{"id":4259,"date":"2013-11-09T13:39:06","date_gmt":"2013-11-09T12:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jungsi.de\/?p=4259"},"modified":"2026-08-27T23:12:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T21:12:13","slug":"retro-atari-vcs-2600","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jungsi.de\/en\/retro-atari-vcs-2600\/","title":{"rendered":"Atari VCS 2600 [Atari]"},"content":{"rendered":"

I've finally got the first game console in my collection! I managed to rescue this Atari VCS 2600 (built sometime from 1982 onward, judging by the manufacturing date) right before it ended up at the recycling centre. Along with it came 18 cartridges, all handed to me in a plastic bag. First up was a thorough cleaning. A bit of soapy water and some silicone spray took care of that quickly enough. After checking over the crudely repaired antenna and power cables once more, I was ready to give it a try. At first I got no picture at all, since I was searching in the frequency range I was used to from my other computers (870 MHz). The VCS, however, sits on channel 2 or 3 \u2013 68 MHz. Once tuned in correctly, it worked right away. Unfortunately, the picture coming through the RF\/antenna input is barely bearable for more than five minutes on a modern flat screen. :-)<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

History<\/strong>
The Atari VCS (Video Computer System) was introduced in 1977, though it sold poorly at first. By 1979 it had become the must-have gift of the holiday season, despite being technically outdated even then (128 bytes of memory). In Germany, incidentally, the first units went on sale in 1980. That same year, the home conversion of the arcade hit Space Invaders gave sales a massive boost and turned the VCS into a true mass phenomenon. In 1982 the console was renamed Atari VCS 2600 (or Atari 2600 for short). In 1986 a visually slimmer version arrived on the market: the Atari VCS 2600 Junior, which then remained in production into the 1990s. The VCS helped cement the then-new concept of separating hardware from software once and for all. Up to that point, almost all consoles could only run various versions of Pong. With the VCS, there was now a base unit for the mass market that could play hundreds of different games. Roughly 30 million units of the VCS were sold, making it the best-selling game console of its era.<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That rapid success had a flip side, though: the market became flooded with cartridges, many of them of dubious quality. In 1983 the US video game market then collapsed dramatically \u2013 now known as the \"Video Game Crash of 1983\". Flops like the home ports of Pac-Man and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial are still seen as symbols of that crisis; legend has it that Atari had millions of unsold cartridges buried in a landfill in New Mexico. Trust among retailers and customers was badly shaken, and it took the next console generation \u2013 above all the NES \u2013 to bring the market back to life.<\/p><\/p>\n

\n
\"VCS
before cleaning<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Switches on the unit:<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n