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8-bit Cartridge Label Project


Atari8bitCarts

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  • 4 weeks later...
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On 3/9/2019 at 5:36 PM, Mr Robot said:

Lessons learned from doing the Platoterm label about the origin of the darker stripe at the bottom of the brown cart label (its just not as faded) caused me to redo all of the brown cart labels without the stripe. I've been uploading them to here https://atari8bit.net/repro-cart-labels/

 

The The!Cart brown label is one of them.

And now I have to put all the stripes back, this one has a definitely darker logo strip ? 

 

 

c_3DTicTacToe_Brown_front.jpg

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I'd leave it a solid color.  I've sold some reproduction carts like this in the past, and I used a solid brown without the darker stripe at the bottom.  Now I'm going to have to look at all the 8-bit carts I have (a ton in this style) to see if there's any consistency with them.

 

 ..Al

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I wonder if the label was printed a single colour and the red and yellow were underprinted, it would have been a lot easier back than trying to get the registration that precise. If you look closely at the yellow on this cart it also has a band across the label.

 

As the label is fading with age the underprint is becoming visible.  You're right, I think it should be left a single colour, but we need to rethink the reason why they all have that band now, it's not from spending a long time in a 400/800. 

 

 c_AssemblerEditor_Brown_front.jpg.1a1ee0c7ca98f5997d8ec5b166ac5f6e.jpg

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Here's a photo I just took of nine brand new Pac-Man carts that have been sitting in a box in a dark closet for years..  Yes, the carts don't look perfect, but, hey, they are 40 years old at this point.  The metal covers on these do look perfect, though!!  :D

 

atari8bitPacManCarts.jpg

The darker stripes appear under the "PAC-MAN" title and at the bottom starting with the "ATARI CXL4022" text.  All of these carts are consistent as far as that goes.  Whether or not this is how they looked when they were printed is beyond me.  But it certainly isn't fading due to light exposure from sitting in the system as I posited some time ago. Not sure this was intentional on Atari's part, either, or something to do with the printing process (and in particular, how those darker areas contain color text).  My guess is it has to do with the way these were printed and wasn't really an intended effect.

 

I still have to go look through my collection to see how those carts all look.  But I'm super busy at the moment, so that will have to wait until tomorrow. 

 

 ..Al

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Yeah you can see brown around the yellow text has a slightly yellower tinge to it as well. It looks like they printed a yellow stripe at the top and an orangered stripe at the bottom then printed the brown over the top to get the label. The label where the text is white looks about the same colour as the cart so it's probably pretty close to the original colour. 

 

I would guess that the carts looked like this (or very close to it) when they were new as well. Which begs the question, should that be replicated on a repro label?

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Maybe I can clear this up...

 

The Banding is a two fold issue.

 

The Yellow and what is referred to as Darker Yellow or Brown or even Orange lettering and the resulting band is on ALL cartridge at that time, if you can not perceive it, try looking at it with different spectrums of light and angles and distance for your viewing point. Even on the cartridges that have faded and are hard to see it is present. This is a product of the process of making the Labels and coloring the letters. The color is applied as a rectangle, or band to color the letters and as a square for descending text like a TM (trademark etc) It was later used as a way to authenticate the product. What was allowed to change was the stamping of numbers into the label.

 

This method allowed uniform color across the text and avoided registration issues...  I hope this clears some of the concerns up. I tend to ramble and nobody wants me to go on about this kind of stuff to be sure :)

 

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5 hours ago, Mr Robot said:

This looks great. we need all the labels available like this. 8/xl/xe. How many of you are missing or have a grimy label that need replacement. Both Atari OEM and more importantly 3rd part carts.  A DB might be setup for easy download. I wish I knew how to do it.

Many thanks!!!

 

 

5 hours ago, Mr Robot said:

 

bb.thumb.jpg.687f713154961ddf039f8a40f66d346d.jpg

 

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One thing I've noticed doing all these cart labels is that some of the homebrew and flashcarts used numbers that clash with real carts. Platoterm is one of them, so is The!Cart, I don't know where the numbers came from for these but CXL4042 clashes with RX8042 which is Tennis. Platoterm is CXL4030 which clashes with RX8030 which is E.T. Phone Home

 

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I think I have all of the Official Atari carts done now (except for the two Atari Lab carts) I'm working on the known variations now with the help of Jon Bowers on Facebook who has a good collection of scans for me to look at.

 

I've started on the Prototypes, I think I've got the XEGS versions of most of them, still need to do Brown/Gray versions for the Protos from those years.

 

There are a few Hombrew cart labels as well now. 

 

It's coming along but theres a lot to do!

 

The link is in my sig.

 

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  • 6 months later...

I think I've done about 99% of the Atari labels, there are still a few minor variants to do.

 

I'd like to do Activision and Parker Bros, they have a good amount of detail to work on but there aren't many good images of the originals to repro, you rarely see the top part of the labels for example.

 

Epyx labels look very do-able ;)

 

Edit: Wordpress have recently fixed a bug in the gallery block I use on my website, it used to only link to the 'large' version of an image even if you asked it to link to the media file, the large size was ~1024px. I just updated the gallery and now it links to the full size which is ~2500px.

Edited by Mr Robot
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1 hour ago, Mr Robot said:

I'd like to do Activision and Parker Bros, they have a good amount of detail to work on but there aren't many good images of the originals to repro, you rarely see the top part of the labels for example.

 

Coincidentally, one of the few, kinda crappy carts I happen to still have (a small number a friend thoughtfully picked up for me at a thrift store many years ago) is a Parker Brothers Frogger.  Here's a scan I made when I was thinking about this last night (note that there are images of the front, back and top):

 

https://archive.org/details/frogger1983parkerbrothers

 

And here's my also-not-in-good-shape 1981 Space Invaders label:

https://archive.org/details/spaceinvaders1981ataricxl4008

 

Note that these are 1,200 DPI scans in TIFF format, so you may not like them if you're on a low bandwidth connection.

Edited by jamm
Added Space Invaders label
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