My newer atari carts are begining to just quit one by one. Is it normal?

[Seaquest]

My silver label games are dying one by one. Is it normal for newer atari games (1982 and up) to stop working?

[GreenDayRlz]

I've never had any atari game or any cartridge game besides SNES Sim City die. They're very high quality and I highly doubt the game is actually dead, you should clean the games and your system and if they doesn't work they actually might be dead.

 

 

(It might even be a power supply problem on your system, you never know, but sort of unlikely)

[tz101]

My experience with dying carts on VCS has been mostly with Activision. I have lost Pitfall II, Enduro, and Tennis over the years. Atari has been pretty solid from what I've seen. Have you tried any of your "dead" Atari carts on another console? Just curious, because it may have something to do with that specific console.

[Benzman66]

Which games are dying?

[godzillajoe]

Not to hijack, but I'm worried that my homebrews will die one day. Is that possible? Is there a difference in the way they are produced vs. "real" Atari carts?

[cd-w]

Not to hijack, but I'm worried that my homebrews will die one day. Is that possible? Is there a difference in the way they are produced vs. "real" Atari carts?

 

Homebrews are produced using EPROMs rather than mask ROMs. EPROMs can suffer from bit rot, but they are usually good for at least 25 years.

 

For anyone concerned about their carts dying, I suggest using a Harmony Cartridge for regular use, and keeping the real carts safely stored.

 

Chris

[GreenDayRlz]

Which games are dying?

 

Silver labeled ones.

 

 

 

And yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised if AA uses PROM's or One-Time-Programmables for their releases. They're cheaper in bulk. I don't have any AA homebrews or anything, but you could use PROM's or one-time-programmable chips. I am pretty sure they use fuses in them and so it's just as good as a mask ROM unless for some reason you blow more fuses to change the value. But I'm sure homebrews and be backed-up off of something more then carts so no worries.

[tz101]

For anyone concerned about their carts dying, I suggest using a Harmony Cartridge for regular use, and keeping the real carts safely stored.

 

Except that ROM sites are hard to come by these days, as they seem to have all coward down to the Nintendo lawyers.

[cd-w]

For anyone concerned about their carts dying, I suggest using a Harmony Cartridge for regular use, and keeping the real carts safely stored.

 

Except that ROM sites are hard to come by these days, as they seem to have all coward down to the Nintendo lawyers.

 

The AtariMania collection assembled by RomHunter has the majority of non-homebrew releases in it (for the 2600).

 

Chris

[Benzman66]

Which games are dying?

 

Silver labeled ones.

 

 

 

And yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised if AA uses PROM's or One-Time-Programmables for their releases. They're cheaper in bulk. I don't have any AA homebrews or anything, but you could use PROM's or one-time-programmable chips. I am pretty sure they use fuses in them and so it's just as good as a mask ROM unless for some reason you blow more fuses to change the value. But I'm sure homebrews and be backed-up off of something more then carts so no worries.

 

I saw where he said silver carts in the first post. I was moreso wondering which titles. I know from my experiences that some games like Warlords, Demons to Diamonds, etc, seem to stop working if a chip is going bad in the console than the other games.

[GreenDayRlz]

Which games are dying?

 

Silver labeled ones.

 

 

 

And yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised if AA uses PROM's or One-Time-Programmables for their releases. They're cheaper in bulk. I don't have any AA homebrews or anything, but you could use PROM's or one-time-programmable chips. I am pretty sure they use fuses in them and so it's just as good as a mask ROM unless for some reason you blow more fuses to change the value. But I'm sure homebrews and be backed-up off of something more then carts so no worries.

 

I saw where he said silver carts in the first post. I was moreso wondering which titles. I know from my experiences that some games like Warlords, Demons to Diamonds, etc, seem to stop working if a chip is going bad in the console than the other games.

 

Yeah, but they should have gotten chips from multiple sources and the fact that none of my 200+ games are dead leads me to believe it's not the chip but the connector or contacts or something of that sort.

[high voltage]

Carts are not eternal. I had some Spectravision carts die, yes Activision too, NES carts are prone to die as well. Never had any trouble yet with Genesis carts, they're like German tanks, go on forever.

Edited November 29, 2010 by high voltage

[GreenDayRlz]

Carts are not eternal. I had some Spectravision carts die, yes Activision too, NES carts are prone to die as well. Never had any trouble yet with Genesis carts, they're like German tanks, go on forever.

 

 

Yeah, they're prone to die, but the program is hardcoded in silicon and will out live us 5 times 98% of the time. I'd say that odds of the chip actually being "dead" are slim to none and still would argue it's the board needing cleaned. Like I said before. Sim City SNES died on me. PRG-ROM died. But if you have two or three dead carts, I would say check your system and clean the games and the system.

[A.J. Franzman]

Try those "dead" cartridges on another console. Also, try cleaning the console's cartridge port. If the carts work on the other console, but cleaning the cart port doesn't help with the problem console, I have an idea of what may be the cause of the problem. It would be a weird coincidence for me never to see this issue in person in over five years of fixing VCSes, then to diagnose it online twice in other people's consoles in just a few weeks, but stranger things have happened.

[R.O.T.S]

With my experience in electronics servicing repairing arcade game boards and stuff the ic`s out at that time (TTL) 74 series,cpu`s,Eproms,etc have a life span of around 5 years upwards constant use,you have to remember that the carts we collect although were used a lot when first released are not always used so much today so they appear to have survived 20+ years,i normally find that RAMS have a lot of internal components and so get hot and thus fail then really old CPU`s are second and third bad EPROM`s and ROM`s with old corrupted game code. (static garbage on screen)

In some cases i still expect some electrical appliances to fail around the 5 year mark (normally just after a 3year warranty has expired lol)

[Rex Dart]

Except that ROM sites are hard to come by these days, as they seem to have all coward down to the Nintendo lawyers.

 

 

If all you're doing is searching yahoo for "free roms", I guess that might be correct... but who does that?

[Seaquest]

Which games are dying?

Crystal castles(which I found boxed),pole position,kangaroo,seaquest,dk junior,jungle hunt,demons to dimonds,Et(Which might not be such a bad thing),and video pinball.

[+save2600]

My silver label games are dying one by one. Is it normal for newer atari games (1982 and up) to stop working?

Have you tried cleaning out the cartridge port and the carts themselves? You're experiencing an inordinate amount of failures, so I'm inclined to think something's either wrong with your console and/or carts just need a real good cleaning.

[GreenDayRlz]

Bad power supply will rape the ROM's if it's shorting something out.

 

 

Have you released any magic smoke from those carts? Unleashing the magic smoke from ANY game will do the trick every time.

[DickNixonArisen]

I dunno... dead carts are pretty rare. Even bad batteries in NES/GEN/SNES carts are still fairly rare. I have two dead carts out of my 2,000 or so total... Ex-mutants on GEN and Toki on NES. both found dead. Power spike, maybe? From either household voltage or a problem with the console's power supply itself? I've seen brownouts kill cartridges and consoles together before. Static could probably do it, but you don't usually end up touching cart connectors after shuffling on a carpet. I've found enough original GB's with water damage; that could be something too. Actually having a cart work for a while and then die I've never heard of outside of EEproms like Bomb carts and such. I understand that a lot of manufacturers used them that you might not think about (spectravision, right?)