ROMs on chips

[fluorescein]

My dad used to work at the company that provided the chips for Atari's 2600 games. As I recall, he told me some of his chip designs also went into the video arcade (Pac-Man) games.

 

Anyways, he brought home an Atari 2600 console with joysticks and paddles, as well as 2 or 3 hundred games. I truly enjoyed the Atari during my childhood! I'm pretty sure I still have these games somewhere in the garage. The thing is, they don't come in cartridges. All my games are on chips (about 1/2" wide and 1" long). These chips are stored on "foamy" blocks in plastic containers. (Hence, all 2 or 3 hundred games fit in 1 or 2 shoeboxes.)

 

To play the games, I had several "modified" cartridges where there was a slot to put the chip into and a locking mechanism. I had several of these modified cartridges, as certain chips could only be played on certain cartridges. I'm not sure if this had to do with memory allocation, or what because some of the switches on the cartridges (the game chips were put into boxes, and the boxes were labeled with which cartridge and switches to use) were labeled with things like "4K" and "16K". Or something like that... keep in mind I haven't played with this stuff in over 10 years!

 

Has anyone heard about ROM collections on chips like these? I wish my Atari 2600 still worked! I would have kept playing, but the on/off switch stopped working a long time ago. I've considered buying another console, but I don't know if I'd ever really play again.

 

fluorescein

[Mountain King]

Actually my friend gave me a bunch of these. They were actually copies of the original games. My friend's dad worked for a company that made computer parts and he somehow knew how to copy Atari Games and put them on these chips. Another friend of mine also had a bunch of games in this format, but I never found out how she got them.

[Marco(2)]

This practice appears to have been rather wide-spread. These chips are surfacing in Ebay auctions quite regularly, like in these two:

 

Ebay auction #1

Ebay auction #2

 

I found something similar here in Holland, where Philips employees copied Videopac (Odyssey2) games onto EPROMs, using hacked carts to play the games.

 

Cheers,

 

Marco

[fluorescein]

Thanks so much for posting... I had tried looking for "ROM chips" on ebay, but didn't quite know what to search for. The chips on Ebay look exactly like what I have. I had a similar system for playing the ROMs as the "Loaner" device on the second Ebay auction you mention... except my "chip holder" is imbedded in a "Combat" cartride, rather than the open circuit board shown on the auction picture.

 

The other thing is the label on the chips... 16K, 32K, etc. It's been a long time, but I believe you need a different "chip holder" for each type of chip, otherwise the game will not play correctly.

 

Thanks again for pointing out the auctions. It certainly brings back memories to see pictures of those chips again.