Re: [stella] Strange Atari item found

Subject: Re: [stella] Strange Atari item found
From: "MoonlightKnight" <mnlghtnt@xxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 11:11:15 -0600
The strangest thing about the gold marked ones is that two of them, which
both have the game Robot Tank on them, actually say Activision and have the
year "83" and the part number AG-028-01 on them. There are four others (I
didn't get pictures of ALL the ROMs so you only see two more) which are
Yar's Revenge, E.T., Berzerk and Frogs & Flies. Those three don't have any
markings on them at all. Alot of the ROMs, including the Robot Tanks, have
the initials "VTI" on them. Maybe that would help further identify them. I
did notice that any doubles I got are identical to each other, but not
necessarily identical to another pair of doubles.

In comparing an actual Enduro ROM with the two ROMs that I received that had
Enduro on them, they are very different. The real one has the part number,
the year and said Activision on it. The copies (obviously) have none of
this.  Without mutilating anymore carts, I'm going to make the assumption
that ALL of these ROMs are copies, although I fail to see the purpose of
making these, especially considering the assortment of different chips used.

Well gotta go again, talk to y'all later.
And remember to eschew obfuscation!

Brian J Nelson
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Grand" <jgrand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <stella@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2001 9:00 AM
Subject: Re: [stella] Strange Atari item found


> It would be interesting to compare the markings on some of those ROMs to
> the markings on the ROMs of the actual production carts.. Maybe someone
> just snuck some of the ROMs out of Atari or the manufacturing facility..
> The devices with the gold covers are still ROM devices (not EPROM or EE),
> but I haven't seen those used in any production carts..
>
> Joe
>
>
> At 08:20 AM 12/07/2001 -0500, Eric wrote:
>
> >The appear to be OTP (one time programmable) PROMs.  The gold covers are
> >typical of the ceramic packaging.  Although it is possible that these are
> >prototypes, I would suspect that a developer would more probably use a UV
> >erasable EPROM rather than an OTP.  OTP PROMs are considerably cheaper
than
> >EPROMs, so these are probably pirate ROMs as has been suggested
previously.
> >The only other thing they could be is an electrically erasable EEPROM,
but
> >I don't know when those first became available (and they are much more
> >expensive than a standard UV EPROM).
>
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