Gism Butter

Well, they’ve been dumped. And just about everything here is what I thought it was. The boner is still raging.

The entire kit and kaboodle of these roms can be downloaded from my server here. This file includes all the Coleco games, and the 10, yes 10 revisions of the Cabbage Patch Kids game for Atari. Other games in this file are Video Hustler, Sword and Sorcery (Yes, really), monkey Academy (Seemingly molested with a debugger), Spy Hunter and 2010 The Action Graphic Game.

Also, there’s a bunch of Adam tools in there. There’s a dev suite, a debugger, two bank switches and a duplicator for the tape drive.

So, breaking it down a bit, here’s what we know. Firstly, Ed Temple is a fucking god. Take one look at Cabbage Patch for Atari and you’ll see that he worked very hard to squeeze some amazing graphics out of the platform. Second, Sword and Sorcery needs to be diddled in order to work. The Atari ROMS work fine because they’re all on single ROMs. the Coleco games are multi-chip games, save for Hustler. Therefore, they won’t work right in a Coleco emulator because it can only open a single file, not the four needed to fun the game. I tried pasting these files together, but that doesn’t work either.

Sword and Sorcery, which is just barely on two chips, halts on its load screen. I can’t get the game to run. I’m sure someone out there will solve this mystery for me. The same problem occurs with Dragon 80, which was can’t even get to run up to menu screen.

Jigsaw and Tapper are both single ROMs from larger batches, so they won’t run either. The 2010 game is complete, as is Spy Hunter. Also in there is Monkey Academy, but it’s got all manner of debug code in the middle chip. I figure this means it was having dev issues.

We also have, in this batch, those Adam development tools, so someone please let me know if those are cool, unknowns or are already out there and not that exciting.

The final summary: Everything worked. Many chips had memory checksums written on them, and every time, they matched the dumped check sum. The one chip that was not taped and have an open window on it was completely empty, likely a blank.

Special thanks goes out to Joe Grand who dumped these for me. I gave him one of the 12 Cabbage Patch kids roms, so you can all be insanely jealous.

If you’re going to play around with these ROMs, I ask that you post info you find on the Web, and then link to it in the comments on this post. Again, all the ROMs are in this zip file.

Tomorrow they will be dumped. Tomorrow night, we should know. We’ll probably need some help analyzing the data, but I’ll post it all here. I can’t say that I will get it all posted by tomorrow night, as I have a dinner engagement at Tommy’s Joynt. But after that, the data that is recovered will come here.

On Tuesday evening, I went to the ACCRC because I had seen a Colecovision there a few weeks back. It was there, but it only had a 2-wire TV connector RF converter. Can’t just plug in the seemingly RCA jack that comes out the back of old game consoles, because it carries sound and video on one plug. You need that silver box with a switch in it. Usually, that box has a coax plug. None of the three I found at the ACCRC did.

So we had to hook it up to a 1960’s era TV. We plug in Venture, which was lying around in the piles of junk there, and nothing happens. Coleco’s dead. Probably the power supply. TV worked fine, though. Got kinda red inside… like, glowing tubes red. Took 1 minute to warm up enough to work. Wire console in the back was loose and I had to pull it up from behind the bezzel and hold it in place while I screwed down the two-wire connectors. It was black and white.
It worked.

Anyway, we ended the night knowing NOTHING more than we started.

So, tomorrow, we know. Sunday, I’d like to go to Laney and look for a Colecovision. I know that hitting the flea market is kinda a solo affair– don’t wanna fight over who saw something first. But perhaps, as a gesture of good faith, we can have a collectors armistice this Sunday. Maybe us local Oakland / San Francisco / East Bay could all meet up somewhere on Sunday morning and hit Laney as one swarm?

I hadn’t been to the Laney College flea market in a couple of months, mainly due to the rain and the fact that I’ve been wicked busy since the year started. But yesterday, I went over and checked it out. good thing too, as the next two weeks are going to be no-flea-market weeks since the carnival is in town and takes up the same spot.

But, oh, what a day it was! Right off the bat, there was a guy out front with large boxes filled with Nintendo games, both NES and SNES. He had other games too, but I ended up not buying anything from him because they were all in such terrible shape. Still, lots of titles to choose from there. All common, though.

