33 replies to this topic

[jumbojohnny]

I am new to the site, and I honestly know very litte about prototypes and rare games. I am asking anybody here if they might be able to help me.

A few years ago, my girlfriend's mother gave me a Coleco with many games. I have 16 carts that are unlabeled (not factory label, just a strip of tape with the game title). My girlfriend's mother used to work for Coleco in Hartford, CT and thats how she got all the games. She does not know much about the unlabeled games, except that a lot of times these carts were passed from departments.

How am I supposed to identify if these are protoypes or in-house carts used for developement? I havent got pictures of them yet, but I should shortly. Somebody told me to open the carts, but I dont want to do anything that might ruin or damage the actual game. Also, if I were to open the carts, I have no clue what I am looking for to figure out what it is.

Can anybody help me out with some useful information as to what I should do? At this point I am not worried too much about the values of these games (for all I know they might be gold or worthless). I will figure that out as I learn more about them.

What do I need to provide for information or pics that can get me some info?

[Cebus Capucinis]

I'm going to go ahead and say it from other forums:

"In before 'dump the rom' and then a huge debate as to whether something super-secret-rare-awesome is actually real or not", and then "in before OP isn't interested in selling it until he finds out it's worth eleventy billion dollars then magically becomes interested in it"

[CPUWIZ]

Open one, take pics.

[jumbojohnny]

I am not sure what the first part of that means...as for the seeling part...I would be more interested in finding out what I have before selling things off. I dont want to sell one of these games and have an unhappy buyer becuase it is nto what I claimed it to be, also I would rather sell something like this to a person who actually would value it more than I would. I dont care for this system or the games, so therefore I would rather see somebody who care have it. IF these are some type of rare games then they should belong to people that actually apprecaite them.

CebusCapucinis, on Sun Nov 8, 2009 9:29 PM, said:

I'm going to go ahead and say it from other forums:

"In before 'dump the rom' and then a huge debate as to whether something super-secret-rare-awesome is actually real or not", and then "in before OP isn't interested in selling it until he finds out it's worth eleventy billion dollars then magically becomes interested in it"

[jumbojohnny]

And what else am I supposed to do? Is there any information that I would need to post with the pics?

CPUWIZ, on Sun Nov 8, 2009 9:29 PM, said:

Open one, take pics.

[Mitch]

jumbojohnny, on Sun Nov 8, 2009 10:32 PM, said:

And what else am I supposed to do? Is there any information that I would need to post with the pics?

CPUWIZ, on Sun Nov 8, 2009 9:29 PM, said:

Open one, take pics.

I think the old saying that a picture is worth 1000 words applies here.

Detailed pictures should suffice for the moment.

Mitch

[jumbojohnny]

Here are a few pictures that I took.

This picture is of three "regular game carts"

Mouse Trap - Donkey Kong Jr - Cosmic Avenger



This is the "Questionable" Ms Pac-Man cart







This is a "regular" Donkey Kong


Two copies of "questionable" Q-Bert




"questionable" Burger Time

[Shawn Sr.]

Looks like the folks at coleco did some in house "pirating" of the competitors games (ms.pac is atari, qbert is parker bros. ect.) BUT some of those are proto boards for sure.

Edited by Shawn Sr., Wed Nov 11, 2009 6:56 PM.

[newcoleco]

The Miss PacMan cartridge looks like an Atari 2600 game, but I have no answer why it's inside a cart with the logo Coleco on it. But it's an Atari 2600 cartridge, so I guess it can be explained if someone did place the game inside the cartridge because the other cartridge was broken. But at the same time, someone did prove to me that sometimes there are weird things like a Coleco cartridge with a label for an Atari 2600 game on it, printed "for ColecoVision" for no logical reason... maybe it was the opposite, I can't remember anymore.

As for the pcbs with sockets, it's difficult to know if it's prototype or not. Q*Bert game is very well compressed into 8K, and your picture shows a Q*Bert chip alone which indicated me it's a 8K too. Sometimes, prototypes are using more chips and then optimized to use less, sometimes the prototypes has less levels or sounds, that makes the game fit in the same number of chips than the final version. So, it's really difficult to judge if it's prototypes or not. I'll say they are prototypes.

