The Museum's Curt Vendel says the project has a practical application beyond the living history factor. "What is the potential of this?" he said to Atari Age. "Doing the chips in smaller SMT packaging, and potentially bringing back to life some of the later CMOS designs of combo chips which could lead to a SoC - System on a Chip.

"The future just got a little brighter in terms of preserving and continuing the legacy of Atari's custom IC chips," he added.

The more technically inclined can follow a deeper discussion here. The project involves the TIA, used in the Atari 2600; the GTIA, used in the 5200 and the 8-bit line (the Atari 400 and 800) and the MARIA (used in the Atari 7800).

Atari Chips Reconstructed [GameSetWatch]

Hack-a-Day says the console has "somewhere around 1200 ROMs" on an SD card inside the case. With the three switches on the front, the user can cycle through them and then flash the title over to the EEPROM inside. The display's size is 2x16.

Atari 2600 Mod Features LCD Selector [The Bits, Bytes, Pixels and Sprites]

"The Music Machine" was based on a line of other products, including albums - back when they were, in fact, albums. The seller indicated his elderly mother owned a Christian bookstore, and, while going through her things, came across the game. It puts a real twist on the cliché of your mom chucking out a rare baseball card or comic book you later find out is worth thousands. I

If the guy is taking care of his mom, and it sounds like it, then it sounds like the dough will be put to good use. Or he could be spending it all on hookers and cocaine, who am I to make judgments of people I've never met? C'mon, I'm trying to be a nice guy here.

Sealed Atari Game Sells for Over $5,000 [Hot Blooded Gaming]

Yes, the Toys R Us trade-in program differs from many of their competition in that there is no cut-off point when a game is too old to be traded in. As long as the customer supplies the original game in the original packaging, they can exchange their games for store credit good at Toys R Us and Babies R Us stores, along with the corresponding online outlets.

"The video game trade-in program is another way we're providing customers with additional value when they visit our stores," said Bill Lee, Vice President, Divisional Merchandise Manager, Toys"R"Us, U.S. "This program is designed to make the exchange process completely hassle-free for customers by accepting games from even the oldest systems, including the original Atari 2600 and 32-bit Sega Genesis."

Outside of the odd vintage video game shop and online outlets like eBay, there really aren't many places you can take your old Intellivision, NES, or Sega Genesis games for store credit. Depending on the reaction to the program, this could make the Toys R Us used video game section a very interesting place to shop, with games we've not seen in ages popping up on store shelves.

As if I needed more of an excuse to visit Toys R Us.

Update: Just got a message from a Toys R Us representative explaining that the games will not be going up for resell in Toys R Us stores. "The games will be collected by a third party that will then resell the games to retailers across the country."

That's a missed opportunity right there.

Giant Bomb community member buzz_clik threw theses screens together in lieu of an actual game after reading a story about the Rutgers University robot that conquered the Atari 2600 classic game. It would have been cooler to have an actual flash game, of course, but what buzz_clik lacks in programing know-how, he (or she) makes up for in Photoshop skills.

And I can't argue with buzz_clik's logic on this — the games do seem to be a match made in heaven. Or, post apocalyptic brown heaven as the case may be.

Why not make a game that combines Pitfall! and Fallout ? They're both open-world games, with our hero braving a harsh landscape looking for stuff to pocket. They both have portions that take place underground. Both games have scorpions, as any good game should. Hell, there's even an expansion for Fallout 3 called The Pitt!

PitFallout! [Giant Bomb]

The maker, Nilesz, is running a win-a-wallet contest over on his site, which of course gives you the info on how to order one. From his blog, it sounds like he does take mail-in requests, but you need to make sure you're sending him something usable first. It'd be bitchin' if he could do the old Imagic cases, but the 14 he does offer - including Haunted House, Circus Atari and everyone's favorite, E.T. - are slick enough.

The Atari Wallet [Nilesz, via Boing Boing]

"We are treating game openings like movie openings if they're cool," he told Kotaku. "Video games are interesting, I think it's something a lot of people do now.

"It's entertaining and it gets your mind off things like my life sucks, or I have to pay the bills. It's almost like meditation for me."

And Fallon's not just tapping into a hobby that he thinks he viewers might find interesting, he's a life-long gamer himself.

"I'm 34, so I think I grew up in that generation where video games were always a part of my life," he said. "Getting an Atari 2600 was a huge deal for me, I think I had that before I had cable."

The next big thing for Fallon was Nintendo and Super Mario Bros. an experience that made him a stalwart fan of Nintendo and their consoles. Nowadays he owns all of the gaming systems, including a modded PSP that he rarely touches and an iPhone, but rarely has the time to play on them.