This did whet my appetite, though. Inside the flea market, my hunger was sated. First thing I found was a copy of Uncharted, the Koei pirate game for SNES. $2. Next, one of the regular game sellers had obviously had quite a haul since last I was there. This hispanic family sells modern games, and a lot of last gen stuff too. But yesterday, they had a box full of NES carts, and in there was a Dr. Mario box. I tried to buy just the box, since the cart was burried in their box, but he wanted me to get the game too. I tried not to let on that I was collecting, but the guy knows me by now, and I think he knows I pay a fair premium on good stuff. I got the Dr. Mario Box (everything, including ripped shrink wrap, but no manual), a full copy of Road Rash, and Chrystalis. I payed $20. Probably more than I should have, since Road Rash isn’t worth dick.

But god, I love Road Rash. Note the developers pictured on the back of the manual! Geez, EA has really changed.

Next up was the Asian family that sells games from all eras. They had nothing of interest! A shame. It looks like they haven’t refreshed their stock since last I was there.

There’s one guy at the flea market who always has rare game stuff. And he knows what it is, too, which sucks. But then, he always has rad things that you simply can’t find anywhere else. He had a floppy-disk adapter for the SNES, and a Vectorex, once.

Well, yesterday, he had a Game & Watch. Super Mario Brothers. No battery cover, though. Still he wanted $30. And that’s what I paid for it. He doesn’t haggle. Still, good price, I’d say. Took it home and swapped the cover from my Turtles G&W, and the damn thing still works.

Then I stumbled upon a stack of Atari home computer games at a nearby stall. These were for the Atari 400. not terribly collectible, but there was one that was: Donkey Kong. $1. Of course, the dood who’s been circling the net with his story of how he wrote that game made me really want it.

I always keep a copy of Videogame Collector with me at the flea market. When I found a box filled with an Intellivision, games, manuals and overlays, I sneaked away to glimpse the mag’s prices. A quick look told me that most intellivision games were worth $1, but that some were in their $20’s. I fretted, then decided to buy the whole box for $20. The games weren’t worth it at all, cept Locomotion, which is worth $8. But the Intellivision was in near mint shape, and there were manuals and overlays for a lot of games that weren’t in the box.

V looked at me like I was crazy, but I’m glad I bought it. When I got the box home, I photographed all the ephemera, and it’s posted below. One thing I didn’t bargain for in this set was a bag of meth. Yep, someone’s stash was in the box, unbeknownst to the seller. I flushed the stuff without confirming what it really was, but come on: white powder, small baggie… Someone in Oakland is still looking desperately for their drugs right now.

After the Intellivision, I was ready to leave, but there was one row left. And down that row I found two Sega gems: 1 full complete boxed copy of Phantasy Star 2, and a Mega Drive game called PsyoBlade. $2 each. The Phantasy Star 2 even has the map, though it is mangled and taped together. Someone played the hell outta this game!

While I wouldn’t go as far as calling him a recluse, Jack Tramiel is probably the toughest 80’s computer mogul to find. jack and his sons built Commodore into a household name, thanks to the PET, the VIC-20 and finally the Commodore 64, the best selling personal computer of all time.

Quibble quibble: every type of Apple iBook is essentially different thanks to shifting specs and individually configured RAM and drives. Thus, the C64 remains the champ of single unit sales for PCs.

Anyway, Tramiel and his family came out for the 25th anniversary of the C64, held three months after the fact at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. For Jack, the patriarch of the family and an Auschwitz survivor, it was the first time he’d appeared in public to speak about Commodore in 15 years. many in attendance, I heard, thought he was dead, or had alzhiemers. Fortunately, these were rumors, and Jack was a joy to listen to all night.

He and Wozniak were exchanging jabs over computer price points all night long.

I was not thinking about demos when I walked into this event, but as the evening progressed, I found myself thinking about the whole Demo Scene more and more. This world began with the C64, really. But later in the night, I got a midnight demonstration of the PDP-1, which can play 4-channel square-wave music, and display mandalas on its oscilloscope screen. Wouldn’t that count as the first demo? I suppose the music and display would have to be going at once, a feat the PDP-1 was not powerful enough to do at the time. Sallem thinks it could be done with 2-channel sound…

Tramiel answered my question, at one point, by stating that he knew of the significance of the C64 for the demo scene and for the game world. After I asked my question, demo nerds swarmed me. It’s good to see people are still interested in these moving art works realized in code.

Also, special events at the CHS mean occasional trips into the back rooms! Note the cool Newton prototypes and the hardcore upskirt shot I got of a Xerox Alto. These are all in my Flickr stream.

Oodles of pictures, and my GameTap story linked here. Anyone want to stick one of my pictures in the Wikipedia entry on Jack?