Atari 5200

Trackball CX -53

The Atari 5200 was a computer games console of 1982 and should the successful predecessor, the Atari 2600 to replace, and offer competitive as the Mattel Intellivision Paroli.

Technically the console to your home computers from Atari is almost identical, only the joystick ports and the module port were incompatible. As with the Atari 400 and 800 operates inside the unit a 6502C CPU and the well-known custom chips ANTIC and POKEY, is also available as newer Atari home computers of GTIA.

It but not very many games have been released for the new device, also because in 1983 began the great crash of the video game industry and has set 5200. The games that there were, however, excellent in quality, but they mostly corresponded exactly to the home computer version, only a few were significantly better. Some of these titles were consequently - inter alia " 5200 Man Glenn the " from - ported to home computers and distributed illegally.

The double incompatibility both for 2600 and for Atari 400/800 held many 2600 owners of the transition from to the new model. Newcomers had other consoles to choose from, such as the ColecoVision or Intellivision. Furthermore, there were problems with controllers from the console, most of which did not work in their delivery or broke after a short time. For these reasons, the sales success of 5200 was relatively low. In Europe, it appeared not even on the market.

Games

From Atari only 69 official games for the Atari 5200 were released. Most of these are well-known Atari arcade games, most of which also appeared on the Atari 2600. Many games use here but from the larger color palette. Furthermore, there are games from third-party manufacturers, as well as homebrew games.