SCSIcide

Your job, as the hard drive controller, is to read the data bits in the correct color order. Prevent a hard drive crash by reading the bits before the latency buffer underflows!

SCSIcide is a "Modern Era" game for the Atari 2600. "Modern Era" means that it is still in production today. Many programmers are still developing Atari 2600 games and around a half dozen new cartridges come out every year. Many of the newer games are a whole lot more advanced than the old ones were, as programmers have literally had decades to learn the hardware. Not to mention the fact that programming itself has come along way since the seventies.

This is a paddle game set inside the hard drive of a modern computer. This game is rather notable, because it is one of the few commercial Atari 2600 titles that has freely available source code on the web. The designer of this game kept the Atari 2600 web community constantly updated during the development of this game, and the source code and ROM images of all versions have always been freely available.

You can download this game for free and try it out in any popular Atari 2600 emulator. StellaX is particularly good with this game, as it has good mouse support.

There are three distinct cartridge versions of this game. You can tell the versions apart by the art on the cartridge and by what is displayed on the secret easter egg screen.

The first version was the "Classic Gaming Expo 2k1" version. There were 50 of these produced, and they all came in an antistatic hard drive bag, and were signed and numbered by the programmer.

The second version was available only by mail order from Joe Grand. There were also 50 of these, signed and numbered, but the label was slightly different, and they didn't come with the bag.

The final version was available from Hozer Video Games. It was sold for several years at a price of $16.

In 2005 Joe released a much improved version of the game that he dubbed "Ultra SCSIcide". This fixes a lot of bugs, and adds joystick support, PAL support, and allows for higher top scores and longer games. As of this writing you are able to purchase a copy of Ultra SCSIcide at the atariage.com store for $25.