Atari 2600

The Atari 2600 in RetroXR is the six-switch VCS — the “heavy sixer”, wood veneer and all. Along with the NES it is one of the few machines wearing a detailed shell rather than a procedural stand-in.

The six-switch VCS. The switches sit on a control panel sloped at 42.5°, not flat on the top.

The switches

This is the detail the 2600 is worth spawning for. They are slide switches, not buttons — thin levers that travel up and down the sloped control panel — and the two that are wired behave differently from each other, as they did on the real thing.

Switch	Behavior
POWER	Latches. Two detents; it stays where you put it
GAME RESET	Momentary. Push it and it springs back the instant you let go

Modeled but not yet wired

The other four switches — TV Type, Left Difficulty, Right Difficulty and Game Select — are modeled and individually pivoted in the shell, but they do not do anything yet.

Driving these with the generic button used elsewhere sank them into the shell, which is both the wrong motion and buries the ON/OFF legend printed beside each slot. They get their own slider behavior instead.

Cartridges

A 2600 cartridge. It goes into the slot on top and pulls straight back out.

1. Spawn a game from SPAWN → Cartridges.
2. Push it into the slot on top of the console.
3. Slide POWER on.

There is no eject on this machine — 2600 carts pull straight out of the top slot, so that is how you take them out here too.

The CX40 joystick

The CX40. One stick, one button — and the button is in the corner, where your thumb is not.

Spawn one from SPAWN → Controllers and plug it into a controller port. Two ports, so two sticks.

For a real gamepad instead, spawn a Controller Receiver and plug that into the port — see using a real gamepad, keyboard or mouse.

Getting a picture

The 2600 predates composite sockets, so like the NES it reaches a television through an RF switch — see plugging things in and the NES page, which covers the same RF chain in detail.

Cores

The 2600 has more than one libretro core available. Pick the default in CORES → Manager — see downloading and managing cores.

Needs an in-headset pass

The switch behavior above is read from the model’s source and is accurate. Which cores are offered, and how the RF chain behaves for this specific machine, have not been checked against a running build.