freewheel

The gauntlet is thrown Serious question for those that know both - would you describe INTV programming easier, or harder than 2600? Or just "different"? I've messed around with 2600 eons ago but never really came up with anything worthwhile. I have a lot of spare cycles these days and even looked at the Vectrex, but vector math hurts my brain.

Jeepers. Now I see why 30 copies of an INTV homebrew causes near riots. If I ever made one, I'd have to produce 300 just to satisfy a few of you

Dead TIA? Certainly looks like video problems. Weird that Combat works.

The double enders are almost always listed as "one" cart. It's not the game count that matters. Think of the 32-in-1 cart or things like that. Most collectors count that as "one". And I count a Harmony the same as any other multicart - one. Although I personally don't include homebrew/recent stuff in my "official" lists. They're just a nice extra. YMMV

Shinkwrapping a game costs a few pennies and a minute of your time, if you have access to the right equipment. And a LOT of people do (I did at a minimum wage job in university). Even if the premium is only a few bucks - and it's usually a fair bit more - it's still worth it. Given that you can replace the contents of a sealed box with... well anything, because most people buying sealed wouldn't DARE take it out of the factory plastic... imagine a $500 loose cart situation (doesn't happen with Colecovision but does with other systems). Replace with a common $1 cart and you've made a $500 profit, plus whatever extra you get for the plastic. Also, people who do this think that everyone is a sucker speculator just like them. It never occurs to them that people can actually find them out. Or they just feign ignorance "hey it was sold to ME as factory sealed, I didn't know!". It's pretty low risk for a sometimes very decent gain. Incredibly common in most collector markets these days, ever since people became obsessed with lucite-encased boat anchors. And yes, it happens in the "sealed and graded" comic market, even though many refuse to believe it's even possible.

It's possible that Spiker and SMB were produced in the exact same quantities, but people have decided Spiker is more rare based on completely random information. So, they're holding onto it more. Of course you'd think more would end up on Ebay given the much higher price... who knows.

Depends. I find a lot of devs these days simply ship rushed beta code, knowing they can just send an update down the wire in a few weeks. Back in the cart/early optical days, you actually had to QA your product before shipping. Were there bugs? Sure, but nothing like what we see today. Every goddamn time I fire up my Xbox/Wii/PS it needs to do yet another goddamn update. Not just the console firmware/OS, but game patches ad nauseum. And untold games will be basically useless in the future once these update services go offline - you're stuck playing whatever shipped on disc - buggy, unplayable messes. For those of us who continue to enjoy playing 20 year old games on any platform, the future is looking pretty bleak as a result.

Kids weren't anywhere near that obese 30 years ago, unless this commercial was filmed at the ultimate fat camp. Watch an 80s movie sometime like Stand By Me or Monster Squad or Goonies. Take a close look at just how pudgy the "fat kid" is. Now compare that to the "fat kid" in modern movies. The 80s kid would probably be the main hero these days.

Thanks I'm always on the prowl for anything that came out in Canada but not the US (ie: Zellers 2600), or at least more common up here. There's not much we have an edge on when it comes to consumer products and certainly not in this business. But now I know something to get my Euro buds to keep an eye out for!

Yup. I remember a loooong time ago, when a lot of less common ROMs still weren't dumped. Someone got their hands on a particularly rare title (think Air Raid for 2600 rare) and started looking for someone to dump it. A couple of people who owned the game got absolutely livid and threatened to call the FBI and such - note that these were not the copyright owners or related to them in any fashion. Just people who either got lucky or overpaid on early forms of Ebay and such. I actually saw this repeated a few times during the early years of emulation. But no, it's never about the money, right? Quite frankly if I paid say $50 for a new homebrew, and demand got high enough for the author to make a bunch more copies at $30, I'd be overjoyed. I'm buying these things primarily to support the creator, not as an investment and certainly not just to have an expensive toy. If more people can enjoy it, and if the guy/gal who spent untold hours on it can make a bit more out of their work - all the better!

Where were Tutankham and Super Cobra released?

5000ish sounds about right. The BSR page discusses runs in the 10-20,000 range for the later INTV releases, and I can't see them having bothered with just a few hundred carts for a game. It's not like the modern homebrew market where you're only serving a dedicated core audience. Now, it's possible Spiker just sold miserably and most of the carts were destroyed, but... I dunno. Something that's only 1/5 or heck even 1/10 as rare doesn't seem to me to demand such a premium, given that most of the rest of the lineup can be found for $100-150. I also suspect that someone, somewhere, will discover a hoard of these in a warehouse somewhere (hey, it still happens even 30 years later). Imagine 1000 Spikers suddenly released onto the market. All MIB. Prices would crash. There always seems to be a bit of speculator mindset that comes with the rarest-for-a-given-console.

Thanks for the auction video link. I completely forgot about it although it seems like i didn't miss much. Some stuff went decent, but some of the prices were.. a bit much. I wish I had the time and energy to transcribe a list with final prices, for those that don't have 2.5 hours to kill.

That wouldn't be the first and it won't be the last time that companies have seriously underestimated fan backlash. Making a limited edition for its own sake is cool. Make 10,000 of those figures. That way the fans know they have something fairly unique, but it doesn't drive speculators into hoarding them just to fuck over the few people who actually want these things. It's strange, too. There are very few times that this will actually make a company MORE money. Selling fewer items just means less profit, plus alienating your core market if you do it severely enough. The only people it pleases are speculators. The ONLY time this makes sense is when your product line is dying and you're trying to convince suckers to "invest" - ie: selling more product than you would otherwise, because the only people who will buy are not fans. Obviously with homebrew gaming things are different, because of the difficulty in producing carts and whatnot. And I don't think people are exactly becoming rich in this business. But making extremely limited editions solely to drive interest? With a digital product you're committing suicide in the long run. Fortunately it seems to be pretty rare. In this instance it seems like someone underestimated demand - lesson learned.

I notice that 3 of the 4 posters are Canadian, so .. possibly.

Surprises me that they couldn't get some working. Landfills are excellent storage media, you can basically read newspapers from 60 years ago if you dig down far enough. Especially in the desert I'd think conditions would be prime for safe storage. Considering the insane amounts of water and other damage I've seen with 2600 carts that a simple contact wipe will fix... maybe it's something in the alkaline soils.

Ah, gotcha. I mis-read. Yeah - unless they're all even flips, 2 cables won't cut it. Although perhaps there's a combination of enough cables to completely do it... like 20...

I sold him mine for $200. Sucker! Just kidding. I came just after the vendor area had closed on Friday, but we had the arcade almost to ourselves. If anyone noticed a tall redheaded girl who's a bit too young to remember the 80s, having fun learning how to use a joystick for the first time, that was us.

I thought it was just that pins 8 and 9 were flipped. So 2 cables should reverse the flip, giving you a straight-through cable. Pretty expensive way of doing it, but shrug.

I think people react to this one so strongly because there's a pretty strong consensus in the community of what makes up "the 125". Most of us follow it due to its provenance.

I often wonder about this. There is literally no way to ever "prove" your game is MIB really - I guess unless you own an xray machine or something. How do you tell a fake when you're unwilling to open it? One thing to keep in mind - as people are discussing, a LOT of games were not shrinkwrapped by the manufacturer in the 80s. Some were then later wrapped by the retailer but it's hit and miss on this one. Really, short of shrinkwrapping with a retailer price tag that's clearly from the 80s (could be faked, but not as easy as a shrink job), I don't know that I'd trust any of it. There's just way too much insane markup for MIB games, too much motivation for fraud. I've seen people get shunked on entire cases of 2600 games, MIB and shrinkwrapped, supposedly from an Atari warehouse - when Atari never did this in the first place.

I checked the playable game list vs the back of the box and it matches exactly. So if you can find an image of the box art online, it's correct (I assume recent web listings match this, but just in case anyone's really curious). It did take me by surprise to see what seemed to be unlreased or homebrew games (Minotaur? wtf?) until I fired them up and did a double take. There were quite a few name changes for the FB due to licensing issues.

Depends on what you collect. Differently named games tend to .. well show up in lists as different names. Even if they're basically the same game. Look at the 2600 scene - do you include Sears clones as unique titles, or not? Even though they're generally the exact same game? Depends on the collector. One thing about INTV that irritates me is how many ROM variants exist that are impossible to determine without a dump (or playing the game in many cases). So what do you do? Put a sticker on the cart to identify it? Keep it in a labelled bag? And I won't even get into the Lock n Chase 8k unicorn. I've play-tested dozens upon dozens of Lock n Chase carts over the years and even the newest INTV Corp release doesn't seem to be the mythical 8k version. But... expansion system games are unarguably *different games*. So I don't see the comparison. Your question is still valid though. I guess the answer is that a) most people don't care about these things and b) it's impossible to distinguish them. However - variants are why the 125 list is actually closer to 500, once you include ROM and packaging variations. Some collect to the former, some collect to the latter. Just an individual choice.

Blix is not on my Flashback. Either the seller is misinformed (likely), lying (equally likely), or I got a defective unit. Unless I'm very stupid or there's some easter egg code to access it. However given the recent kerfuffle, I'd assume people would be talking about it everywhere if this were the case. At least Bill L if no one else, as he seems to have his finger on the pulse of these things.

What the hell, while we're on this topic: here's the other INTV corp variants that came in this collection (at least I think all of these had Mattel releases originally). Any of these particularly rare/desirable? Lock n Chase - Night Stalker - Pinball - Royal Dealer - Sea Battle - Tron Deadly Discs - Utopia I'm at least the 3rd person to own this collection; I suspect whoever put this together must have been something of a collector to have variants like this and in such great shape. I wouldn't call any of it mint, but it's all remarkably glossy and flat.