He says that they have all of the consoles at the studio, but people rarely have the time to use them and when he's home he tends to spend his down time with his wife.

Fallon says he just landed a copy of Ghostbusters, but asked me how it was because he hadn't had a chance yet to check it out. (I haven't either.)

Growing up, Fallon said he never really stopped playing games. When he was at Saturday Night Live he was one of the people who helped get pieces on video gaming into the weekly show.

"I shared my office with Horatio (Sanz) and we had an Xbox," he said. "You're up so late at Saturday Night Live, it's kind of like a dorm vibe."

And out of that came several funny skits.

On Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, the crew doesn't really have time to play games, but Fallon still thinks incorporating gaming into the show is important.

Fallon played Punch Out!!! on the Wii on his show earlier in the year, and last week sent a correspondent to E3, SNL's Jason Sudeikis. Tonight he will have Microsoft's Kudo Tsunoda on to talk about Project Natal, something Fallon had heard about but hasn't seen.

He said he didn't want to know much about the system before tonight's show so that he could see what someone new to the idea can do with it.

And Fallon isn't gun shy about having game developers and producers on his show either. He recently invited Double Fine's Tim Schafer to come on the show with Jack Black to talk about their collaboration on Brutal Legend.

That flies in the face of the argument that game developers may not be as entertaining on a talk show as a musician or an actor.

"I think it's all about how interested you are in talking to these people," Fallon said. "There are some really famous celebrities out there that aren't that exciting.

Tsunoda says he happy to see video games getting so much time on Fallon's show.

"I am really excited to be able to show him the Project Natal technology and how it works," Tsunoda told Kotaku. "We have been working on this project for so long in secret, it's awesome to finally be able to show it off. Hopefully, we can bring that same spirit of fun we had during E3 to the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon show."

And what about showing the people at home what the bottom of an avatar's shoe looks like?

"That was something totally improvised," Tsunoda said. "I'm not even sure what possessed me to do that at the time. I'm sure something just as fun will happen tonight on the show."

You can catch Fallon and Tsunoda on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on NBC tonight.

Full-time thinking man and part-time Kotaku Guest Editor Ian Bogost has asked some kids at Georgia Tech to come up with an emulator that can not only recreate an old game on a new platform, but recreate how it actually looked back in its day.

For example, the Atari 2600 was designed to run on 1970s TV sets. Big, clunky, cathode ray TV sets, on which a pixel looked a lot different than it does a crystal-clear monitor or HD TV set. So the GT computer science students have created some tweaks for the popular Stella emulator, which are able to recreate the way a game would have looked on a dusty, wood-panelled television set.

The results are, for this misty-eyed nostalgic, wonderful. Bogost says talks are currently underway to have these tweaks incorporated into Stella's release builds, so hopefully they'll be made available to the public soon.

A Television Simulator [Ian Bogost]

When I went on my hunt for this list, I needed a theme, so I settled on "Easter Eggs I have actually observed." Having missed most of gaming in the 1990s thanks to work, college, and not owning a PC - and because you know about all the cool recent Easter eggs - we'll have to reach way back to antiquity.

Of course, commenters are invited to share with us the oldest Easter egg you can recall finding. Or just any old cool Easter egg you remember, video game or otherwise. In fact, the coolest Easter egg I can recall is the one my brother and I painted to look like Jesse Helms back in 1984. Had glasses and everything. Then Fletch smashed him against a tree.

Where was I? Oh yeah, old Easter eggs.

Smurfette Topless (Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle, Colecovision)
Yes, Smurfette porn long, long predates the discovery of Rule 34. This was a redraw glitch available on the final screen of Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle (in which Gargamel makes no appearance.) If you walked off the screen to the preceding one, then back very quickly, the slow redraw would leave Smurfette topless. The topless Smurfette Easter egg - with the false urban myth that she remained topless and would slap the Smurf out of your Smurf - was all the rage in fifth grade. I wouldn't discover it until I bought a ColecoVision off of a seller on Usenet (yes, really) my senior year of college.

RF (Missile Command, Atari 2600) Warren Robinette's secret room in Adventure is probably the most notorious Atari 2600 Easter egg. This one is a close second. I forget where I first heard how to do this, but it increased my neighborhood cred a thousandfold when it went off, as described, the first time. Select difficulty 13, and fire off all of your missiles without scoring any points. At the end of the game, the initials of the programmer, RF, pop up from the ruins of the rightmost city. The coder's name? Rob Fulop, who also wrote "Demon Attack" for Imagic, and was Billboard Magazine's 1983 Programmer of the Year.

