Have you played Atari today?

I was sitting in a cafe playing a game of Donkey Kong on my Game Boy Advance when a friend of mine commented he used to play that all the time on his Atari 7800. Which made him the first person I'd ever met in real life who owned one.

The Atari 7800 is a console I hold a deep soft spot for, for the same reason I have a soft spot for the Atari Jaguar, the Sega 32X and the 3DO - they were all consoles with great potential that was never really fulfilled. The Atari 7800 was meant to be released in 1984 - a potential way for Atari to break out of the video game crash and return to dominance. For 1984, the games were impressive - breathtaking conversions of Pole Position II, Xevious, Ms Pac Man and others would have kickstarted the next generation.

What happened next - the arrival of Jack Tramiel and the shift of Atari's focus, the dealy of the system's launch for two to three years - is well documented. The point is, however, that by the time the 7800 finally made it out there, the NES was already on sale, dominating the market, and in the US Atari had to settle for a very distant second. In Europe and Australia, it trailed even further behind, beaten out by the Master System, which dominated both territories.

If, like me, you're intrigued by the curio that is the Atari 7800, you will be interested by EMU7800, available now on the Windows Store for both touch-screen and key-driven devices. A fantastic compilation of classic 7800 games, along with a handful of Atari-published classics for the 2600 for good measure, all emulated perfectly.

To be frank, there's not a lot to be said about the emulation. Both the 7800 and 2600 could be comfortably emulated on a modern slide rule, really, so the more interesting element is the interface. Tapping or clicking on the settings button in-game will bring up the on console controls, including difficulty and game select toggles, colour and b/w and the ability to switch which input the controller is plugged into. The game supports XBox 360 controllers with several convenient mappings (including Game Select/Reset on the triggers - anyone who has played a 2600 will know how helpful that is - and the right analogue stick being set to player 2's control, rendering Raiders of the Lost Ark - one of the included games - playable). I haven't tested the touch screen controls as I don't have a touch-screen compatible Windows device, but the simple controls of many of the games (the 2600 only has one fire button, after all) means it should work well, I would hope. Light gun games can be played with the mouse. All in all, it's quite intuitive and anything you can't work out should be sorted after a quick glance at the help menu.

The selection of games is impressive, and they can be selected from a fairly simple (if clearly touch-screen oriented) menu that breaks them down by system, by publisher and finally by designer. The games included are almost all Atari-published titles for both the 2600 and 7800, and - impressively - a large handful of homebrew titles that give a really good sense of what the 7800 could have been capable of. Classics such as Ninja Golf (yes, you read that right) , Donkey Kong, Ms. Pac Man and Galaga populate the 7800 list while Yar's Revenge, Combat and the all time classic E.T. The Extra Terrestrial wave the 2600 flag (yes, that's right, this title includes the worst game of all time(tm) (c)). You can apparently add ROMS to it, but I haven't yet tried it (the obvious missing pieces would be the Activision classics like River Raid).

The love for the source material that has gone into this project is clear and the quantity and quality of the content is excellent. While far form a comprehensive selection of games, what is on offer is very good. The 7800 ports of games like Xevious and originals like Alien Brigade (in both light gun and controller mode) are good fun and 2600 games like Adventure and Yar's are a fantastic example that sometimes it's the simplest things that work best. If you have a windows compatible device, I can't think of a reason why you shouldn't get EMU7800. It's a quality product from top to bottom and will provide hours and hours of good clean fun.