Two loaner dumps- Baseball and Berzerk

[ianoid]

I tried these on Altierra64 which crashes. Although the emulator seems to recognize that they are Baseball and Berserk.

 

Any thoughts? Are these good dumps?

 

 

Berzerk blue loaner.bin Baseball 4-14.bin

[ianoid]

Can anyone make any sense of these two dumps? I'd like to make sure they are good dumps while I still have access to them. 

[bah]

I can only add that both games work the same on a real 5200, go to title screen then crash.

[Tempest]

Both of these are unarchived and appear to be WIP versions.  How did you dump them?  Did you assemble the different file correctly (LO -> MID LO -> MID HI -> HI)?

[ianoid]

I will test them on real hardware in a minute or 200. 

 

I dumped them with the AtariMax rig. I didn't pull the EPROMs or anything.

 

Excellent! I love adding unique contributions to the world of game data.

[DavidD]

What's the story behind "loaner" carts, exactly?

I came across two 2600 Lab Loaner carts years ago in a thrift store, and I was always curious as to what the intended purpose was...

[Kr0tki]

I think both dumps are bad. In both the Baseball and Berzerk BINs data is duplicated - each 32 KB image consists of two copies of the first 8 KB, then two copies of the last 8 KB of data. But each copy is different from the other one in numerous locations, suggesting that the AtariMax dumper was reading random data from these location when it was reading them twice. This might be an indication of a failure in the ROM chips, unfortunately.

 

While this duplication of data is expected for Berzerk, which is a 16 KB cartridge, in case of Baseball it is rather strange, because the picture clearly shows four 8 KB ROMs on the PCB. As if half of the ROMs weren't even acessed when dumped. What is also strange is that Baseball and all its known prototypes contained 24 KB in three 8 KB chips, while this one has four.

 

Anyway, comparing the salvageable parts of the dumps with the other known versions, it seems that both these cartridges are different from other prototypes and released versions.