Desert Falcon
Charley Chuck's Food Fight
Planet Smashers

Atari Flashback 2

The Atari Flashback 2, the successor to the original Atari Flashback console, was released in 2005. It has forty Atari 2600 games built-in. A few of the included games are homebrews which were created by enthusiasts in recent years, and two of the games were originally published by Activision.

The appearance of the Atari Flashback 2 is reminiscent of the original Atari 2600 console from 1977. It is roughly two-thirds the size of the original, and much lighter in weight. The Flashback 2 console has five buttons (power, reset, left and right difficulty toggles, and select); on the back it has a color/black-and-white slider switch and a two ports for the included joysticks. The joysticks bear very close similarity to the original Atari joysticks from 1977, and are compatible and interchangeable with them. The Flashback 2 does not come with paddle controllers, but original paddle controllers can be connected to it and used with its paddle-based games.

Curt Vendel and Legacy Engineering returned to develop the Flashback 2. Unlike the original Flashback console, the Flashback 2 contains a single-chip version of circuitry designed by Vendel; it is a reproduction of the original ciruitry in that of the original Atari 2600. Therefore, the Atari Flashback 2 runs games just as they ran on an original console. The Atari Flashback 2 project was codenamed "Michele", after Vendel's wife. Her name is printed on the motherboard.

Marty Goldberg (of ClassicGaming.Com, Atari Gaming Headquarters and the Midwest Gaming Classic) was brought on board to Legacy Engineering as a technical writer to develop the content for the packed in manual and full design of the online manual. Because of changes in game content during the development and problems with the graphic design company keeping edit revisions straight, the manual which comes with the Flashback 2 has several errors in it including typos. For example, contrary to the manual there is no two-player mode in Centipede, and there is no connected-ship gameplay in Space Duel. Likewise in the description of Save Mary: "Barnaby just blew up the nearby damn." appears.

Included games

The available games are arranged into four categories selectable from an on-screen menu. Once a game is selected, the only way back to the menu is to use the power button to turn the console off and on again.

The games listed below as hacks used other games' code as a starting point and modified their gameplay or appearance. Homebrews were written from scratch by Atari fans in the 1990s and 2000s. Unreleased prototypes are games which were developed by Atari in the 1970s and 1980s but never sold to consumers; some of these games may have bugs or be incomplete. A few of the games listed are new and exclusive to the Flashback 2.

Adventure Territory

Adventure
Adventure II (a hack of Adventure)
Haunted House
Return To Haunted House (a hack of Haunted House)
Secret Quest
Wizard (unreleased prototype)

Arcade Favorites

Arcade Asteroids (a hack of Asteroids with the sprites changed to be outlines)
Arcade Pong (exclusive to the Flashback 2, a version of Pong which can use paddle controllers if attached)
Asteroids Deluxe (exclusive to the Flashback 2)
Battlezone
Centipede
Lunar Lander (exclusive to the Flashback 2)
Millipede
Missile Command
Space Duel (exclusive to the Flashback 2)

Skill and Action Zone

3D Tic-Tac-Toe
Aquaventure (unreleased prototype)
Atari Climber (homebrew, released in 2004 as "Climber 5")
Combat
Combat 2 (unreleased prototype)
Dodge 'Em
Fatal Run
Frog Pond (unreleased prototype)
Hangman
Human Cannonball
Maze Craze
Off The Wall
Outlaw
Pitfall! (originally released by Activision)
Radar Lock
River Raid (originally released by Activision)
Save Mary (unreleased prototype)
Video Checkers
Video Chess

Space Station

Caverns Of Mars (exclusive to the Flashback 2)
Quadrun (originally sold only by mail order through the Atari fan club)
Saboteur (unreleased prototype)
Space War
Yars' Return (exclusive to the Flashback 2)
Yars' Revenge

Paddle Games

The console also includes two hidden titles which require the use of paddle controllers. The Flashback 2 does not come with paddle controllers, so these games cannot be played unless the user has an original set of Atari 2600 paddle controllers. To access the hidden paddle game menu, the user must press up on the joystick 1 time, pull down 9 times, push up 7 times, and pull down 2 times. (This represents the year 1972, in which Pong first appeared). The code must be entered steadily and without pauses (enter it too quickly and it won't work).
Super Breakout
Warlords

Test screens

Controller test screens can be accessed by holding down the select and reset buttons while pressing the power button to turn on the console. With the color/black-and-white switch set to 'color', the joystick test screen will appear; with it set to black-and-white, the paddle test screen will appear. These test screens allow a gamer to test controller inputs as well as the console's colors and sounds.

Revisions

There have so far been two revisions of the Atari Flashback 2.

Rev. A has a problem with the synthesized voice in Quadrun not working due to a problem with the emulation of the original cartridge's voice chip (when play begins, the game should speak "Quadrun" three times). It also contains a prototype version of Millipede programmed by General Computer Corporation [1]; this version has problems with the display losing vertical hold and appearing to "roll", making the game unplayable.

Rev. B fixes the voice synthesis in Quadrun and contains the Atari version of Millipede.

A few of the included games, such as Lunar Lander, exhibit some flicker. This is due to limitations in the original Atari hardware, and are not flaws in the Flashback 2.

Adding a cartridge port

While the original Atari 2600 consoles had a cartridge slot, the Atari Flashback 2 does not include one. However, a hobbyist can easily modify a Flashback 2 to use Atari 2600 cartridges, and can even install a switch across certain points of the motherboard so that the console can be easily set to play the forty built-in games again. The motherboard is printed with several solder points and a guide to what contact points associate with which cartridge pinouts. Complete details regarding the cartridge modification can be found at "http://www.atarimuseum.com/fb2hacks/", a site set up by Curt Vendel.

External links

*Atari Flashback on Atari.com
*Atari Flashback 2 on Atari.com
*Atari Flashback 2 online manual: HTML, PDF
*Unabridged Return to Haunted House Game Manual: PDF (640.73k)
*Flashback 2 FAQ
*Save Mary - How to play: AtariProtos.com, 2600 High Score Club