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Unreleased Atari 2600 Game Found At Flea Market
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 A few were unpublished or saw limited runs, like Video Hustler (billiards).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."
Good find. My first job in HS was at Atari playtesting video games for the Tengen system. (I knew someone who worked there as a 'game councelor' on their help line, a fellow Amiga fanatic, ironically)
It's not surprising that the roms turned up there - it's close to Milpitas. Usually I say there's nothing more to be had at flea markets - all the vendors these days are selling various combinations of the same grey market goods from Asia...but every now and then I guess there's still a gem.
The unveiling and first attempt at this game requires:
/. history. There could easily be as many as 5, even 6 guests! Rock on!
- A projector.
- A camera to record footage for posterity.
- A celebrity guest, Either CmdrTaco, CowboyNeal, or one of the Diggnation guys.
- Huuuuuge quantities of alcohol.
This has the potential to be one of the most successful parties in
Sometimes people are very careless about their trash. Notice the WTC plans that showed up in the dumpster trawled by the homeless guy the other day.
Dumpster diving has become both an art, a business and industrial espionage.
Also, it's quite likely that a programmer just took them home after an office cleaning or cancelled project or mass-layoff.
The great thing about the age of carts is just what the article touches on...here's a game that never made it to the store shelves but clearly a copy or two was made on actual hardware that somehow made it to this flea market.
But what happens to games today when they're cancelled? I read about games being put on "indefinite hiatus", or just being cancelled with the company essentially throwing their hands up in the air and saying "ain't gonna happen." What becomes of all that code? Since it just sits on the developer's machines, does it just get wiped when they start on a new project?
Maybe someday someone will find a hd in a flea market labeled "Shenmue 3 SVN Repo", but it doesn't seem likely, sadly.
So while we revel in the curios of the past, we ourselves have none to give to future generations.
I have to chuckle. A Cabbage Patch Kids game? There was probably a reason those ROMs never made it to mass production. I remember E.T. for Atari. If THAT game made it to press run, how bad does the CPK game have to be?!?
Now a Garbage Pail Kids game... THAT I'd play. Even now.
You're not paranoid if they really ARE out to get you...
1. Get access to some eproms, preferably the old, worn-out kind. ...
2. Put a cryptic label on them, something like "P0N 13S OMG", or "SR0 CKS TH1", plus some brandname like "Coleco" or "Atari"
3. Go to the nearest auction site
4.
5. Profit !
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
How do we actually know that's what's on the EPROMs? They could be mislabeled, or the data on the chips could be unreadable. EPROMs do have a tendency to degrade over time, especially if they're not well taken care of.
Besides, even if they do contain some version of the game, and even if it's readable, there's no guarantee that it's actually a playable game. It could be an unplayable version, or even a test or demo of some sort.
Sorry to rain on the parade. If this turns out to be the real McCoy, I'll be as excited as anyone. But I'd put up even money that this ends up being a disappointment. I hope I'm wrong, though.
"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/
Connection closed by foreign host.
Somebody was paid to spend time and work hard on that game, no matter how horrible it is. This is your time lonesome programmer... your moment of fame has finally arrived after so many long years of obscurity. Will the effort of years past pay off now, or will you simply fade away from whence you cam to that cold, bleak corner of gaming history.
"Taboo, like anything else, goes in and out of style."
What else would have helped is the type of EEPROM, the manufacturer, and part number... Something like 27C512 in a 40 pin DIN or similar... Different types of EEPROMs require different equipment...
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
But to echo what Guido said, EPROMs typically aren't rated for "eternal" data retention and depending on storage conditions there could be anything from bit errors to blank chips. If both copies of the Park roms were the same you've at least got something to work with.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
What's an Atari 2600?
(just joking)
Although I can imagine some teenager asking that question. The Atari VCS/2600 is older than many people alive today (almost 31 years). As for why Atari did not erase the EPROMS, in 1984 they were on the verge of collapse and probably didn't care. They had more important things to worry about... like not going bankrupt.
Best Atari games?
- Space Invaders
- Breakout
- Defender
- Missile Command
- Berzerk
- Phoenix
- Joust
- Jr. Pac-man (only VCS version of Pac-man that was arcade-accurate)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
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/
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Some things are better left alone!! The "pappach" as my niece once called them died for a reason. Do not bring the parent of "Chucky" back to life. Nothing good could come of this.
