Gism Butter

Hit my favorite flea market this past Sunday at Laney college in Oakland. While I didn’t score anything amazing, I did get a legal box full of carts for $30. The guy wanted $50, but I walked away, and by the time I was 2 booths down, he was shouting “$30!”

All of the above 2600 carts were what I’d label “uncommon,” though that’s a complete lie. Maybe about 1/3 were uncommon. The rest are distinctly common. But I’d not had a copy of M*A*S*H or GI Joe before, so I chalked these up to bringing my Atari 2600 cart collection up to snuff.

Of course, the Atari 5200 is worthless. Even the rare games don’t top $100 in the original packaging. I already have most of these anyway. But the three Sega carts, I felt, were worth it. Star Trek and Buck Rogers are both somewhat uncommon.

More Intellivision games for my collection. Plus a Ms. Pac-Man for 7800 that I can play. I have another copy in the sealed box. None of these are really worth anything.

The Genesis games were a great addition to the box. Especially Mutant League hockey. A great game, and somewhat uncommon. I had Ecco, but the others are additions to my collection, and thus I was happy to bring them home.

Finally, two cheat devices and an Atari 800 game. The N64 Game Shark was unexpected. And the Game Genie for Genesis was a nice addition too. You could easily make an argument that I over paid for this box, but I think I got a relative deal.

I normally hate fast food. But EA had shitty food at its event tonight, and I needed something to absorb the liquor when I got home to Oakland. So I wandered into the Burger King at 13th and Broadway for a chicken sandwich. I had the hiccups.

No sooner had I ordered, than Doris, the Shift Manager, noticed I had some nasty Hiccups. She immediately handed me a cup of water. And dammed if it didn’t kill my hickups. Therefore, I’d like to give a shout out to Doris, night manager at the 13th and Broadway Burger King in Oakland. She’s a rose amongst thorns.

Heinold’s First and Last and Last Chance Saloon is turning 125 years old on June Sunday 1st. In honor of this historic occasion, you can drink nickel beer from noon until someone calls the cops.

No fooling!

In case you didn’t know, Alameda Island was dry back in the day. 1880’s, you see. As such, those leaving from the mainland for the island found that their last chance to get a shot and a beer was this humble bunk house salvaged from a tall ship. J. M. Heinold served drinks to the likes of Jack London, for whom the square around this glorious pub is named.

So, come down and get hammers in the shadow of a craptacular steel construction project. The bar is covered in a net shielding it from the building materials that surround it; there’s a new shopping and office structure going in nextdoor. But don’t worry, the party will be spilling out far into the pier and shorefront. And it’s a sure bet that Heinold’s will be serving booze 125 years from now. Provided we’re all not 20 feet under water.

Well, that about wraps it up for the ROMs. All has been revealed. I’d like to thank everyone who helped out (Kevtris, Kingpin, and Zylon) in identifying the games, and making them available to the world. I’ll be returning to my normal, silly blog thingie now, and allow the games to speak for themselves.

Another shout out to Ed Temple, the excellent ninja programmer who wrote Cabbage Patch Kids for the Atari. I mistakenly credited Ed English with this feat, but was informed that it was Temple who really did it.

Finally, a few links to cool things that came about as a result of this find. First, the Wall Street Journal piece. Then there’s the Fark Photoshop contest. Various things at Atari Age have followed the game and its journey to digital distribution. And Tempest took it upon himself to review each version of CPK and describe the differences betwixt them.

Again, thanks to everyone for their support and praise. Anyone who’s asked questions in the comments, I can only say that they’re all answered now, amongst the various pages on this blog and in some of the above links. Above is a picture of me with the ROM and the game in the background. Below is a picture of Joe, who dumped the game. This is a picture of the first time the game had been seen or played in almost 25 years.

Does anyone in the Bay Area want to meet before the flea market? I think a group of collectors could make a great bunch to have coffee with. Comment here if yer into it tomorrow morning!

It only took a few hours to find someone, but #RGVC’s Kevtris came through on the Coleco ROM problem. I have posted another Zip file here, which includes playable forms of the Coleco ROMs I found, all stitched up. The Dragon 80 game has a broken select screen, but the game works, I’m told. I have a crappy emulator here, so I can’t verify… emulator isn’t accepting inputs from the keyboard…..

Behold, the first ever screen shot of The Sword and the Sorcerer:

So, I’ve stuck all of Kevtris’ ROM reconstructions in this archive. They’ve also been stuck into the existing ROM archive, so everyone can play all the revisions in here. We’ve got Sword and the Sorcerer, Spy Hunter in 2 revisions, Wargames, the Adam Resident Debugger, 2010 the Action Graphic Game, Cabbage Patch Kids for Coleco and the still unidentified Dragon 80. Oh, and Cabbage Patch Kids for Atari, but that’s not in this Coleco zip file.

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?

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.

The ACCRC is having its second annual Re-Make event this weekend. On Saturday, it’s “Bring us your crap” day from 10 AM to 5 PM. Bring us your old projects and junk that you just don’t have the time to fix. Then, on Sunday, we’ll be opening the door to a bunch of preselected Makers and letting them rebuilt, remake, and reuse all this stuff, as well as some other junk we’ve got lying around. Should be a real hoot!