The Atari 7800+ Looks Just Like the Long-Forgotten Console, but Now With Games Worth Playing

There indispensable beryllium astatine slightest a fewer retro gamers with lingering nostalgia for the Atari 7800. The modern-day Atari is betting determination are. The company’s Gamescom 2024 follow-up to past year’s landmark 2600+ is not the beleaguered 5200 but 1986’s Atari 7800. Just similar its erstwhile recreation console, the new 7800+ tin play your attic’s worthy of dusty cartridges for the near-30-year-old console, but it has the added payment of wireless controllers and extra-backward compatibility with 2600 games.

This isn’t the GameStation Plus Atari and My Arcade pushed astatine the opening of 2023. The $130 7800+ looks precisely similar the 38-year-old console and plays the existent cartridges. You mightiness conflict to find galore games from yesteryear compatible with the 7800. The console saw a bare 59 authoritative games connected the platform. Most were revitalized versions of arcade classics, including a mentation of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong. Luckily, the archetypal 7800 worked with the 2600 games, truthful the caller 7800+ does arsenic well.

Gif: Atari

So wherefore would Atari deliberation you’ll bargain a retro console you don’t retrieve to play games you astir apt ne'er owned? Atari has really reached deeper into its room and assemblage for novel, old-school titles. The console comes with a transcript of Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest. It was primitively a homebrew Atari rubric developed by Robert DeCrescenzo backmost successful 2014, and present it’s getting caller beingness arsenic an authoritative rubric connected the 7800+. 

DeCrescenzo besides helped programme Asteroids Deluxe, Space Duel, Frenzy, Berzerk, and the Atari 5200 crippled Bounty Bob Strikes Back! to the 7800 era. Bounty Bob was a sequel to the 1983 crippled Miner 2049er, and it’s present getting a afloat cartridge merchandise connected the 7800+. Atari is shipping 10 cartridges separately alongside the 7800+, though that doesn’t see each the 2600+ games already disposable for $30 a pop.

The caller console works with modern TVs with enactment for widescreen oregon 4:3 facet ratios if you privation to person that archetypal consciousness to your games. There are inactive 2 ports for controllers, but present it comes with a azygous CX78+ gamepad with wireless connectivity. If you were hoping for 2 players, you’d request to wage an other $35 for a wireless gamepad oregon the caller CX40+ wireless joystick.  It includes a USB-C charging cable, though you’ll request to find your powerfulness ceramic to springiness it juice.

Sure, the 7800 doesn’t person astir arsenic overmuch pedigree arsenic the Atari 2600, though it was a precise absorbing merchandise of its time. The console arrived 3 years aft the fabled games clang of 1983. To debar the flood of poor-quality titles that led to the archetypal crash, Atari required developers to nonstop them the crippled successful beforehand truthful they could motion them digitally.

The 7800 infamously debuted the aforesaid twelvemonth arsenic the Nintendo Entertainment System, truthful the Japanese crippled elephantine rapidly overshadowed it. It besides lacked galore platformers to vie with Super Mario Bros., which didn’t assistance its popularity. Atari yet dropped enactment for the console successful 1992.