You can read them with a standard EPROM programmer ..... something like a Dataman S3 ..... they're probably up to S5 or S6 by now, but the S3 is the one I remember. The S3 also had some built-in RAM with its own power supply, so you could load it up with data and use it in a circuit in place of a real EPROM. Nice hacker tool, back in the days.
..... it'd hafta be async refresh anyway, lovely, there goes your MW radio, unless you pulled some weirdy stunt with a phase-locked loop and gotta watch what you're asking that poxy little PSU for) need the RAM mapping to two distinct address blocks; one for write and one for read, because the R/W line isn't brought out on the 2600's cartridge port.
Note that if you try to use a standard 2732 or 2716 EPROM in an Atari 2600 cart, the chip enable (on pin 20 -- driven by A12) needs to be inverted. (The OTP parts used by Atari had this inversion logic built in.) Just use a BC547 and a couple of 4k7 resistors (one in series with the base and one as a pull-up from collector to +5V). If it seems a bit temperamental, drop the collector load down to 3k3 or 2k2.
You can use bigger chips eg. 27512 to hold several ROM images -- just attach 4k7 pull-up resistors to each of the high-order address lines, with switches to pull them to 0V.
Carts with ROMs > 4K need some extra logic to switch the high-order address lines, dependent on values being written to some address somewhere. Carts with integral RAMs (yes, they existed; all of them TTBOMK were static RAM which at least makes it simpler, no need for refresh logic
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
atariage.com is the place you need to go. There are plenty of people all over the country who will go out of their way to your place to dump the chips. There are also prototype version collectors who will be interested in dumping all the rest of your chips as well, in case there's an undiscovered version in your pile of chips.
And bare EPROMs are the easiest to dump. If you have a standard programmer, assuming these are standard EPROMs, which they should be, you can do it yourself. Just don't read the important chip first until you know you've got the procedure right.
In the meantime, keep the chip windows covered and keep the chips away from light. The older they are, the more likely they will be vulnerable to "bit rot", which is the chip erasing itself even with weak light, usually after 15-25 years. Once the process begins, it can take weeks or months for the whole chip to be blank.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
...and can vouch for the "dumpster diving" approach. For a while, physical mockups (without the electronics) were just tossed in the dumpster; I saw neighborhood kids brandishing their "prizes". Later on, one of the guys took to hanging them in a tree outside our 2nd-floor office window; that didn't go over well when our VP found out...
It's a TAM - the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh
:o(
The integrated sound system was designed by Bose (after an initial design by Bang & Olufsen was deemed not good enough), and it marks the first time Apple externalised the PSU of a desktop machine - it is contained within the floor-standing subwooofer. The design is a clear forerunner of the modern iMac all in one, but is thinner than any production iMac. Noteworthy was that your purchase was delivered in a limousine, and set up for you by a concierge.
I have two, but one is missing its "fatback", meaning I can't upgrade it - not even to add ethernet
If anyone could help me source the part, I'd love to hear from you before I gut it to retro fit the innards of an Intel MacMini.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
Oh, OK, so we are excited about how bad the game probably is.
Sort of like a vintage Daikatana?
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
1. Find some old EPROMS
2. Write the names of old video games on stickers and attach.
3. Go to flea market.
4. Profit!!
Lament an ignorance of the Playstation 3 or Windows XP? You must be joking. I hope that Sony and Microsoft will be only footnotes in dusty history lessons for the 2010's generation.
I wouldn't worry about WW2 either, there will be plenty of other wars to talk about. I hope I live to see a time after TV.
If this were any other item (visual art, books, songs, etc), no one would care that some shitty unreleased piece of work was found by some unknown author. Why is it any different because it's a video game?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Looking at google maps, he's probably in California.
Google Maps Linky
Further down the threads, he links to his Flikr photos of these roms.
Second Linky
bork bork bork!
that didn't go over well when our VP found out...
I imagine the kids didn't care for hanging in the tree either.
creation science book
2 words: Warlords
Tell the moon dogs, tell the March hare
Although I can imagine some teenager asking that question. The Atari VCS/2600 is older than many people alive today (almost 31 years).
:P
Thank you so much for making me feel old
I had one of these when I was a kid (actually a colecovision with the Atari 2600 adapter.)
I'm going to go play "Adventure" now.
