Found a neat toy! Old developer cart... I think

[teh_d3th_st4r]

One of my dads old friends came over the other night, and he brought me a box of fun Atari trinkets (mostly old and unused prototype cart labels, and bits of developer hardware) But buried deep in the box was another small box full of chips and this thing.

 

He said that these were distributed to him and his team back in 1980-81, now it's mine... sweet. I'm not sure what they were needed for, but it still looks cool and it works great (the chip in it is combat, no solder on the points)

 

Maybe I'll crack it open and take some pics of the insides.

Edited August 19, 2009 by the_alpha_geek

[SLAYAR]

One of my dads old friends came over the other night, and he brought me a box of fun Atari trinkets (mostly old and unused prototype cart labels, and bits of developer hardware) But buried deep in the box was another small box full of chips and this thing.

 

He said that these were distributed to him and his team back in 1980-81, now it's mine... sweet. I'm not sure what they were needed for, but it still looks cool and it works great (the chip in it is combat, no solder on the points)

 

Maybe I'll crack it open and take some pics of the insides.

 

that looks very similar to a cart I have for the Odyssey 2, it enables people to play copied EPROMS, this used to be quite a passtime for the Dutch Employee's in Eindhoven. Usually people would swap EPROMS just like people would swap a cartridge.

[teh_d3th_st4r]

that looks very similar to a cart I have for the Odyssey 2, it enables people to play copied EPROMS, this used to be quite a passtime for the Dutch Employee's in Eindhoven. Usually people would swap EPROMS just like people would swap a cartridge.

Yeah, Chris was saying something like that, I'll reassemble some of the other components that were in the box, maybe this cartridge coincides with the other hardware.

[EricDeLee]

Wanna show us the labels? Are they just the lab loaner ones or actual ones with pictures?

[Wickeycolumbus]

Do all of the chips look like the one pictured? If so, its most likely a standard commercial PCB with a ZIF socket (allowing it to only work with mask ROMs, not EPROMs).

 

Could you take some pictures of the other stuff?

Edited August 19, 2009 by Wickeycolumbus

[teh_d3th_st4r]

Wanna show us the labels? Are they just the lab loaner ones or actual ones with pictures?

They're just black lab loaners with white text, and they're just end labels with ID numbers, nothing super special.

 

Do all of the chips look like the one pictured? If so, its most likely a standard commercial PCB with a ZIF socket (allowing it to only work with mask ROMs, not EPROMs).

 

Could you take some pictures of the other stuff?

Yeah, I cracked it open, just a ZIF socket wired to the board, I don't know if it will read EPROMs, I haven't tried. However, the inside looks very clean, not a hack job like I was expecting, but a carefully assembled piece of hardware.

 

I'll take some pictures of the rest of the stuff once I have it all put back together, this stuff has been floating around in a garage for the last 23 years, but I'll do my best to reassemble what I have.

[teh_d3th_st4r]

Okay, I reassembled some of the stuff, and found out that what I thought was a pong type of thing, was actually an adjustable blue box (one of the original hacker toys... you know John Draper) but if anyone here can tell me what this thing is, I'd really appreciate it.

[Bruce Tomlin]

Looks like a cart dumper rig for an EPROM programmer.

 

But I'm not sure why anyone would rig up a socket cart for mask ROMs unless they had access to a bunch of bare chips. That means it was made by/for someone who had access to extra chips from production runs. And since back in those days, the chips were made in Silicon Valley, that's far from impossible.

Edited August 21, 2009 by Bruce Tomlin

[Wickeycolumbus]

Looks like a cart dumper rig for an EPROM programmer.

 

My thoughts exactly. This equipment was probably used for making pirate copies of games, rather than developing them.

 

I am really interested to see the labels you mention, the_alpah_geek