I suspect that Activision tailored the emulator slightly for the various games. The plug application plugs the ROM into the “AtariHack” emulator, from what I can tell. The ROM should play within “AtariHack”, but it’s actually getting side-loaded via the “plug” application shown in the screenshot above. If it does not, you may need to rebuild your desktop. From here, double-clicking your ROM should do the trick.This will set up your ROMs to open up correctly. Take your (legally-owned, of course) Atari 2600 game ROMs and drag them unto the “atari cart typer” AutoTyper, as shown in the above screenshot.You can also go into the STR# resource, open up #129 and change the various strings to something else – in my case I renamed the old game name to “AtariHack” OPTIONAL: For fun, the hack includes a “.rsrc” resource file you can copy and paste into the “AtariHack” application for additional icons.Open this copy (“AtariHack”) in ResEdit and change its CREATOR to ATRI.

Keep this copy in the same folder as the other games, per the README. I named my copy “AtariHack”, and from here I’ll refer to it as that. This copy will become the “emulator” for your ROMs. Make a copy of one of the Activision game application icons.

I found the README slightly confusing – but generally the process is: To make the process of swapping out the ROM easier, there’s a tool designed for this called the Action Pack Plugin Hack, and can be downloaded here. So theoretically speaking, you can take an individual game icon and replace it’s ROM with another Atari game ROM, and play it! Hacking the Activision Action Pack Games Each one individually is an emulator and if you inspect one in ResEdit, you can actually see a resource inside containing the Atari game ROM itself. When installed, the Activision Action Pack provides you with a folder full of game icon applications – one for each game. In fact, I owned a copy of this software back then – but I never realized that behind the scenes it was actually an Atari 2600 emulator. They included classics like Pitfall, River-Raid, and Keystone Kapers. You would think Atari 2600 would be one such example – but Alas, there wasn’t any 68k-built Atari 2600 emulators back then… or so we thought.īack in the 90s, Activision released a few anthology games on floppy for Macintosh. The classic Mac OS had a plethora of emulators targeting various platforms like Apple II, NES, TRS-80, IBM PC, and so forth.

Atari emulator for mac