"FEEL DESTRUCTIVE "(Pirate Cove, VIC-20) Pirate Cove was a cartridge text adventure for the Commodore VIC-20, and one of the first pieces of software Dad bought me and my brother for our first ever computer. Pirate Cove's command line was brutally unsophisticated. Two words at most, verb and object (sentence diagrammers, the subject was always implied to be "you.") For a nine year old trying to figure out how to get past the goddamn crocodiles, without any visual assistance, it was hard to imagine any solution other than "KILL CROC." But commanding the game to KILL anything brought up this peace-love-dope reply: "I'm sorry, I can't do that. I don't feel destructive." You know where this is headed; I typed FEEL DESTRUCTIVE. Came the reply: "OK, POOF! The game is destroyed!" And Dad nearly herniated himself laughing at me.

HSWWSH (Yars' Revenge, Atari 2600) Another less-publicized set of initials. These are for programmer Howard Scott Warshaw. You had to wait for the Qotile to go into swirl mode, then hit it in mid-flight with the cannon. During the explosion animation, a black line would appear in the midst of the radioactive cloud. Hovering over it brought up the initials and ended the game.

Ghostbusters Scam (Ghostbusters, Commodore 64)In Activision's original Ghostbusters game, you earned money from mundane ghost-busting missions to buy equipment and vehicle upgrades. You started the game with a pitiful sum, barely enough to buy the Ecto-mobile. But in the new game screen, where you create a "bank account" to start the game, punching in "BELLIN ADAM" - for programmer Adam Bellin - and the number 12345 got $954,000 dumped in your account. Then you could go out and buy the Porsche, the mobile ghost detention unit, and every other high dollar gadget you needed.

Indiana Jones and the Extra-Terrestrial (E.T., Atari 2600) Howard Scott Warshaw was so proud of his role in the cartridge that would destroy Atari (the first time) that he upped the self-referential Easter eggs to two: the pieces of the phone were his initials, and there was another way to get the letters up on the screen. You could also summon other Steven Spielberg IP. After collecting all the phone pieces and giving Elliot seven pieces of candy, reviving the flower turned it into a Yar. Doing it a second time changed the flower into Indiana Jones, as represented in the 2600 Raiders of the Lost Ark game. Doing it a third time brought up Warshaw's initials beside the score, so you knew whom to credit blame for this masterpiece.

As it's called a "1981 Atari Ring", I'm guessing it's from an Atari 2600. Regardless, it looks great, especially since - if weddings aren't your thing - it'll leave one hell of an Atari-shaped dent in the faces of your enemies.

1981 Atari Ring [Boing-Boing]

Racing the Beam sets up the Atari Video Computer System (later 2600) as a console that profoundly shaped game design because its limitations forced programmers to come up with new efficiencies and tricks to deliver more complex games. The book also points out that it was an unusually long-lived platform - going into 1992 - despite its lightweight computing power.

The VCS' big setback, according to the book, is that the console had a tiny 128 bytes (yes bytes) of RAM, which could not accommodate a frame buffer - in other words the portion of RAM that stores the image data for each successive screen displayed by the game. So VCS programmers had to generate graphics purely in real time. For those who complain about how difficult it is to program for the PlayStation 3, this is the equivalent of "In my day, I walked six miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways."

By "racing the beam," programmers came up with a few tricks. The information space inside three blank spots that the electron gun didn't have to render was rededicated to things like joystick inputs, scoring and other processes. In some cases they shrank the playing screen more to give themselves more programming space. Pitfall!, one of the deepest games of its generation, made use of this.

Further, the VCS could only display two sprites on the screen at any given moment. How they compensated for that is a technical challenge that I can't intelligently describe. But suffice to say, in Pac-Man - a disappointing port partially blamed for the early 1980s video game crash - every time you ate a dot, the game redrew the screen. This manic redrawing accounted for the ghosts' flicker, which, of course, was justified because THEY GHOSTS after all.

The book's authors, Nick Monfort and Ian Bogost, say that arcade ports to the 2600 lay the foundation for future practices in bringing arcade games home. Says Bogost:

"The porting of arcade games to home systems was first really worked through on the VCS. It was because of this VCS development that developers were able to figure out what to try to carry over and what to leave behind, and how to adapt the arcade experience for more limited consoles that would be played at home."

The authors say Racing the Beam is the first in a series of "platform studies" that will probe how gaming platforms affect how games are created.

