Could any other consoles be "fried"?

[SteveW]

A lot of kids in the early 80's (like me) figured out that if you screw with the Atari 2600's power switch, you could "fry" a game and get it to go squirrely. Most consoles didn't use that 2600 flip switch, but could other consoles (up to present day) be fried somehow? And if you removed the old power button and installed a power switch on a console, could you fry one of those? Or is "frying" a game something only the 2600's hardware is capable of?

[Ferris]

Frying the NES is the only way I get the old cartridges to work. I thought they had bitrot... but if you fry them long enuf they come back to life. Dont try frying 2600 games on the 7800 tho...

[Ze_ro]

I wouldn't recommend trying this on any console, since it could cause serious problems for very little good outcome. I would imagine that most systems probably have "de-bouncing" circuits to prevent the kinds of power surges that frying induces in the 2600. Also, frying usually affects random memory locations, which is less likely to produce meaningful effects on systems with huge (compared to the 2600) amounts of memory. You'd likely just get graphical glitches and unplayable games, or random lock ups (I've gotten lots of these on the NES).

 

Just get a Game Genie instead. It's much safer, and you'll at least get something that you can repeat if you like it.

 

--Zero

[christianscott27]

i used to keep tweaking with the fried screen when i was a kid, judging each pattern on its artistic merit. i guess i was easily entertained, i imagined the screens were showing the electronic world inside the game ala tron. funny thing is that i was doing this on my sears video arcade II (the all black 7800 looking VCS) which has push button on/off rather than switches.

[Ferris]

Yep let me just head out and get myself a Game Genie for the Atari 2600. I'm gonna run down to Toys R Us, I'll be right back.

[vanman]

Hey, ninja harry is cool. Frying is the only way to get him.

[Video]

I've accidentally done frying on NES once, maybe it's ability to fry is what causes it to start blinking after the card port gets bent out of shape?

 

You can probably fry any system with a click style pushbutton, not the rubber graphite button like newer consoles have.

[Room 34]

In my experience ColecoVision and 7800 are fairly prone to "frying" on their own! Lots of garbage graphics. My friend who had a CV back in elementary school had a lot of trouble with that, as have I with the 7800.

[SteveW]

But 'frying' on a 2600 actually did something other than give you garbage graphics. I found out that frying the Arcadia/Starpath Supercharger pack-in game Phazer Patrol would make the enemies meaner, faster, and sometimes invisible! It doubled the challenge! Frying Space Invaders always did something fun, and there were a few others I can't recall off the top of my head that got a lot more interesting after frying. Were there other consoles you could fry and actually change the gameplay, instead of giving you scrambled graphics only?

[Han]

When I was a kid I had this rather primitive post pong console (well… I still have it check out the pix). I don’t remember if you could actually fry it like a 2600. But if you held down several gameselect keys simultaneously you would get some pretty interesting game variations... Still didn’t make the console much more fun, thankfully my next console was a 2600 …

[Video]

Woah, that things pretty cool. Was it a pong machine? And were there more carts you could get or is that for looks?

[Han]

Woah, that things pretty cool.  Was it a pong machine?  And were there more carts you could get or is that for looks?

 

Well it was slightly more advanced than Pong. But it was very basic, with dots and lines graphics. There were actually a couple of cartridges available for it, see the attached pix. I had the sports cart, with 10 different variations of Pong including basketball pong. Some of the variations were pretty ok I suppose. I liked the one called Target where you had to shoot big evil dots that would fly by on the screen ...

 

And then I had the Submarine cart, which was absolutely pointless. Actually the worse submarine game version I have ever played. Even by those days’ standards…

 

I think there were several different versions of this consol, with different names and from different manufactures, but with similar hardware. But I don’t know much about it...