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 A few were unpublished or saw limited runs, like Video Hustler (billiards).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."

nice

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.

Launch Party

The unveiling and first attempt at this game requires:

- 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 /. history. There could easily be as many as 5, even 6 guests! Rock on!

What happens to today's games?

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.

Re:What happens to today's games?

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'm sure a lot of these programmers aren't going to just erase something they may have spent months or years on.

Sometimes they even risk their jobs and lawsuits to see the game get played: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrill_Kill [wikipedia.org]

You never know what might turn up on a DVD-R at a tag sale someday. Maybe the first 3 versions of Duke Nukem Forever. Heres hoping...

Re:What happens to today's games?

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.

It's a lot easier to leak some files on the internet today, then it was to leak a cart back then, and a lot harder to stop.

Re:What happens to today's games?

So while we revel in the curios of the past, we ourselves have none to give to future generations.

I'd say we're more likely to get stuff like this in the future, rather than less likely.. old backup tapes.. possibly stuff the developers took home to show their friends/family (well, maybe that's strictly forbidden or something, it certainly would be with DNF :P ). But I doubt developers just wipe old projects as soon as they start a new one. They probably keep backups of all their code on a network fileserver, that's what any sane person/company would do.

Thanks to the internets, it's easy to find stuff like this online too - I wrote a game when I was 12/13 and sent it into Amiga Format. A couple of years ago in a fit of nostalgia I tried searching for it online, found a website mentioning the name, got in contact with the author, and he sent me a copy (I dont have an Amiga any more and if I still have the floppies for the game they're at least 10 years old and probably corrupt, although the version that I sent into Amiga Format wasn't my final version, so there are little touches that are missing :( ). I can now play my game on an emulator. Kinda cool.

Usually if a project is canceled, it's because it was no fun to play anyway, so don't feel like you're missing out or anything! Some companies just release their boring games anyway.. others, like Valve or 3D Realms, only release games that they know are worthy.

Re:What happens to today's games?

True, though those were rather extreme circumstances. I hate political correctness. Even if I had a family member that died in 9/11, I wouldn't be looking to blame video games and movies (didn't one of the Spiderman movies have to be redone because one of the scenes involved the twin towers?), or accuse them of bad taste by releasing a game that was accurate in the time it was made. Admittedly a game where you can crash planes into towers could upset some people by digging up bad memories, but you can do that in pretty much any flight simulator.. it's not the game publisher's fault. If someone dropped some giant tetris blocks off of the top of a skyscraper (laced with explosives which would automatically go off when a line was completed, of course) and crushed/asploded lots of people, should we stop playing tetris? Or if someone dropped a giant pizza off the top of a tower and flattened a bunch of people, should we stop eating pizza? It's the highly dedicated person that setup these intricate acts of terror that is to blame, not computer games or food..

Seems like we're jumping the gun here...

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.

MAME Dumping Project

"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/ [mameworld.net]

Somebody is getting their comeuppance

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.

reading them

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.

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 ..... 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.

Get thee to AtariAge!

atariage.com [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.

So why should we care?

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

A large subculture

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/ [atariprotos.com] is a repository of Atari stuff and http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/ [assemblergames.com] 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.

Re:Origins

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.

"Them"?

that didn't go over well when our VP found out...

I imagine the kids didn't care for hanging in the tree either.

Re:Cool

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)

Profit!

1. Find some old EPROMS
2. Write the names of old video games on stickers and attach.
3. Go to flea market.
4. Profit!!

Re:Cool

Although I can imagine some teenager asking that question. The Atari VCS/2600 is older than many people alive today (almost 31 years).

Thank you so much for making me feel old :P

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.

Re:Cool

You might like Medieval Mayhem [spiceware.org], my homebrew version of Warlords for the Atari. You can even play online [spiceware.org], though note that the mouse makes a poor substitute for a paddle.

Re:Cool

> though note that the mouse makes a poor substitute for a paddle

Richard Gere might disagree.

Re:Cool

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 [sourceforge.net] for the(you guessed it) 800, and Stella [sourceforge.net] for the 2600. Games are a little harder to come by, underground-gamer.com is down atm. You could try the Pleasuredome [pleasuredome.org.uk] though.

Re:Cool

Oh, OK, so we are excited about how bad the game probably is.

Sort of like a vintage Daikatana?

Re:Where do you live ?

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/ [flickr.com]

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 [wikipedia.org]. 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/ [flickr.com]

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/ [cpushack.net]

Re:That's funny

http://atari.digital-madman.com/content/part4/part4-index.html [digital-madman.com]