I know you all could have found it yourselves, but I'll take the middle step out of it... Berzerk Commercial. It's pretty good!
/Take that, turkey!
What, no Custer's Revenge?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
You might like Medieval Mayhem, my homebrew version of Warlords for the Atari. You can even play online, though note that the mouse makes a poor substitute for a paddle.
I used to work for Flying Buffalo (the makers of the Nuclear War card game and Tunnels & Trolls RPG) and they had an agreement with Coleco for Coleco to produce a T&T game for their system. Coleco gave FBI a Colecovision, it was an amusing little game. What was funny was that perhaps our favorite game to play was the Smurf game as it had an amusing little bug at the end.
Now I live in New Mexico, originally near Alamogordo, which is famed for being the dumping ground for Atari's ET game cartridge. Apparently they trucked thousands of the unsold cartridges, dumped them, ran over them with a bulldozer, then covered them with concrete. I wish I could find out where that was, that'd be a cool place to explore and maybe find one.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
No, as he described, it's the Macintosh TV. Download mactracker for the full story.
My favorite Atari game was Star Raiders. It was a complex, 3D space simulator years before X-Wing and the like. Sure the space ships you were battling were basic shapes, but you still could fly around in space, fire at them, watch your fuel level, refill at the service station (or blow it up! ;-) ), travel in hyperspace (trying to keep from veering off course) and toggle your shields/weapons/etc to save on power. I only wish I could play a version of that on my PC today.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There's a large and fairly obsessive subculture associated with videogame prototypes. The ultimate goal for most people involved is to find prototypes 'in the wild' like this, but a lot of ultra rare video game stuff is found through dodgy deals and allegedly, bribery and outright theft.
http://www.atariprotos.com/ is a repository of Atari stuff and http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/ is a message board discussing the subject.
The big area for debate around prototyes is wheather or not they should be realeased. Regardless of the fact that this game never saw commercial release, it's still likely to be someone's intellectual property, and they may not be keen on seeing it spread around freely.
A lot of prototypes are worth serious money, this one as an Atari game will be too. A lot of collectors refuse to relase prototypes they've discovered incase it lowers the value of them.
Atari 2600 ROMs and emulators are easy to come by, but if you like Star Raiders, you should look up the Atari 800 version of it. It's very much improved over the 2600 version. There's Atari800 for the(you guessed it) 800, and Stella for the 2600. Games are a little harder to come by, underground-gamer.com is down atm. You could try the Pleasuredome though.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I doubt it. PS3 was an evolutionary step in the entire video console sequence.
The entire attraction of things like the Coleco/Intellivision/Atari 2600 were that they were the first, and each provided uniqueness in how they approached the video console concept.
The thing they may lament is that they don't remember the Wii, the one console that actually broke new ground this round.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I run a website about unreleased Atari games called AtariProtos.com (http://www.atariprotos.com/). We've known about the existance of Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park for years now, but it was thought that programmer Ed English had the only copy. While I'm pleasantly surprised that it appears that it has finally turned up, I'm still a little skeptical that this is indeed the 2600 version and not the Colecovision version since it was found with many other Colecovision prototypes. We'll have to wait and see, but if it turns out to be the real deal, another long lost prototype will have be found!
On a side note, one of the other EPROMs he found is labeled "Sword". This may be the lost Coelcovision game The Sword and the Sorcerer that was thought to be complete but not released.
Oh and a little bit of trivia, Cabbage Patch Kids is actually a port of an MSX game called Athletic Land. It was simply hacked into CPK to fit the license.
Tempest
Your score took up 45K? That must have been one helluva high score!
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Best Atari games?
M.U.L.E. - 'nuff said.
ah.clem
"Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
From TFA:
OK, now I was getting a boner. Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600.
Is it just me or did this creep out anyone else?
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
> though note that the mouse makes a poor substitute for a paddle
Richard Gere might disagree.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Since we're going off topic anyway, I'll mention that the NES port of Elite is recommended by the authors as the best Elite experience.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
um, I highly doubt that it's a TAM. TAMs are not black, Macintosh TVs are black though.
http://lowendmac.com/500/macintosh-tv.html
Imagine trying to port GTA3 to the original Nintendo system and you'll have some idea how bad this game probably is.
You could imagine it, or you could actually do it.
