If you're looking for a good time-waster this weekend, look no further than Adult Swim's new game Captain Commander. The latest from PixelJam -- a.k.a. the guys who did Dino Run -- has you playing as the titular Captain Commando, saving his men's orifices from nefarious aliens with no grasp of English. In essence, you're fighting against incomprehensible message board trolls.

Captain Commander looks like a supercharged Atari game, with that special brand of nostalgia that reminds you of dated games without being dragged down by their gameplay conventions and graphical limitations. It's silly fun and well worth a play. Plus, the jet you get to fly goes right-to-left! That's still unusual enough for me to recommend it just based on that aspect.

From: http://www.destructoid.com/captain-commander-is-an-atari-game-for-the-internet-age-222119.phtml

The Anodyne Software web site has been updated to include a new application, Textbook. Textbook is both an e-reader (for Project Gutenberg e-books) and a text viewer. Please go to the following URL for more details: http://www.anodynesoftware.com/textbook/index.htm Note that Textbook is being released as Donationware: free with an optional donation to the author, Claude Labelle. Thank you for your interest in our products! Roger Burrows

From: http://www.atari-users.net

BlkMtnAudio writes:

I had an old Atari 2600 that had stopped working and I couldn't just get rid of it, so I converted it to a portable media audio dock. The Atari console had holes in the top where speakers could have gone, but Atari never built it with speakers. I took an old set of computer speakers that had a subwoofer and mounted the raw speakers and amplifier inside the console. It took some "customization" to get the speakers to mount inside, heating and reshaping the plastic. I took a game I had and cut the top so there would be a space for the media device to rest in. The game cartridge was "Basic Programming" On the back there is a power button, volume control, audio input jack, sub out jack and a power cable. The original Atari controls and joystick are for aesthetic purposes only, they don't actually control anything. I shielded the amp to prevent rf interference. I also upgraded the speaker in the subwoofer to an Aura Sound 3" woofer.  Will work with any device that has a 3.5 mm analog audio output.

The date stamp inside was Nov. 1980.

Now for sale on Etsy.

From the Retroist:

A little while ago, I started a small group on Flickr where I try and collect photos related to both Atari and Christmas. The group is aptly titles, Atari Christmas. The group currently has 24 photos of people happily playing or opening their Atari products on Christmas. If you want to get into either the Atari or Christmas state of mind, drop on by and enjoy. If you have a photo of you own, please share it, I would love to see them.

Have you played Atari today?

Hatari 1.6.0 "Happy New Year 2012" has been released. You can download it from http://download.tuxfamily.org/hatari/1.6.0

• More accurate FDC emulation (correct status bits and commands' timings, DMA transfer by blocks of 16 bytes, floppy change detection). This should fix a lot of non working games, as well as a few demos
• More accurate microwire clock emulation
• SCSI class 1 (ICD) command support for drives > 1 GB
• Improve shifter (add another method to do 4 pixel hardware scrolling, better emulation for 0 byte blank line)
• Some fixes to the IKBD emulation
• Better filters and model for sound emulation
• Correct VBL timings in TT monochrome (double clicking works now)
• More cycle accurate Falcon DSP <-> CPU emulation. All the demos that needed 32Mhz CPU with the old CPU core in Hatari v1.5, work now at correct 16Mhz with the WinUAE CPU core
• 030 MMU emulation with the WinUAE CPU core
• Debugger improvements : "history" command to list instructions executed before entering debugger
• Fixed behavior of the Caps Lock key

In related news, Hatari will now be hosted on tuxfamily.org. Our new homepage is http://hatari.tuxfamily.org/ – so please update your bookmarks!

I think I've written about this before, but it deserves repeating.  Remember the box and cartridge art on those old Atari 2600 games?  Video game graphics back weren't exactly photorealistic, so the packaging was tweaked to create a more interesting picture of the game inside.  Sometimes, the artists took some liberties and the results, well...  Wouldn't it be interesting if the game was actually more like the art?  Fun from Yesterday is an amusing detour exploring that very premise.

Be sure to check out titles such as PIXEL BONDAGE, FIND THE KOALA, and the ever popular EVERY SPORT EVER IN PONG FORM.

One of the earlier titles on the Atari 2600, Video Pinball is the bare basics of what you'd expect in a video pinball game. There's a plunger, two flippers, and a few targets and lanes. Nowadays, the square, blocky graphics make it hard to imagine the playfield and the ball certainly bounces around strangely to compensate for the lack of angled boundaries, but those who played this back in the early 80s might look back on this game with fond memories as it was their first experience with a video pinball title.

Video Pinball was developed and published by Atari in 1981.