Is Jinks the best cartridge case for donor/homebrew purposes?

[Lynxpro]

Is the Jinks 7800 cartridge the best shell to use for donor/homebrew purposes? Or is the draw with the board used with the game? Or both?

 

Reason why I ask is because I found a spare cartridge and I thought if the shell is the best of the best, then why not scan it for 3D printing purposes?

 

If the Jinks shell isn't the best, which shell is?

[CPUWIZ]

3D printed shells are not going to cut it, I am afraid.

 

The only reason, I like them, is that Jay had a shitton of them at one point and I was able to use them frequently. All labels come off clean and the shells are all the same, not something you can say for most other games.

 

Nothing special about them.

[jaybird3rd]

There are a few things about Jinks which made it desirable for homebrew projects. Jinks uses Atari's versatile C300565 cartridge board, which supports bankswitched ROMs in a variety of configurations, and it also has an extra 8K of onboard SRAM. Jinks was also readily available, because for the longest time, vendors like O'Shea had huge inventories of NOS Jinks cartridges. The Jinks shells are actually identical to those of other Tramiel-era 7800 cartridges, but because they usually came fresh out of the box, they were crisp and clean and the labels could be peeled off whole with no trouble, so they were easier than most to work with.

 

About five years ago, O'Shea scrapped their inventory (including, sadly, many new Jinks cartridges), but thanks to CPUWIZ's new cartridge boards, Atari's old boards aren't nearly as important for homebrew as they once were. The only thing we haven't replaced yet are the cartridge shells.

 

(Some background, in case anyone is interested: when I learned that O'Shea would be scrapping their inventory, I bought fifteen cases of their 7800 cartridges all at once: six cases of Ballblazer, and nine cases of Jinks, with a few stray packs of Joust and Touchdown Football accidentally mixed in by Atari. In all, it was just over one thousand new 7800 cartridges. Since then, they've all been recycled: the POKEY chips inside the Ballblazers were reclaimed, and the shells and Jinks boards eventually became new homebrew cartridges. I "rescued" all I could afford at the time, and in retrospect I wish I could have bought more. My inventory finally ran out last year; all I have left now is one or two copies of each game, and a pile of Atari Advantage 7800 poster catalogs, pulled from the Ballblazer boxes. As for the empty boxes ... I decided to have some fun with them, so I "re-enacted" the Alamogordo dump in my own backyard when we poured a new foundation.)

[+Trebor]

(Some background, in case anyone is interested: when I learned that O'Shea would be scrapping their inventory, I bought fifteen cases of their 7800 cartridges all at once: six cases of Ballblazer, and nine cases of Jinks, with a few stray packs of Joust and Touchdown Football accidentally mixed in by Atari. In all, it was just over one thousand new 7800 cartridges. Since then, they've all been recycled: the POKEY chips inside the Ballblazers were reclaimed, and the shells and Jinks boards eventually became new homebrew cartridges. I "rescued" all I could afford at the time, and in retrospect I wish I could have bought more. My inventory finally ran out last year; all I have left now is one or two copies of each game, and a pile of Atari Advantage 7800 poster catalogs, pulled from the Ballblazer boxes. As for the empty boxes ... I decided to have some fun with them, so I "re-enacted" the Alamogordo dump in my own backyard when we poured a new foundation.)

Very interested/interesting.

 

Wow...thank you for both the investment and the breakdown.

 

Hindsight is 20/20...I kick myself every time I think about O'Shea and the stock of brand new shrink wrapped ~25 or so different 2600 games and ~35 or so different 7800 games at $0.40 a piece back in the mid 90's. We all should have bought up boat loads...Thanks for being wise enough to do so once you caught word of the ship going down.

 

I believe the highest their prices ever hit was $4-$5 each (Still a steal compared to the joke of pricing on eBay now). Regardless, it must have cost you a small fortune. Very cool, considerate, and generous of you providing for the community like that. Again, thank you.

 

The earliest the archives go back is April 1997; a few titles already sold out and the price bumped from $0.40 to a whooping $0.80...LOL!

 

http://web.archive.org/web/19970415125908/http://www.oshealtd.com/

 

[ls650]

I bought one of every O'Shea cart for both 2600 and 7800 years ago, when they were only a couple of bucks a pop.

It's really a shame that they scrapped them eventually, but I guess the market was saturated and they just weren't selling any more.

[Lynxpro]

Well, at least they only crushed 20,000. Supposedly, they started out with 1 million carts, so if they did sell 880,000, more power to them.

 

What annoys me is thinking about how many of those 20,000 had POKEYs in them. I think Commando had sold out long before so we're talking about Ballblazer carts, if any were left.

 

Still, as RetroGameGirl demonstrated, even the lowly Pole Position 2 cart board can be of use...

 

 

 

3D printing isn't cost effective for production runs but if someone has a board and wants a customized shell in anything in black, that would be one way of doing it without resorting to painting.

 

The label info is interesting. 7800 labels being easy to peel off but silver Atari 2600 labels aren't based upon Albert's comments elsewhere.