Just Like Starting Over
by John on Jan.02, 2010, under Main Stuff
I’m going to confess a dark secret: the first game system I wanted wasn’t the NES.
It’s the fall of 1987, and my parents are asking me what I wanted for Christmas. The only thing on my list was the Atari 7800, which had Ms. Pac-Man. That was my game, that was what I wanted more than anything else. It wound up under the tree that year, with about a dozen games to go with it, new in box. The other games were 2600 cartridges, including the infamously horrible port of Pac-Man. Still, they ran on the machine, and I was ecstatic. We had to leave the machine behind pretty soon afterwards, though, as we were heading up to my grandmother’s house to celebrate Christmas. My uncle had given the family the NES core set that year.
The rest, as they say, is history. I went home and was thrilled to go back to the 7800 and its capabilities and library. For a year or two I was more enthralled with the Atari than the Nintendo, to the point of turning down a new NES game in favor of two Atari titles for my birthday the coming year. Eventually, though, my cousins and friends started showing me the hot games they had for their machines, the 7800 library started drying up in stores, and in a sad, sorry moment of fate, I sold off the 7800 and its pile of games at a garage sale once the SNES was out.
I regretted the decision probably a week later.
Today that mental anguish, however minimal it was, ended as I proudly took home a gently used but still functional 7800 and four games (total was $40). I was initially alarmed when I remembered that I couldn’t connect it to the main TV in the living room; but I’d also received a lower-end TV a few weeks ago that did indeed have the appropriate connector, so I connected it, fired it up, and found myself back in the dawning weeks of 1988.
I’d call that a pretty good starting-over.
January 2nd, 2010 on 9:48 pm
Is it the “claw” holding connectors for the TV connection? Radio Shack sells converters for that to coaxial, and you know of course that there are converters from coaxial to composite. There’ll be a way to use it on your main TV. However, you may need to tweak certain settings on whichever TV input you hook it to in order for it to not have weird visual effects going on (the same is true of the NES on my HDTV – I have that input using a custom configuration that mitigates all the negative possibilities – so I can only assume), and if there were any 7800 light gun games, they’ll be useless.
January 2nd, 2010 on 9:53 pm
If you’re looking for retro stuff, try estarland.com. Starland was originally a local store, now it’s basically an online warehouse. It only has one location, and the website only claims to have something in stock if it’s actually present at that location. The “warehouse” is local to my area, but if you go there directly you STILL buy things by making the online order on a provided computer and then having them hand you the product instead of ship it to you. You’ll likely find other retro systems you’ve been looking for, among other things.
January 3rd, 2010 on 7:09 am
Anything I can’t find at the flea market across the street I’ll go to eStarland for; I was actually on my last week of looking for the 7800 there before I started an online search. It was only by sheer dumb luck that I managed to find it this time.
I kept looking for a coax-to-composite converter yesterday but couldn’t find one, strangely enough. I found the reverse– RF modulator boxes– but that’s useless in this case. In any event it might become a non-issue anyway; depending on how the next month and a half goes I’m thinking of using my tax return to upgrade the living room TV into something that has a coax input (right now it’s a glorified computer monitor).
January 4th, 2010 on 9:15 am
Coax-to-composite converters might not be billed as such… they might be something that’s willing to take more than one type of input and be willing to output in composite, and it so happens one of the inputs is coax.