Atarisoft : Arcade Collection SPECIAL 

Atarisoft really cared about the authenticity of their conversions and it showed 👏

I played most of these games on the Apple II, and most of them were great conversions : Moon Patrol, Jungle Hunt, Donkey Kong, Ms. Pacman, Defender, etc. Thanks for the video.

Great video. The one that intrigues me the most is that Track & Field came with a dedicated controller - I saw it advertised for mail order years later, but never got one myself.

Hi, good to see another one of your 15-30 min docos on c64 soft houses. These are probably my fav of all your programs. It’s so nice to hear the background story. Keep up the good work 😎

It blew my mind as a kiddo, I had a 7800, my older cousins had a ColecoVision Setup. I couldn't believe Atari made games for it, and it was Sneakie with its Gemini Expansion Mod for 2600 games lol

Pac-Man looks like a 1-to-1 port of the Atari 8-bit/5200 version of the game.

There is also an Atarisoft version of Mario Bros (the two player arcade game) that AFAIK circulated through piracy alone: I saw a comment from one of the programmers (i.e., not evidence that would hold up in court, as I can't verify who wrote the comment) affirming that it had been an abandoned version of the game, etc., consistent with the story you're setting out here.

Bizarrely, Atarisoft's VIC-20 port of Centipede is better than their C64 port. The C64 port is similar to the Atari 8 bit port, with tile aligned Centipede segments. But the VIC-20 port has sub-tile Centipede segment motion, as well as segments overlapping with background mushrooms (like the original arcade). What's even more bizarre, though, is that their Atari 5200 port of Centipede is completely different from their 400/800 port. I don't know what kind of technical wizardry they did with the 5200 port, because the mushroom field isn't even a multiple of 4 or 8 pixels aligned (they're 6 pixels wide). The Centipede motion is sub-tile and also matches the original arcade's motion where the segments would "turn a curve" in motion. I don't know what's going on, but whatever they did should have been possible on the 400/800 as well as probably the C64.

You know which AtariSoft conversion I liked which never officially came out was Mario Bros. I didn’t learn until decades later that it had been canned.

Thanks man. Always informative and fun. I always fire up Launchbox when your videos come on and reminisce.

Great video as always 👌

I had that Ms. Pac-Man cart for my C64. I was very please with it.

loved the rediscovered joust port from these guys - miles better than that horrible jouste thing from back in the day

Fun video. Thanks

Here is another monthly boost to help out.

Great video. I had the Ms. Pac-man cartridge. Hadn't used it for many years and when i tried it again it blew up my c64, oops. BTW when you mention the "video game crash" PLEASE point out it was the North America video game crash. Didn't affect anywhere else in the world.

Another great show👍 As always I'm blown away by the colors! Thanks for pointing out Joust. I wonder if it would be possible to reprogram Robotron to use both sticks on a C64...and maybe throw in some monsters from Wizard of Wor🤯

That was a real treat seeing all those Atarisoft conversions in one video, thank you! They really were generally excellent for their time. I do wonder if some of them work better on NTSC for speed and image ratio; take for example: Donkey Kong. Also I thought Mario Bros was an Atari(soft) game and maybe Crystal Castles but I guess it gets confusing with the publishing. 😅

Hi, did think of one thing to tell you a lot of these atarisoft conversions are tiny only 8k e.g. pacman or 16k dig dug (by memory). As back in old days you never saw game cartridges bigger than 16k.

My top three would have to be: 3. Moon Patrol, 2. Jungle Hunt, and 1. Ms. Pac-Man. The C64's original Pac-Man was really more of a port of the Atari XL/XE and 5200 versions than a straight arcade conversion. Atari were really limited by the 16k constraints of the Commodore's main cartridge formats. Joust is okay, but again it's more of a conversion of the XL/XE version. A fairly decent port, but the best version of Joust by far, even better than the arcade, is the 7800 version, which was made by GCC. The C64 version has some basic gameplay components disabled unless you play on the two highest difficulty levels. It's a little rough around the edges but it's still good to have it after all these years. As for Pac-Man, Galaxian, Dig Dug and Donkey Kong, we're fortunate to have newer, more complete options for each. I can't be sure, but it looks like you're showcasing all these games in PAL. A few of them, like Dig Dug, get slight speed bumps in NTSC.

Had battlezone Atarisoft cartridge- it was “just ok”- and yes competent but barebones 😢 as my only C64 cart

pac-man and ms. pac-man made me put my atari in the closet forever and adopt the c64 as my primary gaming machine up until the voodoo gfx cards were released.

It is a shame Jack didn't take software serious enough, he might have survived longer in the business.

Some great conversions, sadly for a short release period only.

Born in 1964 and was the 64th like... :)

You're very easy to make harsh comments about the graphics. Remember that these games came a few months after the actual release of the C64 and were written by 6502 Atari veterans. Check some other releases from around the same era to compare the quality. In my opinion the minimalistic graphics (which actually pretty much match the arcade ones) work to the advantage of the machine. Also the fact that they were all cartridge releases meant they were 16K games, so there wasn't much room for extra stuff.

I would have liked to have seen a comment on Mario Bros (non-released), Crystal Castles (2 different versions - first once official or rip-off?), DK Jr (the game that should have been, but only was a fake. I have the A8 cart.)