Most Legendary Haul at the Flea Market
| April 20th, 2008
Today, we went to the Laney College Flea Market. As usual. I know I’ve written about the amazing things I’ve found at this swap meet. In the past, I got a Game & Watch, and oodles of rare old console games. But today, I found a never published Atari game. I am not kidding. This is the holy grail of videogame collecting.
Normally, identifying unreleased games is not easy. But these are.
I found a bunch of EPROMs laying at the front of a table of junk at the market. I immediately went to check them out, and when I looked closely, I saw that one of them said in hand-written letters “Coleco 6/30 2 Cabbage Patch.” Ok, so I knew that meant this was a copy of the poor Colecovision game, Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park. A $10 game. Not so wonderful, but certainly intriguing. I bought 7 of the blocks of chips for $14.
When I got home, I noticed that a bunch of the chips said “CPKPark Atari” Some said “CPKPARK 2600 Atari.”
OK, now I was getting a boner. Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600. A game which was never finished, and never released. I searched the Web, and found this page. Which says, basically, that the only known copy of Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600 is in the hands of Ed English, the guy who wrote it. Did Ed clean house and give the junk to random Mexican Flea Market people? I think, more likely, an old Coleco office was cleaned out. I went back and bought the remaining 9 slabs of chips.
I already know I have a new find here, something unique, unseen. Now, there are many many other EPROMS in this bunch. Some say “Spy 13″ with various rev numbers and dates. Is this Spy Hunter for Colecovision? One says WarGames, which I take to be the Colecovision Wargames game. Another set says only “51c7.” Still, another set says AET2010 or possibly ACT2010. I think that’s “2010 Action Game” for Colecovision. Another one is a copy of “Tapper.”
Also, there’s a ship labeled Dragon 80. Another labeled L12. Then there’s Hustler, and a couple more that I take to be test chips. Another says Sword. I’ll have to find someone with the know-how to dump old ROMS to help me save this stuff for posterity.
As if this once-in-a-lifetime find wasn’t enough, on the way out, I found two Mario diorama figures. Great, whatever, they make those all over now, right? Wrong. These two are from 1988. Wow!
So, I suppose I’d better not ever go back to the flea market. After today, I can’t possibly find anything to top this. This is fucking unreal. I’m so excited, I’ve been cackling madly out the window of my car all day.
UPDATE: For anyone who didn’t notice, I’ve dumped the ROMs. More info at the front of the blog, or directly at this page.
Nice find! I hope you figure out a way to read the ROMs.
Hello…..Great find. If those EPROMS are still working and the labels are consistent to what is actually in the EPROMS you have quite a find there. What do you plan to do with the EPROMS……I highly suggest that you dump them first to preserve them….if you need help with that, open an account with atariage.com/forums and somebody in the forums can help you with them. If you ever plan to sell them, you can sell them on atariage.com (cannot sell them on e-bay because they do not allow the sale of protos)….of course I would be very interested in them. E-mail me if you have any further questions. Again, congrats on your find…..
Wonder007
Do they all work? Definitely a great find!!
Can I come over and play Cabbage Patch with you?
Those Mario figurines are dope. I remember seeing those a long time ago.
Drool! What a great find! And to think I spend most of my time on Treasure Island. So close…
I have a set-up to dump Atari 2600 ROMs, so if you want to meet up, let me know. I don’t have any easy way to dump Colecovision ROMs short of using my device programmer (BP Microsystems BP-1200).
-Joe
OMG! I’m really excited at this news! Man, you must NEVER sell those proto’s, money is not important when you have a UNIQUE item in the world!
I wish I could find such items for creatiVision…
Wish you good luck dumping those ROMs, and I can’t wait to play the actual games on emulator!
Regards,
Luca, Italia
OK, now I’m getting boner.
wooo. cabbage patch kids. there is a reason it wasnt released.
This needs to be archive by either Atariage or Digital Press
Contact those guys for any help
Surely someone has a USB EEprom reader for their PC. I still have the reader for my c64. Never know when I’m gonna find new roms for my MAME box. If you were in Florida I could help you in a jiffy. Great find. Good Luck!
GREAT !!!
I wonder how would that be even possible… Extreme find ! DUMP DUMP DUMP DUMP IT
Atari 2600 still kicks asses.