As for the "regular" Donkey Kong, I did open a lot of Donkey Kong cartridges to recycle them for my own projects, none of them had this pcb version. In your pictures, we can see it's a 24K version which is the first released version of Donkey Kong, before they decided to cut the production by making a more optimized version with only 2 chips, which is 16K. The dates written on the labels suggest june '82, the last Coleco bios version is dated of september '82, so my guess is... Congratulations! You have a one-of-a-kind DK prototype.

My supposition of these made for an exhibition is possible. But to be well presented at the press, they usually uses cartridges with labels, here it's more for testing purpose.

If I was you, I'll try to dump the content of the ROM files, then compare them with the ROM files already in the Internet to see any differences.

Edited by newcoleco, Wed Nov 11, 2009 7:13 PM.

[jumbojohnny]

I dont know how to dump ROM or anything of the sort. I am a baseball car collector, and a fan of video games, but I know nothing of technical talk. As for the Ms.Pacman cart...the PC board is also labeled COLECO in siler on the upper right corner.

Here is a list of all of the other "Questionabale" carts that I have. I will try to get some more pics before the weekend.

Cabbage Patch Kids Adventure in the Park
Congo Bongo
War Games
QBert x2
Omega Race
Miss Pacman
Carnival
Space Panic
Centipede
Popeye
Burger Time
Black Jack/Poker
Telly Turtle
Artic Adventure

[Wickeycolumbus]

Very interesting! Thanks for the pictures, I look forward to seeing the others.

jumbojohnny, on Wed Nov 11, 2009 7:24 PM, said:

Cabbage Patch Kids Adventure in the Park

I wonder if it is the 2600 version

[jumbojohnny]

I am taking more pictures now. I should have them up a bit later. I apologize if the quality is a bit shotty, my camera kinda sucks.

Wickeycolumbus, on Wed Nov 11, 2009 7:33 PM, said:

Very interesting! Thanks for the pictures, I look forward to seeing the others.

jumbojohnny, on Wed Nov 11, 2009 7:24 PM, said:

Cabbage Patch Kids Adventure in the Park

I wonder if it is the 2600 version

[Cebus Capucinis]

Would that be cars with baseballs inside them or baseball shaped cars?

[jumbojohnny]

CebusCapucinis, on Wed Nov 11, 2009 8:10 PM, said:

Would that be cars with baseballs inside them or baseball shaped cars?

Sorry about that typo. Baseball Cards

[slydc]

Humm...i say the Ms.Pac-Man you have there is NOT for the Colecovision but for the Atari 2600.

For those who doesn't know, the Ms.Pac-Man cartridge board has 12 pins on one side, which makes a total of 24-pins.
It is exactly the numbers of pins of the Atari 2600 cartridge slot. As for the Colecovision, it has 15 pins on one
side and has 30-pins in total (both side counted for).

One day, i found an Atari 2600 cartridge lot on a nearby flea market, and one of those carts was Donkey Kong Junior
which i thought it was heavier than the other. So since it peaked my curiosity, i opened it and saw exacty what
your Ms.Pac-Man has inside (x4 TTLs and x1 Eprom - except that your Ms.Pac-Man has a dip socket). But the DKJr. isn't a prototype, it had the released label on it
like any others. So what i did with it was i pulled-off the eprom, solder a zif socket and made myself a dev cart with
it. I know that some companies were shorts on proms (back then) so they opted for eproms which costed more than regular
proms but they didn't wanted te stores to get short on stock.

I even found Colecovision carts with eproms on them BUT they didn't have any dip socket on them, the eproms were solder
directly on the board. Those i gave to Daniel Bienvenu since he love so much the Colecovision.

Ok 'Nuff said on technical babble...LOL!!!

Edited by slydc, Thu Nov 12, 2009 12:45 AM.

