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Final Legacy Rev. 5.3


Scooter83

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I was talking to a guy about Atari games and he told me about this cart he had forsale. Its a Final Legacy Rev 5.3 Titled "Legacy". I know in my research there was a REV. 5.3 and 7.1 with 7.1 being a later version. The owner claims he got it from the original programmer himself as it was part of his personal collection and was passed over to the current owner over time. I know Atari 2600 and 5200s had the lab loaner labels and I have never seen any in my research of Atari 8 bit protos. Nor have I seen any on AtariProtos.com's site. SO I figure this item looks legit. He was able to tell me some of the variations this cart is over the regular release version ( Blue text, No game over, different music, Title Screen saying Legacy instead of Final Legacy. In my paperwork research theres a Beta 1 and Beta 2. I dont know if this differs from the 2 versions in proto form Ive learned about ( 5.3 and 7.1 ). Anyway I wanted to get your opinions on the cart. The insides are regular reprogrammable eprom chips. Label looks well aged. Opinions welcomed. Also what would to value be on an item like this?

 

RX8067LegacyPrototypeRev53a_zpsc07f79e6.jpg

Edited by Scooter83
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is this the Beta 1 or Beta 2 version ive seen on my check lists?

I don't know, I'd have to see a dump of the rom. Dan had mentioned that there were 12-15 of these made and they're 'out there' somewhere.

 

So, for the collectors out there. There are 12-15 of these. All were returned to me at Atari. Where they all went from there I have no idea except for one which I have. I attached a photo of my cart. The label was a white paper label hand written by me "LEGACY © ATARI 1983 Rev 5.3" and a stamp at the top in red which I can barely see "CONFIDENTIAL". I think they all had exactly the same text. But each ROM image would be different by at least a byte for the serial number. I don't remember which one was stolen so there would be more copies of at least one of these. Not sure how copies could be verified.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/169826-is-laser-gates-really-inner-space/page__st__50?do=findComment&comment=2756886

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It is indeed a legit cart. EPROM was burned by me and label written by me. It was personally owned by me up until a couple of months ago when I traded it to Scott Stilpen. Scott did a lot of analysis to compare the Rev 5.3 cart to the known Rev 7.1 versions and we exchanged many emails on the carts.

 

I'm now nearly 100% sure the 7.1 carts were made for a focus group test and if that's the case there would be 12-15 of those. Someone could tell for sure if 2 copies were found because the carts made for focus testing would each have a slightly different ROM image because I put a serial number in each which turned out to be useful.

 

I now believe Rev 5.3 would have been made for maybe a magazine editor for review or something like that and I made an extra copy for myself. I didn't normally make copies and would have only done so if asked to do so by my boss Chris Horseman for a specific reason. In that case I think there would be just a couple copies (say 2 or 3) of Rev 5.3. There would be very few made because we were very concerned about it being stolen. There wasn't any internal testing group for Legacy or Final Legacy so there weren't a lot of pre-release carts made.

 

I had recently thought my Rev 5.3 copy was part of the set made for focus testing, but after discussion with Scott I now believe 5.3 was earlier.

 

"Legacy" was the title I originally wanted but turned out to have been used by something else so the name was changed to "Final Legacy".

 

I never used the terms "beta" or "alpha" for games because games aren't speced like apps so there's no way to know when a game is "feature complete". If I would retroactively assign those terms I would call Rev 5.3 an alpha version and Rev 7.1 a beta. Alpha being something still in development and beta being feature complete but still being tweaked. So terms like "beta 1" etc would be something other people came up with later as a description like "proto", strictly a term used by collectors.

 

I can't speak to value because I'm not a collector. I traded the cart to Scott for some VCS equipment for developing a new game mainly because I thought that was a pretty cool use of the Legacy cart. After learning about collectors for these I figured it was probably better the cart be available to collectors instead of banging around my house. Scott being an Archivist seemed a perfect choice to document the cart before it going to a collector and I think he did a very through job.

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Scott did a lot of analysis to compare the Rev 5.3 cart to the known Rev 7.1 versions and we exchanged many emails on the carts.

Did he send you a link as to where this is posted? I'm curious as to what's different.

 

EDIT: Looks like I found it:

 

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Yes, those are the video links. His channel is here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ScottithGames

 

He found many more differences that we discussed via email a month ago, don't know his plans for that info. It was very interesting for me to see the tweaks made.

Were these tweaks made by you or someone else on the team?

 

One thing I was curious about is the version numbers. All the other Atari protos I've run across just used the build date and maybe a single revision number, but yours used actual version numbers. Any reason for this?

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Tweaks were done by me. I was the only programmer on the project.

 

I'm not sure where I picked up my version number scheme. I do like using dates as version numbers, I assume I just hadn't learned of that scheme yet. I do remember spending way too much time worrying about such silly things.

 

The sequential scheme has the advantage in theory that you have some idea about how many releases were made. I assume there was no 0.x version numbers. I would have started with 1 or 2, I'd guess 2. That scheme would mean at max I would have burned ROMs for 2.x, 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, 7.x, so 6 sets max, maybe some for release to manufacturing. It's very likely I skipped some of those numbers altogether. Just something I would have dreamed up, like "this seems pretty far along so I'll call this 5.3" type silliness. The minor number, after the decimal point, could likely be totally made up or if I screwed up a EPROM. Version numbers are more useful as the game is close to release when getting ready for release to manufacturing, don't want to screw that up. Did that on Space Cavern.

 

However, I think collectors and Archivists like Scott actually have a better handle on all this by looking at the carts themselves and comparing features. After all I thought Robert Wheatherby did the music for Final Legacy and it's been proven to me that it was Brad Fuller. Human memory is crap.

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