Congrats and You should never stop looking
As “Joe” has already stated, it’s not difficult to dump the binary content of these Eeproms into PC memory. You just need a “prom programmer” like he has, and these things are more ubiquitous than you may think. Many Web shops sell them, for
prices going from fair to outrageous - because quite franky, the components in there can hardly be called high-tech. Example:
http://microcontrollershop.com/product_info.php?cPath=31_61&products_id=203
Obviously, once you got the whole apparatus set up, you’d better make absolutely sure that you just inspect the content of the eeprom, rather than modify it. I believe that these type of proms have a specific “write command” pin - whereas modern proms use some kind of command language to describe the desired operation. You might consider to deliberately bend this write-pin upwards, so that it can never touch the programmer socket underneath. Like “locking” a floppy.
I have the required eprom reader and would be happy to assist!
Its an old large Serial port Eprom Reader and works well for old chips, perfect for reading these.
Do you still need help? Email me!
[...] April 22, 2008 by knarrnia IS THIS NOT AWESOME? [...]
the question is is why would someone cleaning out coleco not recognize that these just “might” be worth something and put them in a time vault or auction them off for a good cause instead of putting them for the taking at a flea market. seems logical which is probably why it didnt happen.
you should ask some of the veteran members of atari-age. I’m sure one of them has to have a dumper and will actually return the chips back to you afterwards.
http://www.atariage.com/
Great!
Until you haven’t managed to dump them, please pack them carefully in some EMF-shielded container (e.g. a box surrounded with some aluminium sheets).
Then go for atariage and find someone who can help you dumping them!
Congrats on your find. I can only imagine the rush you got when you read the labels
I own a couple Game & Watch’s myself. Found ‘em while moving my old apartment and got almost the same reaction. Donkey Kong’s display has seen better days tho :’( Hope the backuping goes smoothly, let us fanatics now as soon as possible! Can’t wait to emulate some of these babys.
The Laney College Flea Market is the coolest flea market I’ve ever been too. If there was anywhere to find these gems, it had to be there
You sure can find some amazing things at flea markets. Very nice find!
Great find, Bira Bira has surely blessed you.
I’ve got a universal programmer, that should be able to read
all of these. I am in Sunnyvale, so you would have to come
visit, and you can sit at the desk reading each one and
writing to a file.
Email me if interested.
Holy shit this is unreal. That Cabbage Patch game is going to be absolutely wretched but fully worth the wait.
Keep those things out of the light until you talk with someone about dumping them properly. I’d avoid taking any more flash pictures if I were you.
I own a device programmer, and if for some reason that couldn’t do it, my employer owns several others. Let me know if you need help. (I live/work in Alameda.)
Nice find.
Better to be lucky than good
If you need help reading the chips, I have an EPROM reader and could dump them off in short order.
I have an eprom burner/reader. I could read those ROMs for you.
You jammy, jammy, jammy bastard. Is all I can say. Well done on the find; hope the roms have survived the test of time and you/we get to see them.
Hit up the guys at http://www.atariprotos.com/ they would be really interested in this stuff.
–atari
Alex, it’s me! You know who to call when you find old ROMs you shit eating monkey!
Drop me a line or call me and we’ll hook up to dump the ROMs.
you better be careful “dumping” them. you don’t own the copyright. what you’ll be doing is illegal, and you risk a jail sentence
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO READ THE CHIPS YOURSELF.
Old EEPROMs tend to have slightly wonky pinouts. If you’ve never dumped a chip before, you absolutely do NOT want to make an exceedingly rare prototype your first attempt.
Secondly, don’t bother with Atari Age (unless you can contact Dan Boris specifically) or Atari Protos. All of these people are just going to dump the cartridges off the edge connectors themselves.
If you want a reliable, EXTREMELY skilled person to take care of this for you, do yourself a favor and get into contact with Guru, the guy who does the majority of ROM dumping for those of us who develop MAME. His site is located here - http://www.mameworld.net/gurudumps/ - and I can personally vouch for him. I’ve sent a $500 arcade boardset to him before, and he’s treated it with the utmost care. He has the hands of a surgeon, and can recognize and successfully dump practically any ROM type there is, from tricky surface-mount QFP chips to ancient EEPROMs that other people have given up on. He’s in Australia, but let’s be frank: Would you rather trust some random Atari message board patron that you have no info on, or someone who does all of his work openly, and publicly describes his methods and his suite of equipment?
Hi, very nice find!
I’m quite good at dumping EPROMs, check my website to see what I’m doing in retrogames preservation.
If you need my service, contact me, I’ll be more than happy to help.
