R.I.P. Adventure

[+DamonicFury]

I hadn't played my personal copy of Adventure for a while, but I was in the mood to match wits with the Bat again, and plugged it in. No luck. I cleaned the contacts EXTREMELY thoroughly, opened up the cart, resoldered the connections... still nothing. Just pure random failure of a cart I have owned for many, many years! :-( Guess these things happen but it's still a bit disturbing. Could have been worse, could have been a rarer cart... still I've always loved Adventure. I've already ordered a replacement, just was curious if anyone else out there has had similar experiences.

[joeybastard]

I've never had an Atari cart completely die on me. NES yes - 2 in fact, but never on my VCS.

[NE146]

w/ Dead carts? Absolutely. It hurts even more when it's a cart that you've owned since the glory days. But I remember My 5200 MsPacman cart up and died on me when it was only a few months old! My mom just bought me that cart for some good cash back in the early 80's and for some reason it died. I was only about 12-13 so I couldn't easily get a replacement. And I was too afraid to tell my mom that it was broken. So I went for years and years before I got a replacement only a couple of years ago

[ATARI TROLL]

Norman Bates wouldn't have had so much repect for mother. Good job on the Ms Pacman secret.

[ATARIPITBULL]

I never knew that a Atari cartridge could go bad on you unless it was burned or left in water.

 

[BeerGnome]

Ive got a dead donkey Kong cart here that I can't do nothing with..

it happens.. I'm afraid to say.

 

keep in mind.. I'm a very moderate collector and my collection is very limited.. Ihang out with you guys for the good conversation..

 

in any case.. yeah.. DK is dead.. I should get another copy...

 

also my combat cart has a broken spring for the dust cover..

I'm thinking of just yanking out that mechinism

 

but tis a cying shame about Adventure.. first cart I got when I got back into Atari.. was my favorite game as a kid

my cart acts funny though.. no amount of fussing with the difficulty switches will alter the settings of the game

[AtariDude]

That stinks about adventure. I still play that from time to time. I even got a clone of it called "Indenture" if I remember the name correctly to play on my PC.

 

Anyway, here is a site where you can play adventure online while you wait for your cart to arrive.

 

http://www.scottpehnke.com/programming/flash.htm

 

Enjoy

[Lord-Chaos]

Some companies used EPROMs for their carts and EPROMs can get erased over time (bitrot) , but AFAIK ATARI never used EPROMs.

 

I even have ATARI carts that were damaged by water which still work fine.

 

But I think that this does not happen very often to ATARI carts - but carts from other companies , especially Bomb , die without any reason (or are dead when you get them).

 

Thimo

[+DamonicFury]

Thanks to AtariDude for the Java Adventure link... nice way to get my fix. :-)

 

As far as I know, spontaneous complete failure of Atari carts is indeed quite rare... but apparently it does happen from time to time. While I've bought 'dead' carts before this is the first time a known good one has failed on me.

 

Now to plan a proper 'funeral' for my dearly departed cart...

[MegaManFan]

It must have happened to the Warlords I mailed out, because I know it worked when I had it here. Spontaneous failure sux though!

[AtariDude]

Thanks to AtariDude for the Java Adventure link... nice way to get my fix. :-)

 

 

Your welcome. Enjoy!

[Big Player]

I've had a few 2600 carts die on me. The latest was Omega Race.

 

I bought it loose at Cinciclassic 2002 and planning on picking up a booster grip or a colecovision controller to play the game. Well I picked up a Colecovision controller at Philly 4 and so when I got home to see if it worked, the damn cart is dead! It worked perfectly when I tested it right after Cinci.

 

I seem to have bad luck with CBS games. Had Mountain King die on me back in the day. Luckily, I found its replacement it at Philly.

[atarigamer]

I've had this happen to Pac-Man temporarily. Once in awhile it will just decide not to work at ALL on any of my 2600's. And once in a rare while it 'll decide to work.

[Markimus of K.]

I haven't had too many carts die spontaneously, but I sure was pissed when my Sprint Master did this a while back.