Posted Yesterday, 4:49 PM
Well, here's the thing about homebrews (and hacks and re-releases, for that matter). Since the PCB's aren't being produced directly, anymore for Atari 2600 carts, newer carts are all built from donated (in other words cannibalized) components from older carts (including the plastic cover, etc). These aren't officially published, and with today's technology, anyone can reporoduce umpteen million copies of Man Goes Down, provided they have the (fairly) inexpensive equipment to burn a binary to a new EPROM, the fairly simple knowhow to desolder and replace the old chip, a good quality color laser printer for the labels, and a can of spray adhesive. That's it. No difference between me doing that at home and an "official" company doing this. So long as the binaries match (not difficult to find an exact match), the source image files for the labels, manuals, and boxes match 9again, easily found for these titles), and the person constructing the cart works slowly, cleanly, and efficiently, the end result is identical. Because of that capacity to reproduce potentially infinite numbers of a title (provided donor carts don't run out), their "rarity" is non-existent, hence the rating guides here at Atariage. Rarity applies only to the original titles, since those were mass produced on machinery in the 70's and 80's. Their boxes, manuals, labels, and general construction of the carts are all obviously machine made, the PCB's themselves were generally unique to the game, and replicating this exactly (for purposes of counterfeiting) is pretty tough. That's why their rarity ratings still apply for collecting purposes.
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Thomas Jentzsch, on Thu Mar 30, 2006 2:30 AM, said:
