awhite2600

My rarest games are the K-Tel 2600 games Spider Maze and Vulture Attack. I've owned loose copies of both since the 90's. They weren't on any lists when I first bought them. I had a second copy of Vulture Attack but I recently traded it. On the hardware side I would say my Commodore PET. Not too many still kicking around. It's labeled as a 4016 but has 32K of RAM and internal switches to flip between 40 and 80 column modes. I think there is also an 80 column ROM that gets switched as well.

My first true Nintendo product was Mario's Cement Factory Game & Watch purchased at Epcot Center in 1984. I actually used it as my morning alarm clock for about 10 years. I'm fairly certain that my family owned the Intellivision version of Donkey Kong before that. But I don't consider that a true Nintendo product, just a licensed product.

I have to disagree here. Yes, the C64 did have some limitations if compared to the original IBM PC. There were some solid C64 productivity titles. PaperClip was an extremely popular word processor. (It was even ported to the Atari 8-bit line.) I used PaperClip for my high school and college assignments for several years in the mid-80's. There were very functional spreadsheet, database and other productivity titles as well.

Atari did the same thing with the Atarisoft titles. Unlike Coleco, Atari managed to release some very good ports for the competition's systems. Some were still pretty bad, but in most cases it was due to limitations of the hardware.

My son is 19 now. I introduced him to "Daddy's Games" when he was about 2 or 3. Today he will play everything from the 2600 to the PS4 - and enjoy them all. He even volunteers with me at The Personal Computer Museum where he can talk to visitors all about the classics.

I had the same thought. The programmers of the VCS and Intellivision versions were given small ROM sizes to work with. I suspect that there were also tight time constraints that made the programmers rush to get a passable game working by a deadline. You can say the same thing about some of the Atari games - Pac Man, E.T., etc. Had the programmers been give more time and/or bigger cartridges then I'm sure the games would have been better.

The Amiga Sidecar wasn't as great as it appeared. It was a very low end PC (original 8088 specs) at a very high price. If your main intent was PC gaming then the Sidecar might have been a letdown.

I wish I had a second 1541 disk drive for my C64. It would have made things much easier when creating "backups". If the sky's the limit then I would have loved a commercial disk duplicator that could copy all of the protection schemes.

Perhaps - but I suspect that it will be many years before this happens. I met Herman Quast (the programmer) a couple of years ago when the first copy was discovered. He is likely in his early 60's. At the time he was still working as an embedded systems programmer. There is a picture of Herman on the PC Museum page linked a few posts above this one. Hopefully the "fifth" known copy will be offered for sale soon. I have been in contact with the owner and offered to authenticate the cart in order to facilitate a sale. Unfortunately I have not heard back from her in a while.

Both back in the day. Genesis for Sonic The Hedgehog. I played the game at a private event at the CES show several months before release. Couldn't wait to buy the game when it came out. TG16 for Power Golf. I loved the music.

You could also include Extra Terrestrials. Three copies are owned by The Personal Computer Museum. Two are release versions and one is a prototype that isn't 100% complete. The original programmer, Herman Quast, has a copy. I am aware of a possible fifth copy that is owned by an individual who's mother purchased it back in the day. I hope to be able to authenticate the copy at some point as the owner may be interested in selling it. The PC Museum and programmer will never sell their copies. This means that only one copy may ever be offered for sale to collectors. I wouldn't call Extra Terrestrials a homebrew due to the fact that it was developed and sold in limited numbers in 1984.

It looks like either bad or missing ROM. The PETs had some empty sockets for expansion ROMs. I'm wondering if the daughterboard that you removed replaced one of the stock ROM chips. The fact that you are crashing into the ML monitor in the Bxxx address range tells me that code is jumping into that address range. The range from B000 to BFFF was reserved for extra ROM. A standard PET wouldn't attempt to access that area on bootup. Can you put the board back and see if the PET will boot?

I used to have all but the first one or two issues of Electronic Games along with hundreds of other gaming and computer magazines. All were purchased "back in the day". Over the years my collection has been thinned out to almost nothing thanks to several moves, one ex-wife and a few other situations.

The second box looks to be fairly common titles. The first box has some titles that are not very common. I don't see anything really rare. A good deal for $50 if you are starting a collection. $350 for the boxed Intellivision games sounds expensive unless there are some rare titles included.

Thanks for the quick replies. I guess us Canadians don't get any love. I don't have anyone in the US that can accept and reship packages for me. I could always take a trip across the border to pick one up. It just gets expensive, time consuming plus you always run the risk that the border people will give you a hard time.

Are the new Flashback consoles (Intellivision, Colecovision, etc) only available in the US? I seem to recall reading this somewhere in another thread but can't find it now. I see that Toys R Us in the US has the consoles on their website. The Canadian site doesn't list them at all. Will any of the Flashbacks be available at ANY retailers outside of the US?

