Console effects on games

[Osmeroid]

Last night I was playing on my Atari and decided to spend some time on Defender. My old 6-switch is developing a rather poor contact on the power switch and sometimes causes some bizarre effects. This happened with Defender but was I really surprised when the game worked but I apparently had an infinite number of lives! Every level was the same as the first but the level counter did increment as normal, apart from starting at level zero. Nor did the city blocks appear – I could still use bombs and acquire them too. The repeating levels did become dull very quickly so I tweaked the power switch and got it working normally again. Oddly enough, I tried to mangle the game again and it did reproduce the same effect.

 

Has anyone else come across any strange & spooky happenings like this with their consoles?

[Nukey Shay]

It's called frying and you can find a plethora of info over at digitpress.com (in the easter eggs section)

http://www.digitpress.com/eastereggs/26defender.htm

 

[ 04-24-2002: Message edited by: Nukey Shay ]

[Osmeroid]

Thanks Nukey, do you know if it causes any damage?

[Atarian7]

Atari Bible Leviticus 2:10

 

"Any atariite found engaging in the arts of 'frying' shall be stoned to death with E.T. cartridges."

[Osmeroid]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

[Nukey Shay]

Rapidly moving the switch will wear it out in time...but if you have an ac adaptor that has an adjustable current switch, I think you can use that instead (drop the current down to 1.5v and then back up to 9v).

[Mindfield]

I "discovered" Frying back in the day quite by accident on my old heavy sixer. I didn't have an actual term for it, I just liked to mess around with while playing all the different games I had. A lot of games were quite useless when fried, but some produced some rather neat effects and remained moderately playable in its 'new' environment. :-)