[Bruce Tomlin]

What's interesting is that the Ms. Pac-Man is on a Coleco-style (4-chip) 2600 bank switch board. Also, it has no green soldermask on it, which means either it's a spare board or someone had their own made. I suspect that it's a copy cart made by someone who had access to Coleco's equipment (empty boards, EPROM burners, etc.) The other games are on socket carts, and they also have handwritten labels. I'm guessing they may just be copy carts too.

The Ms. Pac-Man is definitely a copy cart, not a proto, but was probably probably made by someone who worked at Coleco. The other boards could very well be dev test boards, though, which would explain having 2-chip and 3-chip boards with less chips than the game needs.

The DK has different labels and dates on the stickers. And it appears to be soldered down, so I guess it would be a proto. They should all be dumped just in case one of them is a pre-release version, even the Ms. Pac-Man, but that one is not likely to be so.

Edited by Bruce Tomlin, Thu Nov 12, 2009 8:40 AM.

[jumbojohnny]

I will be honest is saying that I have no clue waht anybody means "Dumping the ROM"...I am literally clueless in these matters. Can somebody elaberate for me? Thanks

Also I am working on some more pictures, I am getting back to that now.

[Wickeycolumbus]

jumbojohnny, on Thu Nov 12, 2009 4:59 PM, said:

I will be honest is saying that I have no clue waht anybody means "Dumping the ROM"...I am literally clueless in these matters. Can somebody elaberate for me? Thanks

Dumping the ROM is backing up the game for preservation. The ROM image can then be compared with the final version and checked for differences.

I can't wait to see the new photos

[jumbojohnny]

Wickeycolumbus, on Thu Nov 12, 2009 5:09 PM, said:

jumbojohnny, on Thu Nov 12, 2009 4:59 PM, said:

I will be honest is saying that I have no clue waht anybody means "Dumping the ROM"...I am literally clueless in these matters. Can somebody elaberate for me? Thanks

Dumping the ROM is backing up the game for preservation. The ROM image can then be compared with the final version and checked for differences.

I can't wait to see the new photos

OK, thank you for that info...So how do I back up a game? What am I comparing and looking for? I am so clueless that I honestly feel stupid. I really need a walk through for this topic. I am taking the last of the pics now.

[newcoleco]

Well, as for the chips into sockets, you can use them directly with a eprom burner like one of those made by batronix, dumping is easy for these eproms. If you don't want to unsolder the eprom chips from the other pcbs, you need something to read cartridges, and back in the 80s the Coleco Adam users was able to copy games into disks... but you can make an adaptor to be used with an eprom burner.

[jumbojohnny]

newcoleco, on Thu Nov 12, 2009 6:00 PM, said:

Well, as for the chips into sockets, you can use them directly with a eprom burner like one of those made by batronix, dumping is easy for these eproms. If you don't want to unsolder the eprom chips from the other pcbs, you need something to read cartridges, and back in the 80s the Coleco Adam users was able to copy games into disks... but you can make an adaptor to be used with an eprom burner.

Ok, that is out of my realm. I dont have the equip to do that with, nor the intellect either. Is there anything else?

[newcoleco]

Try to find someone near you who can do that for you, and pay for the pizza.

[jumbojohnny]

For those who wanted to see them here are more pics of the "Questionable Carts".


Cabbage Patch Kids Adventure in the Park



Congo Bongo


Space Panic



War Games



Antarctic Adventure



Black Jack Poker



Omega Race



Telly Turtle



Popeye



Centipede CASE IS THE SAME AS MsPACMAN



Carnival



Mysterious No House Board - I have no idea what it is, but it has crystal display windows on the chips

Edited by jumbojohnny, Thu Nov 12, 2009 7:13 PM.

[newcoleco]

Telly Turtle is a 16K game, the board suggest a logic ttl at the top to use 2 banks of 16K instead of 4 banks of 8K each. Also, notice the AM27128, 27 is for EPROM and 128 is for 16 kilobytes bank, a 27256 chip is a 32K EPROM which I use for my games.

Edited by newcoleco, Thu Nov 12, 2009 7:43 PM.

[Allan]

jumbojohnny,
I you still located in Connecticut? If you are I can dump the roms for you. That way they don't have to leave your sight. Just let me know.

Allan