MikeDijital777

My pops said the carts for all the systems arrived in the salem plant in a box, no labels instructions or boxes... just black carts. the salem plant would make the books, my dad made the boxes, and they had a line that put the labels on the carts. Then another machine took all 3 parts put them together and shrinkwrapped them. I " think " the game deal came through Coleco. Coleco bought Parker brothers in 83 ish... might have been kenner too... once companies bought parker brothers, they would dump the manufacturing onto them they themselves didnt want to deal with . I remember they dumped the cabbage patch kids on parker brothers simply because printing birth certificates with a new name for each doll was a daunting task in 1984.... so let parker brothers deal with the headaches.... It really was the beginning of the end for what was once a small family run company that had been there since the turn of the century .... in 1993 Hasbro bought parker brothers , shut down all the american plants and sent it all to china The salem plant was an unrenovated since it was built building, old wood floors, sketchy looking elevator. it was warm and smelled like hotglue, the thing I remember most is 5 foot tall 2x2 foot boxes of monopoly houses, hotels, and those colored player pieces with the ball on top of a cone shape from like sorry and clue and NO SAFETY MEASURES. my mom and I would just walk in to give my dad lunch or something... no one cared. It wasn't a high tech place. there was no way they were making PCB boards lol ..

Parker Bros really did nothing more than slap labels on carts that arrived from where ever they made them, and my dad made the boxes. They really were more of a distributor than anything. Thats why when my dad told the front office about the popeye glitch they really had no idea what to do than grab the breakroom tv, an atari and whoever wasn't important to sit there is find it so they could report it to nintendo, or whomever was doing the actual creation of the game. Sadly Parker Bros just boxed and labeled premade carts, all of their electronics where outsourced. I think at the time , Kenner and/or Tonka bought them as a parent company ( it was kenner/parker/tonka for a while , Coleco owned a piece of it at some point too ) , and the video games deal came with that.

I forgot all about that awful bond game. I got pretty good at it though. back then it didnt seem awful as much as it was hard. Now I got to crank up stella and give it a rip again lol . , I always loved Sky Skipper, Amadar, and Gyrus. I liked the empire SW game and the Jedi one too.

Born in Salem, Moved to Danvers, then to Gloucester, I landed in Peabody in 89 , Higgins middle school for 7, 8 and Peabody Vets memorial HS for the rest of it GO TANNERS! lol

This was the early 80's I assure you they probably grabbed a cleaning lady or receptionist and said, here play this lol.. Context here is king... in 1982 no one really had a VCR, or a cell phone to record footage.... it was on my little kid word that there was a glitch and Parker Bros was a very small, loose rules family run company for a long time. It was the stone age for gaming back then for sure... Much different times in general. Things were alot looser... and kinda halfassed... I think thats what my dad found funny was to random out of touch old ladies trying to muddle through a " video game " ... Video games were looked at like toys back then.

I vaguely remember during my 5200 phase like 10 years ago a guy on ebay was selling a home made adapter so you could use the 7800 gamepad instead of the wico, but still plug in the 5200 controller wico Y adapter style to get the keypad function .. if you could find one of those, THAT was the hands down best 5200 controller.

I just joined this forum to sort out some issues I was having with my flashback X but thought if any group of people would appreciate this life experience.. you all would. I was born in 1975 My dad worked for Parker Brothers in Salem Ma from 1972 till the day they closed the factory and sent it all to china in 1993. He ran the bobst ( sp) machine.. basically 50% of every game box made from 1979 till the day they closed went through my dads machine while he was running it. He can open any parker brothers game box 79-93 and look at how the corners are seamed together and tell you if he or Barry the night guy did it. somewhere in 82, 83 ish my dad started bringing home atari games. I never noticed it at first, I was like 8 or 9 but he would ask me questions about the games he would bring home.... My dad never cared for video games, so it always struck me a little odd... I had a really small black and white TV I won from cub scouts for selling candy.. EVERYONE loved my dad at Parker bros, so he took in the candy sales sheet and sold me enough in one day for the TV or the Bike prize lol ... I remember playing popeye on the B/W tv and finding a glitch in level 2 or 3 where the side shooting bullets couldnt be seen, or something like that and my dad told me that he told his boss, and they had 2 very old ladies in the office playing the game trying to get to the level to see the glitch.... I dont know why but that visual to this day still cracks me up. one day he came home with 4 games. Montezuma's revenge, and then these three has special instructions I could not 1. play them with friends, 2. trade them to my friends 3. Talk about them to my friends... Frogger 2, Qberts cubes, and a labeless cart that had the ewok starwars game. I had to give back the ewok cart almost right away.. but I held onto frogger 2 and qberts cube... context is king here, at the time the game crash was starting but it wasnt a " game crash " back then, it was just atari wasnt selling anymore. right around this time you could get an atari for about 50$ and raider or ET for 1$... my dad started coming home with huge boxes of new atari parker bros games he dumpster dove for. Atari800 computers, those nice Wico microswitch red ball white button controllers. I had stacks of unopened games, I would trade with friends for non parker atari games, lol I had a nice racket going haha Knowing then what I know now.... yikes, The stuff I should have kept that I lost or traded over the years. I remember being 9 or 10 with that atari 800 keyboard thing and nothing else , no drives, nothing, not knowing basic, and thinking, this is junk and giving it away to a friend lol .... and yes... we had every nerf thing you could think of ... i hate nerf ... those boomerangs never worked!!! and every version of monopoly made lol

That was my thought, ive soft modded xbox's and done CFW for my nes and snes mini.... im new to the flashbacks, not sure how to get into it and change the file names.

Could you point me in the direction of " brads CFW " I want to give this a try , thanks so much! Edit : im so stupid, its in the post right below this one lol .. should I use the download in the first post, or was there updates to it in later posts? thanks

Update: I found firmware 0.1.2 for the deluxe, I installed that and while I lost a handful of games ( I believe it was the 8 extra that came with the deluxe (S) model ( no biggie ... the system works... What on earth could be causing the newer updates to crash page 2 in the game selection menus is beyond me... id like to be able to install firmware that will allow me to add my own games on a flash drive, I dont have the dongle yet to test, so does anyone know if 0.1.2 for the X deluxe has usb games function? Im happy with this FW if it does. thanks!

I have an Atari Flashback X deluxe, it had firmware 0.1.7 .. for some reason page 2, and selecting paddle games, freezes the UI .. I can still hear the music playing but I have to power cycle the system . I can got from page 1, 12, 11, 10 etc.. but once I hit page 2 in any direction, the UI freezes, same thing when I get to " paddle games " on the side menu. Im thinking Breakout is the cause . page 2 is the B games, and breakout is the only paddle B game on the system .. I think? I used the RKDevTool to erase the flash, and load FW 0.1.5 FW 0.1.18 ( for the non deluxe ) and someones custom FW I got from here.... Same issue no matter the FW im am using. it has to be a bad rom or something... Any ideas guys??? thanks!