I find back-ports of game titles from more to less powerful hardware to be fascinating -- paring down a complex premise into something more simple really exposes a programmer's cleverness, and it really does give credence to the idea that it's gameplay, not high-quality graphics or sound, that makes a game fun.
I did a mask rom project once. That was scary business.
It was a voice activated clock, and after it was released they found a bug in it that made it off at the end of every day. However, there was a non-mask rom chip in the game, and we happened to have a communications protocol from it to my LCD that allowed reads and writes to anywhere in ram. My co-worker that was writing the voice chip (mine was the LCD microcontroller) wrote up a little patch that checked for the bug and patched it up when it occurred.
Felt so relieved that they wouldn't be throwing out 50,000 chips because I goofed.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
You can order up a cartridge from AtariAge for play on a real Atari. They have a number of other homebrews as well.
I think it means we need tagging for posts.
Which overlaps a lot with moderation, being the same thing but without a formal point system... Maybe with some distributed trust system a tag system could replace the moderation system.
We need a way for people to say "I Agree!" without modding the post up with 'Insightful' or something. And vice-versa. Many people moderate down anything they disagree with just because they have to disagree somehow but aren't prepared to write a message. If they could tag something quick they might be satisfied. (Or if not, in comes that distributed system of trust to reduce the value of their always exaggerated claims.)
Someone in this thread will probably mention the Starpath (Arcadia) Supercharger, which added a datacassette to the 2600. The free game which was included, Phasor Patrol, was my favorite in the Star Raiders / Starmaster spaceflight-sim genre. The A/B switches raised and lowered shields on your ship, and the crosshairs changed color to offer target tracking. It was extremely smooth and immensely playable. Another great game for the Supercharger was Dragon Stomper...
> What's an Atari 2600?
It's a whole new treasure trove of source material for Uwe Bolle.
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
One of the great joys of being this age is listening to people your age whine.
I don't blame you though. We got all the cool games, bought houses before the bubble, got jobs before the dot-com crash, had gas cheap enough to have a pastime called cruising (that's were you simply drive just for pleasure)...and we got all the good music.
Your games are pretty, but not nearly as playable. Houses are now in the quarter-million range commonly - good luck paying that off. New cars can easily run 30k. Gas will be $4 a gallon by the end of the summer, so you're going to be home a lot. As for music, the thumping crap you have to force yourself to like if you're going to be cool is more like electronic artillery rather than anything musical. I only hope that continual exposure to high decibel low frequency bass causes sterility by jangling your balls into non-functionality.
Kids today are screwed. And I actually feel pretty bad about it - except in your case.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Although the 2600 itself was the older system, its version of Star Raiders came out much later (1982 according to Wikipedia). I haven't played that version, but given how primitive the 2600 hardware is compared to the 400/800, I'd give credit to *anyone* who could get a passably faithful version of Star Raiders on that system, regardless of the limitations.
Anyway, the 1979 original was an incredible feat for its time. Yes, it was running on (what was then) state of the art hardware, and of course more polished games came along later (for both the 400/800 and other 8-bit machines). But by the standards of its contemporaries, it's just incredible- relatively advanced "full" 3D graphics, basic strategy elements and (for what is basically a shoot-'em-up) real hunter-killer depth to the fighting itself. Yet running in 16K (8K ROM + 8K RAM) on new and relatively unknown hardware.
This was just a year after Space Invaders had first been released, and it wasn't even running on "arcade" hardware, but a home system (albeit an expensive one).
Yes, Elite probably had more depth (and deserves credit for its influence too), but that came out five years later, during which time both the market and experience in developing software on the 8-bit machines had improved massively. Look at the first and last games to be released for a long-lived console and you'll see a massive difference in technical quality- experience with the system and techniques is just as important as having advanced hardware.
Star Raiders came out around three years before the Commodore 64 was even released!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I love stories like this.
:P
:) And you never know, it could be good (for kids) - sometimes games get canned for all the wrong reasons.
A friend of mine and I went to an ex-Atari developer's house in South San Jose to pick up a few old things he was selling. He just happened to have an old Tempest game . . . with a paper printout overlay. The serial number was 001. Yes, he let us play it. It was in near-perfect condition.
He also sold my friend another old (pinball?) game, unreleased, which previously had been thought to have only one model of. Wrong, there are definitely two. Wish I could remember what it was
Anyway, I hope he's able to recover the game. Even if it's a piece of crap, it's a piece of historical crap
Love, Squeedle