Racing the Beam: How Atari 2600's Crazy Hardware Changed Game Design [Wired]

Huh. I vaguely remember that library of games. Tooling around teh Google, lo and behold, there's video (below) of pre-mushmouth Madden calling the epic Tony Sarkis vs. Ray Johnson showdown — yeah I don't remember it either — in Wizard of Wor on the 2600. Madden's commentary lacks the signature boom, bam, here's-a-guy, and telestrator pee-pees. But still, you always leave him feeling you learned something about the game, you know? For the record, Ray wins.

Hey I got one: What does Ostia have in common with Wizard of Wor? Both are ancient ports! Get it? Get it?!

Don't like the pun? Suck it! But remember, that money back offer on Wizard of Wor expires in two weeks ... from 26 years ago.

20 Awesome Vintage Video Game Ads [Unreality]

Okay, so perhaps Atari 2600 lamps aren't all that readily available in the first place, but that surely doesn't steal away any of the awesome from this piece. Created by Instructibles.com user Seamster, the lamp functions as both a giant, non-working replica of an Atari 2600 joystick on it's own, but take off the top, screw in a light bulb, add a box art-covered lampshade and hit the big red button - yes, the button is functional - and you have the fanciest lighting solution a gamer could ask for.

Hit the link for instructions on how you can go about hurting yourself while trying to replicate what Seamster did.

Giant Atari Joystick Lamp [Instructibles.com - Thanks Tony!]

Steve also explains how he ended up with a cameo in "Four Christmases" (as "Jim", the husband-who-never-talks, playing Donkey Kong on the Virtual Console).

Steve Wiebe explains why he was playing Stampede:



















Wiebe on how he got his film cameo.

















Also, just noticed his birthday is today, too. So, happy birthday Steve! May your cake taste just as sweet as the one on the elevator level because, of course, baked goods strewn about a construction site are the best.

Listen to Owen Good and Steve Wiebe on your iPod or Zune!
Right click and save link as to download.
Subscribe to our Kotaku Video podcast on iTunes and the Zune Marketplace.

I’m not sure why People Magazine is even celebrating the 80s in the first weeks of 2009, but if they’re going to trumpet everything that ever mattered between 1980 and 1989, why isn’t the NES on the there? According to this exhaustively researched article by GamesRadar, the NES sold way better than the Atari 2600.

In fact, aside from a joke about the 2600 being the son of Pong, there’s no mention of video games in the 80s at all. Shame on you, People!

People Magazine’s “Celebrate the ‘80s!” special issue is on shelves now.

P.S. I think People actually meant to call out the Atari 2600 Junior. The original 2600 came out in 1977 and therefore hardly deserves to share page space with the Rubik’s Cube and a Cabbage Patch Kid.

Foldskool Heroes [Marshall Alexander]

While not exactly sexy, it is a fitted an Atari 2600 emulator into a SEGA Game Gear shell. What it lacks in slick good looks, the modder makes up in functionality. It's possible to load actual 2600 cartridges in the portable's back slot. Dubbed the "Atari Gear 2600," the handheld can go for 7-8 hours on AA batteries. Looks aren't everything!

Oh, and the guy who made this? His name is Chris Koopa. And he should really should be doing Nintendo mods, not Atari and not SEGA ones.

Atari Gear [CHRIS KOOPA via Ben Heck via technabob via Gizmodo]

While maybe not up to the spec laid out by Blizz and apparently not playable on a proper Atari 2600 emulator as some other recent demakes were, The Molten Core is playable and visually more authentic than previous attempts to make this joke serious.

The Windows-only download is a mere 2MB and, according to its author, offers about 20 minutes of gameplay. I've yet to walk to the Windows box to try it out myself, so downloaders beware.

The Molten Core [Gamer's University via Something Awful Forums]

Last night, while researching my iPhone gaming gift guide story, I stumbled across an iPhone adaptation of Atari classic Adventure, aka Keep that F-ing Duck Away From Me!

The game is a faithful copy of the original Atari 2600 title, complete with no music, annoying mazes and duck-faced dragons. It even has those surprise sound effects when the duck, I mean dragon, surprises you.

Instead of relying on tapping or tracing to play the game, you use the iPhone's tilt controls, which works surprisingly well. In fact, I've been enjoying this version of Adventure almost as much as I enjoyed the original back when I was nine. Though that might say more about me than the game.

Did I mention it's free? Yeah, if you have an iPhone or Touch you need to go get this, stat!

Atari Modern Classics [The -Minus World - Thanks Brian!]