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Last month, we addressed arcade gaming, with MAME and the set of freeware CHAMP games. This month, we’re going to set up a couple of great game consoles via emulation: the Atari 2600 and the Colecovision.
The most popular cartridge based system in the early days of home video gaming was the Atari VCS, later renamed the Atari 2600. Although the system was lacking in memory and had fairly low resolution graphics, savvy marketing and shrewd leveraging of popular arcade licenses allowed this system to outlast its main rivals, the Mattel Intellivision, Magnavox Odyssey2, and Bally Astrocade. If you wanted to play Asteroids or Space Invaders at home in 1980, you had to go with the Atari. Atari was also sold through both Sears and other retail outlets, giving it a serious retail market advantage.
Some Atari programmers found ways to create fun, compelling games within the console’s rather severe limitations, so even some early Atari games like Adventure and Yar’s Revenge were fun to play. Later, programmers would get better and better and were able to put out some pretty nice games that really stretched well beyond what the console’s limitations seemed to be, such as Defender 2, Joust, and Vanguard. Ms Pac-Man was fun to play, as was her progeny, Jr. Pac-Man. There are a lot of Atari 2600 games that are still fun to play today, as witness the popularity of the Flashback line of Atari 2600 consoles that hit the market about 10 years ago and are still going strong.
Fortunately, there is a cross-platform Atari emulator called Stella, available for Linux (and other OSs). We can install Stella using apt-get’s install capability. Go to the Dash and search for ‘terminal’ (if it’s not already visible in the display), then launch it. Use the following command:
sudo apt-get install stella
and respond to any prompts, including the request for your password. Apt-get will download and install Stella for you. To run Stella, go to the Dash (first item on the Control strip) and it will ask for the directory where you have your ROM files. I put mine under a Stella folder in my home directory, with a ROMS subdirectory, but you can choose whatever directory you want to use.
To actually play games, you’ll need ROM files. You can’t legally use ROM images that you don’t own, but there are a handful of public domain ROM files available at http://sites.google.com/site/jbrodack/atari. Download the atari2600.zip file and extract the contents to your ROM directory – once you’ve downloaded the file, use your file manager to locate it (most likely under Downloads in your home directory), then double-click and hit Extract. Select the desired folder and extract the files. Now we can run Stella and play!
Go back to the Dash and search for Stella, then run it. You’ll see a list of available games:
Here’s Jr. Pac-Man running in Stella:
Hit F2 on the keyboard to start a game. Use the arrow keys for directional control and Space or Left Ctrl to fire.
In 1982, a new game system was announced, Colecovision. Until then, the main home cartridge-based consoles, as mentioned before, were the Astrocade, Odyssey 2, Intellivision, and the Atari VCS (or Atari 2600). The Colecovision was highly anticipated and was regarded in its time as the first home console that could actually play arcade quality games. It came with arcade sensation Donkey Kong, which honestly was not equal to the full-size version of Donkey Kong, but did a good job of capturing the fun of the original game, all the same. Some of the Colecovision games, like Carnival, Ladybug, and Venture, were legitimately as good as their arcade originals, or at least very close. I bought a Colecovision the first day it was available, and actually played Donkey Kong the next couple of days until my hands were cramping. During the console’s brief history, they had to be creative with their arcade licenses, as Atari already had almost all the big game licenses wrapped up, with Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man and his wife Ms. Pac-Man, Defender, Joust, Missile Command, and more. Coleco countered with Donkey Kong and Zaxxon (and, eventually, Donkey Kong, Jr.), but they mostly had to go with less popular licenses. However, they did a great job of selecting some more obscure games, like Ladybug and Mr. Do, that were actually terrific games.
Partly due to the quirky nature of its library, the Colecovision is an uniquely interesting console to emulate. We’re going to emulate it with the Linux version of ColEm. In this case, we’ll download ColEm from Marat Fayzullin’s webpage at https://fms.komkon.org/ColeEm/#Downloads. Download the Linux binaries for Ubuntu. This will be a .tgz file, which is a tarballed GZip file. Tarballs are a very old form of compression for Linux, and GZip is an older form of archive. Fortunately, Ubuntu still knows how to deal with these older formats. Go to the location of your .tgz file in your file explorer and double-click. Extract to your desired location (I set up a ColEm directory under Home).
Once the file is extracted, you have the ColEm emulator and the ROM for the Colecovision console itself. There are a number of public domain ROM files available for download at http://www.planetemu.net/roms/coleco-colecovision-public-domain. Select one and download (it’s ‘telecharger’ in French if you don’t want to bother translating the webpage), then unzip/extract to your ColEm directory.
Now, this is an older game emulator and does not use a modern type of interface, so we’re going to have to dig out some old-fashioned Linux skills, but don’t worry! Ubuntu will make this a lot easier than it was ‘back in the day’. Find your ColEm folder in File Explorer. Right-click a blank area in the Files pane and select Open In Terminal. This will open a Terminal session with the directory location already set to the current directory (which is MUCH easier than navigating to it through the command line used to be, and definitely something valuable to remember). Type in:
colem filename
where filename is the name of the ROM file you want to run (case sensitive!), then hit Enter. The ColEm emulator will open with the desired game loaded and ready to play. There will be a substantial delay on the introductory screen, but your system is not locked up, that was a deliberate Colecovision delay to show the game name for a few seconds. Hit 1-8 for the number of players and difficulty level, and you’re all set to start. Use arrow keys to move and Ctrl for left fire button, Space for right fire button. Here’s Colecovision Donkey Kong in ColEm:
Not entirely arcade accurate, but not bad, all the same. Have fun, and we’ll finish up for a while with Retrogaming with next month’s column.
Next month: Part 4 of Retro Gaming!