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Unreleased Atari 2600 Game Found At Flea Market

Posted by kdawson on from the once-in-a-lifetime dept.

VonGuard writes "I was at the flea market in Oakland yesterday when a pile of EPROMs caught my eye. When I got them home I found that they were prototypes for Colecovision games. A few were unpublished or saw limited runs, like Video Hustler (billiards). Others were fully released, like WarGames. But the crown jewel is what look to be a number of chips with various revisions of Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600. This game was never released and has never been seen. It was a port of the version for Colecovision, and this lot of chips also included the Coleco version. So now I have to find someone who can dump EPROMs gently onto a PC so we can play this never-before seen game, which is almost certainly awful."

2 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. MAME Dumping Project by Thorwak · · Score: 5, Informative

    "The Guru" at the MAME dumping project would probably be very interested in your find! Dumping those kinds of ROMS would be trivial to him.

    http://www.mameworld.net/gurudumps/DumpingProject/

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  2. Re:Where do you live ? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Informative

    Some of these chips are clearly EPROMS, you can see the quartz window peeking out from under a label

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/vonguard/2429248669/

    Remember this is an unreleased game. It's likely that they would use UV EPROMS right up until the final release when they'd commit to a binary to be produced as mask roms. That way they could use the time honoured method of burning a batch of EPROMS, testing them, erasing them under UV and burning a new batch.

    Actually back when these things were still used I never worked on a project that was high volume enough to justify a mask prom. The break even point was about ten thousand chips IIRC. I worked on a system where the production run was only a few hundred per firmware revison so we always used EPROM. Then again you could get chips that were physically EPROM but had a plastic package and no window. They could be programmed in the field, but only once.

    Here's a picture of the chip

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/vonguard/2429242881/in/set-72157604647023310/

    It's a Intel D2763-4. Apparantly it's 8K*8, available in either windowed or OTP versions. It's not really clear how it differs from the very popular 2764.

    http://www.cpushack.net/chippics/EPROM/2763/

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