Hello everyone,
Time for me to speak out again. In order to
increase my collection, I have been buying and selling on EBay. I just
received one of my purchases today and found something odd. The auction said I
would get "games and chips." I took chips to mean PCBs without their cases.
What I got was just the chips without the boards and a strange "player" for
them. Someone took an Atari board, removed the chip and soldered a "TexTool"
to it where the chip used to be. This mod makes it possible to swap any of the
chips and play whatever game with just this one board! For those of you who
don't know what a TexTool is it's kind of like the slots for PC processors on
your motherboard. You know, put the pins in the little holes, move the little
"locking arm" down to secure the chip. The interesting thing about this item
is that it accepts programs from several different companies despite the fact
that it has an Atari board. I've got games from Activision, Data East and
M-Network that seem to work just fine with it.
Definately a strange object, but pretty cool
anyway. I might try taking apart some of my games that have never work ( I
receive one or two every once in a while) and trying those chips to see if I
can get them to work with out their original boards. Who ever made this thing
was part genius and part crazy. Good Idea, but you have to rip apart carts to
use it. I got about 100 chips here (some of them don't look like they are the
original chips for the games that are on them,) but unfortunatly nothing rare
or unusual among them.
Well, that's all for now, but I'll be happy to go
on about this if anyone is interested.
Thanks
Brian J
Nelson
