Gao

I've never seen anything worse than Crazy Bus, a pirate Genesis game that you can find on some South American multicarts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbCNKq7A5i4

It seems odd that this would be the one game in the series that wasn't in first person, though the ad does mention that there's a tank on screen. However, it's worth noting that the ad says that there's a specific action you have to take to stop the tank, which isn't the case in this proto (you just stop moving when you aren't pushing a direction).

While it seems strange to just leave a bar if ones overwriting a logo, it could be that someone made it look like the Video Soft logo on purpose. Like hypothetically, this was a pet project of someone working at Video Soft (Jim?), and this is a proof of concept that he presented to whoever there made decisions to produce games. The graphics may largely be placeholders (meaning they never intended to release a game with swastika looking enemies), and since he was going to replace the graphics anyway, he put in his own signature or inside joke or something where the company logo would go, and kept the bar to make it clear what it was (or perhaps as some sort of inside joke). Comparing "Jim's Toy(i?)" to the Video Soft logo really demonstrates how relatively awkward looking that is as well, with inconsistent letter sizes and possibly two different forms of "i" for some reason.

Never knew about the back and fire thing. That is kind of interesting. I'm probably misremembering reset then, since I first played this thing on a junior.

I think it had sound, but I don't really remember it. You'll have to ask CPUWIZ about that. It uses joysticks and seemed to be only one player. I think reset just starts the game, and I don't recall select doing anything. I think the AB difficulty switch controlled wither enemies shoot or not. Again, CPUWIZ can go ahead and correct me if any of this is wrong.

From what I can recall, the screen didn't scroll automatically. You had to move it upwards yourself. And I think you moved pretty slowly. Moving would decrease your fuel, and as far as I could tell, there wasn't a way to replenish it, so a game would just end after a couple minutes. The only enemies were those swastikas, which I think just moved side to side and shot at you. The gameplay wasn't particularly exciting, but it was hardly the worst thing on the console, and given how terrain didn't do anything and the strangeness of fuel without an ability to refill, I'm thinking that what we have is rather incomplete. Of course, I haven't played this thing in over a decade, so I could be misremembering something. Feel free to correct me on any of that CPUWIZ.

I haven't talked to him in ages, but I just sent a Facebook message asking if he could at least ask his mother who this person she got this from was. I'll let you guys know if anything comes from it.

Just sent it out, so CPUWIZ should have it Thursday or maybe Friday. Hopefully he'll be able to salvage something interesting from it.

Unfortunately no. However, I am sending this thing out to CPUWIZ on Tuesday to see if this can be dumped, so hopefully he'll be able to give us some more information on this thing.

What happened was that it was working at home, I brought it to CGE, and we couldn't get it working there. Someone looked at it, and suggested that the broken chip I pointed out might be the problem. I had plopped it into a bag with some other stuff that I was carrying around, but there wasn't one particular incident of me dropping it. Edit: Oh, and I haven't actually tried it since it first stopped working (I'm not as into the pre-NES games as I used to be, and I'm having trouble finding where I put any RF switchboxes), but if I recall correctly, it would just display a solid color when you tried to use it, though I'm not 100% sure on this. Well at the time I found the thing in 2000 or 2001, I was in middle school. I was spending some time at that friend's house, and we ended up busting out the 2600 Jr that his family had, and this thing was with the games. He apparently never thought much about it. I asked his mother if she knew anything about it, and if I recall correctly, she said she knew a guy who worked at Atari who gave her a few games. Given how this seems to be a very unusual looking board by how you guys are reacting to it and the strange subject matter, I'm not sure she was correct about this. It's possible that the guy worked for some other other company and told her something like "I make games for the Atari" or something like that, and she misinterpreted what he meant or something. Sadly, I don't really know any further detail, and I haven't talked to anyone in that family in a few years. Since other stuff on this board is apparently rather odd, is it also strange that extra thing between the eprom and the board?

Yeah, I plan on doing that. So who's reliable and has the ability to dump this? I asked CPUWIZ, but he hasn't responded yet. And it was definitely something with nature in the background, so it's not Worm War I. Parts of Strategy X looked familiar, so I'm really wondering if it's some bizarre version of that. Does anyone know if Konami internally develop their 2600 games or had an American company do it? Or did they have an American branch back then?

Definitely neither of those. It was definitely something a lot like Strategy X if it wasn't an early version or hack of that.

I wish I had a better recollection of exactly how the game screen looked. It was definitely similar to that, but I'm rather sure you could only face up, and the enemies moved. It's possible that this was some weird early version of that that was never meant to get out of the office, like that bloody version of Freeway. As for people recognizing it as CGE, I never got the game running there, so no one saw it. I believe I described it some people there roughly like I did in my opening post, but they didn't seem to recognize it from that. And as for the damage, CPUWIZ thinks that the problem might have been that it was exposed to too much light, since they didn't cover the EPROM well. I guess I'll have to find someone who can try dumping it to see if there's anything left.

Here's some better pics of both sides: As for the swastika thing, the combination of that and the "Jim's Toy" thing make me wonder if this thing wasn't meant to be released to the public in this form. I'll PM CPUWIZ about this now.

So years ago, a friend of mine gave me this thing: It was a weird little 2600 game where you play as a tank and shoot swastikas. I brought the thing to CGE 2001, and it seemed to be agreed that it was a proto, but my dumb 15 year old ass had tossed the thing unprotected in my bag, and the corner broke off one of the chips there on the bottom right, and it wouldn't work. Someone there offered to try to fix it for me and gave me an address (which I've long since lost), but i put off sending it and eventually lost the thing. Luckily, my mother just recently found the thing in a closet again after all these years. So is there anyone reputable around here who might be able to fix this thing? And since I know you'll be asking about the game itself, here's what I remember (keep in mind that the last time I played this was 12 years ago): You control a tank that faces upwards and could move from side to side, and you can scroll the screen up by moving up. The background had lakes and I think trees and bridges, but running them over didn't seem to do anything. The enemies were swastikas that moved from side to side, and they'd shoot on A difficulty, but not on B. At the bottom of the screen roughly where Activision tended to put their name on their games was what looked like "Jim's Toy" or something like that (it was hard to read on my friend's rather blurry TV). My friend's mom said she once new someone who worked at Atari who gave her some stuff, which presumably included this. Whether he actually worked at Atari or she was misremembering him saying that he made Atari games somewhere else, I have no idea.