Third-Party Cart Shell Fix

[ballyalley]

How to Trim Astrocade Third-Party Cartridges to Fit More-Easily

 

(I posted this fix today to the Bally Alley Yahoo groups, but I figure I should post it here to, as there seem to be more readers on Astrocade AtariAge sub-forum than on the Astrocade Yahoo group.)

The third-party cartridge cases for several Astrocade games, such as Sea Devil, ICBM Attack and the various UltiMulti cartridges from Ken Lill (among others) can be little tough to fit into the cartridge slot when inserting them into the Astrocade. Ken explained to me a few days ago an easy way to fix this problem.

Here's what you need to do:

1) Trim the cartridge case with an X-acto knife. Trim about 1/16'th of an inch (don't trim too much!) of plastic from these two areas in this picture:

 

That's it. In the above picture , the top cartridge is a third-party cartridge, and the bottom cartridge is a regular cartridge from Bally/Astrocade, Inc. (in this case, the cartridge is The Incredible Wizard).

I tried this fix, and now my third-party cartridges insert into the cartridge slot much easier now. Give it a try; you'll be happy you did it.

(Special thanks to Ken for his help with this simple, but clever, fix.)

Adam