All the best
f205v
Ah, “Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600″ yes, I can ask around for help but I’m not too keen to help. See, I already got one. It’s very nice! (said with outrageous french accent).
Wow, I gotta go check out that flea market some time.
Hey, I’ve got two of those Mario figures too, different than the ones you have. (pic)
I can second the comments made by MooglyGuy. The “Don’t try this at home!” applies here.
Send it to “Guru” of Mame fame and you _know_ your ROMs will get the best possible treatment possible.
Please read this carefully:
http://www.mameworld.net/gurudumps/customs.html
Good luck,
OE
Just hopping in from /., great find!
[...] (via gism) [...]
I’ve got a Eprom programmer, and I’ll gladly dump out the contents for you.
EPIC. epic epic epic.
[...] Gism Butter’s finds at a local flea market via Waxy. Today, we went to the Laney College Flea Market. As usual. I know I’ve written about the amazing things I’ve found at this swap meet. In the past, I got a Game & Watch, and oodles of rare old console games. But today, I found a never published Atari game. I am not kidding. This is the holy grail of videogame collecting.Normally, identifying unreleased games is not easy. But these are… [...]
MooglyGuy is right.
ITs a friggin atari game.. are you like 12? people crack me up…
[...] Gism Butter’s finds at a local flea market via Waxy. Today, we went to the Laney College Flea Market. As usual. I know I’ve written about the amazing things I’ve found at this swap meet. In the past, I got a Game & Watch, and oodles of rare old console games. But today, I found a never published Atari game. I am not kidding. This is the holy grail of videogame collecting.Normally, identifying unreleased games is not easy. But these are… [...]
[...] via gism.net. [...]
Just a thought does sword refer to swordquest, possibly teh unreleased airworld game?
EPROMs are only supposed to last 10 years
You should get them dumped relatively soon, just get a cheap programmer
I used to work for Atari many years ago. Those are almost certainly the real deal. I recognize the handwriting
I think your figurines are “bookends” for your Nintendo cassettes.
in the meantime i’m labeling my other worthless EPROMs with stickers like yours have in the hopes that others haven’t yet read this story will also not be able to read them until after they make the purchase.
Thanks!
what the fuck were you doing at a flea market on 4/20?
You’re so lucky, finding a bunch of pieces of shit and paying money for them. I WISH I HAD YOUR LIFE. AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
This is almost as exciting as the time I found that dust ball under my bed….zZzZzZ
you fuckin nerd do something with ur life for god sake!!!!!
i also like videogames a lot but sayin that finding those games (very stupid games so thats why they never released them) is so exciting that it almost mede u come in your fuckin pants… please dont u have anything better to do????
Daaang. That’s an amazing find!
Great find. Ignore the critics. Many do not know the joys of hobbies such as collecting rare items. No matter the subject, on of a kid is one of a kind.
You should probably take the guy that seems the most intense to do this. That way you know you’ve got the best.
[...] geeky cool thing! He discovered some old atari erpom chips from Colico. Check out the article here ARTICLE Author Comments [...]
you’ve got a duty to get copies to a scene release group or release them yourself via p2p. there is no question that your discovery should be shared. let us know if this is your plan.
[...] Read the full article. 2600, atari, EEPROM reddit_url = ‘http://casualgamerchick.com/2008/04/26/one-mans-junk-is-another-mans-2600-game/’; Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
Do ou see any writing on the rom chip of the one that says “sword” that has a date on it? It very well could be the airworld prototype that left mysteriously from atari,one i know went to a programmer or something. You really need to check that one out ASAP!
Go back today and see if your flea market friend has more of these “rare finds”. Good luck this and let us know how it turns out.
honestly…you are a fucking faggot. if this kind of thing gives you a boner, you are in dire need of a life you nerdy little gay piece of shit. what in the world is so great about some stupid atari games about CABBAGE PATCH KIDS? I think someone needs to go and burn those games and slap some sense into you. go outside and do something productive like exercise, and no walking around at the fucking flea market does not count as exercising. GET…A…LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
To ‘wow…’
I agree, if it was true, he only said it for a joke. It would be damned nerdy haha
i think it was just emphasis. I’d be excited if I had that much money’s worth.
Why am I not excited ?
Wow, took all of 5 minutes for Wonder to come out of the woodwork to sleazeball for those eproms, lol.
Wow!! Just like you said, it’s like the holy goddam grail of retro-gaming! Unbelievable!!
Also, you have the same keyboard as me, talking about the Dell one.