RE: [stella] Strange Atari item found

Subject: RE: [stella] Strange Atari item found
From: Ben Combee <combee@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2001 23:06:32 -0600

As someone else pointed out, a cart like this that took the normal ROM chips
from real carts wouldn't make much sense, since it would be hard to get the
chips without thier carts. The ones that took EPROMS where made for the
purpose of piracy. One person would buy the original cart, dump the data,
and program it into as many EPROMS as they wanted, then all you would need
was one of these ZIF socket carts to play the games.

Around here in Austin, several collectors have picked up these kind of carts designed for ROM chips. It seems that Motorola was one of the big companies doing ROM manufacturing for the game companies, and one of the fabs doing the ROM chips was here in town. People who worked in the fabs could often take ROM chips from the factory, bring them home, and play them on their Atari 2600's using these. Alex Bilstein got a set of these a few years ago, and all of the chips were the production versions -- very rarely did a company do ROM prototypes.


--
Ben Combee
Techwood Broadcasting Foundation, Austin Bureau Chief

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/


Current Thread