@“exodus”#p113592 according to that website, it makes for stunning wall decor. They use stunning twice!
@“tomjonjon”#p113615 well now I'm stunned!
@“exodus”#p113592 so weird. Even the choice of ‘games’ is strange. They also have Black Widow and Gravitar.
https://atari.com/collections/reproduction-pcbs
my dad just picked up a bit of a haul
It’s all working and one’s been modded for different memory configurations and one’s got an IBM MSdos emulator hardware upgrade.
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I’ve been doing some reading lately about the Atari Program Exchange, a (mostly) Atari 8-bit computer software mail order service that ran from 1981 to 1984. It was mostly a way for amateur programmers to sell their software via Atari, and a whole bunch of pretty well known games for the platform were initially distributed this way (Caverns of Mars is one particular favourite of mine), and the more I read about it, the more it feels like an extremely early and analogue version of modern software distributions like the Apple app store or the PSN store.
If anyone’s interested, many of the mail order catalogues they sent out are available on archive.org, and are pretty interesting to look through!
What’s most interesting to me is that I remember a ton of these games because I had a neighbour who game me copies of a bunch of them (I was pretty young at the time, and there’s a zero percent chance my parents would have ever let me mail order anything), and for years I assumed he was just pirating the games, because he was also an early BBS enthusiast, but the more I think about it, I suspect that he just ordered many of them (although he also probably pirated a bunch of stuff, lol).
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