Two Lost Atari 5200 Prototypes Recovered from Frank Cohen’s Archives

News of another fantastic preservation story to share, this time for the Atari 5200. Thanks to a collaborative effort between several members of the Atari community, two long-lost prototypes by prolific Atari programmer Frank Cohen have been recovered from original source code.

While examining Frank Cohen’s archive, John Hardie discovered a disk case simply marked “5200”. After preserving the disks, he found source code for two previously unseen games: Mail Boy and Topsy Turvee. The source was then passed to Ken Van Mersbergen (Dutchman2000), who successfully compiled both projects into working Atari 5200 ROMs before going back to Frank to learn more about their history.

The two games provide an amazing glimpse into Cohen’s early work on the Atari 5200. Mail Boy is an early precursor to the Atari 8-bit release Cohen’s Towers, while Topsy Turvee is an experimental original concept that never progressed beyond an early demonstration.

Following the recovery, the ROMs were sent to Matt Reichert at AtariProtos, who has carried out an in depth analysis of both prototypes, documenting their gameplay and development history. The pages are well worth a read if you’d like to learn more about them both.

You can read the full write-ups here:

• Mail Boy: https://www.atariprotos.com/5200/software/mailboy/mailboy.htm
• Topsy Turvee: https://www.atariprotos.com/5200/software/topsy/topsy.htm

With huge thanks to John Hardie for preserving the original disks, Ken Van Mersbergen (Dutchman2000) for compiling the recovered source into working ROMs, Frank Cohen for providing additional information about the games, Peter Rittwage for download heads up, John Hardie and Ross Sillifant for the heads up and Matt Reichert at AtariProtos for the excellent analysis and borrowed screenshots.

Download mirror

• Mail Boy (5-28-83)
• Topsy Turvee (5-8-82)