I have to agree with what others have said... Do what is fun and what you enjoy. I have certain areas where I generally collect, but I do allow myself to stray outside the lines from time to time. When people ask what I collect I like to define it as "Cartridges for video game consoles and computers that are pre-Nintendo." The bulk of my collection is 2600, 7800, Intellivision, Colecovision, VIC-20 and C-64 cartridges. I don't get into disk based games for the C-64 because there are just too many of them. That being said, I do have "newer" systems and some games for each - NES, SNES, Gameboy (Original), SMS, Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, Lynx, GameGear, PS1, PS2, PS3, XBox (Original), Nintendo DS and PSP. Many of these systems were picked up cheap as they became surpassed by newer systems. I was recently given a Wii so I'll likely add a few games for that system. For the newer system I only buy stuff that I would actually play - unless it's very cheap or free. I enjoy the games from the older systems. Most were just simple and fun to play. The controls were easy to learn. I'm not patient enough to learn all of the various controls for games like the current gen FPS games. I don't want to start a game and be crippled until I get enough achievements or badges to unlock a feature. So I guess what I am saying is to pick a few systems for your main collecting efforts. Collect what you enjoy playing. It's okay to stray a bit, just set reasonable limits. Above all - have fun collecting.

Music Construction Set from Electronic Arts allowed you to drag and drop notes onto a traditional music staff. The controls weren't there to really max out the SID chip, but you could make decent music.

It may be possible to fake a rare game as a scam. Extra Terrestrials was sold in a smaller than normal cart housing. No other cart used this type of housing. Creating a fake would require some fairly high end plastic molding equipment. The reproduction carts were sold in standard, reclaimed Atari shells. I believe that the owner lives in the correct geographic region to have bought a copy back in the day. I too would be suspicious if someone in a distant city claims to have purchased the game at a discount store in the 80's. They just weren't distributed anywhere outside the Hamilton / Burlington area in Ontario. That's where the company that made the games is located. In fact the parent company is still in business today. All of the company owners and the programmer also still live in the area. The Personal Computer Museum is about 30 miles away. When the cart was discovered a few years back there was quite a bit of local media coverage. The curator of the museum has a lot of media connections. He is always looking for publicity for the museum. It's very likely that the owner saw one of the stories, recognized the cart and dug it out of their basement / attic / closet. I do know that the museum was contacted by a woman claiming to have one of the carts. I don't believe that she tried to sell it to the museum. The museum offered to help assist with the sale of the cart, but the owner never responded. In my opinion the value of $10,000 stated on the TV show was just a guess by the appraiser. While he may be an expert on collectibles in general he certainly wouldn't know what a true value for an extremely rare 2600 cart would be.

The details of the four known copies are mentioned in the link above. The Personal Computer Museum owns three of the copies. A prototype copy that was the original discovery / donation, a final version copy donated by Herman Quast (the programmer of the game) and a copy located by one of the museum volunteers. Herman Quast also has a copy that he intends to keep. These are the four known copies. The original discovery of the game generated a fair amount of media coverage. As a result, The Personal Computer Museum was contacted by at least one other person who claims to have a copy of the game. None of these claims have been verified by photos or physical inspection of the game. The owners of the company that produced Extra Terrestrials were located and contacted. They no longer have any copies of the game or the original box. We were told that a few hundred copies of the game were sold directly to retailers in Ontario, Canada in early 1984. It is still unknown if any additional copies of the game exist. The value stated on the TV show is the opinion of the appraiser. The Personal Computer Museum is a not for profit organization that aims to preserve past computer and game artifacts so that they can be enjoyed for years to come. As a result, they will not sell any of the copies of Extra Terrestrials in their collection. It would be like the Louvre Museum selling one of their paintings to a private collector.

The box shown on the TV show was created for the reproduction cartridges that were sold a couple of years ago. The original box has never been found - although they would have been sold back in the day. I created the "new" box based on the artwork on the cartridges that were found. The box shown on TV contained one of the known original carts, not one of the reproductions. The article linked above by Necron99 has details of the four known copies. The Personal Computer Museum has been told of one or two other copies but we have not received any proof that these copies exist. The estimate for the entire collection was given by the expert that came in to do the appraisal. He did not state how he arrived at his estimate. You can view the TV segment here.

I found a video of the game on YouTube. Skarro got it right. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eybE0xpddzY

Skarro. You rock! Your description sounds very familiar. I've had this game stuck in my head for years. (Edit: Wow. It's been 28 years since I first saw this game.) For some reason I just want to see it again and hear the music. Now i need to get an ST emulator running and try the image from Atarimania. Thanks so much!

Sorry guys. I wasn't being vague on purpose. I only have a very slight memory of the game. I mostly remember the little nodding head and the fact that I REALLY liked the background music. This was not an action or arcade style game at all. It was some sort of puzzle game - putting pieces of a picture together like a jigsaw puzzle or perhaps even a "concentration" style game. At the time I was bragging about the music capabilities of the Amiga and even the C-64. For some reason I thought that this game had some of the best music I had heard from an ST. The game used the native sound chip, not MIDI. The game would have been available around or before the summer of 1986 - which is when I saw it. So Oxyd with it's 1990 copyright date is too new. The game only ran in monochrome mode on a mono monitor. Thanks.

I hope that someone in this forum can help me to identify an old ST game. I never had an ST back in the day - I was always a Commodore guy. In the late 80's I shared a place with a couple of people while in school. One guy had the first release of the ST with both monochrome and color monitors. I think this was before TOS was in ROM - had to be loaded from disk. The game ran in monochrome only. It was some sort of puzzle game. I think you had to piece pictures together. There was a little head indicator (might have been the mouse pointer) that would nod yes or no depending on your move. I remember that I really liked the background music. Any ideas? Thanks.