Tag Archives: atari 2600

10 Year Anniversary of the VCSp

Photo credit: Kim Keyes Photo.

Hard to believe it’s been 10 years since I completed my first portable the VCSp but it’s true. Many things have happened since then, including the Xbox 360 laptop, Commodore 64 portable and of course, Possumus Woman.

In honor of this momentous occasion I’ve prepared some fun stuff for our visitors to enjoy:

The Atari 2600 Portables Site – Explore the site as it appeared back in the olden days. Most of the navigation works, so have fun!

VCSp Making Of – The very first story about portables I ever published to the web

SNESp Making Of – A classic, completely overdone ‘making of’ from 2001.

Plus you can check out a bunch of classic Benheck videos after the break. Enjoy…

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9 year anniversary of the original VCSp

Hard to believe it’s been so long… 9 years ago this month I completed my first portable gaming project, the Atari 2600 VCSp.


It was an age before decent digital cameras…

You can read the original story by clicking here. I found some photos of the unit that I don’t believe have been on the site before, you can check them out below.

In other news, I plan to do some site changes to include an easy-to-browse gallery of all my work, more downloadable data and other things. Stay tuned!

Continue reading 9 year anniversary of the original VCSp

Longhorn Engineer’s Atari 2600 Video Mod


The back of you Atari could look like this!

At the Midwest Gaming Classic Parker Dillmann – otherwise known as the “Longhorn Engineer” – gave me a sample of his new Atari video mod. This is a small circuit board he sells that you solder to the TIA chip inside and Atari 2600 to get a great composite/S-video picture.

Check out his site here, and continue reading to see me try the mod out for myself.

Also, if you need spare Atari 2600 parts, why not check out my awesome auction?

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3600 Controller

OK so yesterday I had my Facebook status as saying I was “being frustrated by potentiometers” – a rather normal day for me, really. For whatever reason this prompted one of my friends to suggest I build an Xbox 360 controller inside of an Atari 2600 controller shell. And I thought “That’s dumb enough to work!”

A mere 5 hours later I had what you see above – the 3600 controller! This is an Atari 2600 controller with wireless Xbox 360 controller guts inside of it – batteries too. The big red “fire” button is “A”, other buttons are attached to the top:

Granted this wasn’t a pay project (rather a UPP – un-paid project!) but it was a nice break from what I was doing. It isn’t usable for standard Xbox 360 games but adequate for many Arcade games and other low-level tomfoolery.

For the sure-to-be thrilling story of how I did it, check after the break. I kind of did a cheat to get controller guts into this small of a shell…

Oh you can also download this pulse-pounding demo video of the controller in action.

Note: despite the mention of Facebook, I prefer to limit it to people I know / acquaintances, so please do not be offended if friend requests go ignored.

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