what is frying

[atari70s]

i cant remember is that when u hit reset many times fast?

[Urchlay]

i cant remember is that when u hit reset many times fast?

 

It's when you hit the power switch many times fast... turning the Atari on & off rapidly. Not necessarily a safe thing to do, though I've never known anyone who did permanent damage to their Atari or their cartridges.

[Video]

Yes, it's just flipping the power switch very fast. If done right, it can put power into a powered down cart befor all the residual electricity has fully left the cart. Often causeing glitches in how the cart works.

 

You can indeed fry a system, or a cart by doing this. However, the 2600, and it's games are so tough and simple in design, it's highly unlikely. But the possibility is still there.

[Mindfield]

When I discovered it back in the mid-80s, I fried every last one of my carts, just to see how they each reacted. It was fun. It never killed my system or any carts though -- the possibility didn't even occur to me. It was fun though; some games got all freaky, yet still remained playable to some degree.

Edited June 5, 2006 by Mindfield

[NovaXpress]

Has anyone ever actually seen a system or game destroyed by frying? I've never seen or heard of it and I've fried up several 2600s.

[bjk7382]

It's really fun when you get a brazillian 8in1 or 4in1 and flip the switches when the systems on. And get some really strange effects. They crash a lot easier after that though.

Edited June 5, 2006 by bjk7382

[D.Yancey]

is a Brazillian more or less than a Bazillion??

[ZylonBane]

Yes, it's just flipping the power switch very fast. If done right, it can put power into a powered down cart befor all the residual electricity has fully left the cart.

Oh for the love of god. Carts are (usually) ROM. You can't scramble a ROM this way. What frying does is induce random states into the 2600's RAM.

[Nabuko78]

That's frying? I though it was pulling the cartridge side to side in a violent way without turning power off, just pulling and seeing how your favourite game is getting scrambled in a funny way well i guess is the same result. It worked for me with Frogger, I obtained the same results when I tried frying button in stella and when I did cart pull back in the 80's.

 

 

That's right! It is the same image I remember in my childhood. And the scrambled tune as well.

Give it a try!

[Nukey Shay]

Yes, it's just flipping the power switch very fast. If done right, it can put power into a powered down cart befor all the residual electricity has fully left the cart.

Oh for the love of god. Carts are (usually) ROM. You can't scramble a ROM this way. What frying does is induce random states into the 2600's RAM.

 

More exactly, "frying" causes the cartridge to boot from an unspecified location (usually bypassing the game's initialization routines). The program could be coded in a way to correct this error...by checking for valid value(s) expected to be held, and jumping to the init routine if that test fails.

[4ever2600]

I remember doing that back in the 80s to my Space Invaders cart to give me double fire power... If you do power and restart game at the same time (a few times) you'll get rapid fire... I freaked as a kid that you could do that, and had no idea why it was happening...

[stop_rebel_scum]

isn't that more of a "deliberate bug" rather than a condition of frying? it'd be nice to have a list made of known fryables and their result. I've never done it.

[DanBoris]

Has anyone ever actually seen a system or game destroyed by frying? I've never seen or heard of it and I've fried up several 2600s.

 

Although I have never actually seen a system damaged by doing this I can think of at least two logical ways this could damage the system. First, and most obviously you could physically damage the power switch. Secondly, the time when power is being applied to an electronic circuit is when it's under the greatest stress, so the rapid powering on and off may not necessarily kill the hardware but it could accelerator its failure.

 

Dan

[Nukey Shay]

isn't that more of a "deliberate bug" rather than a condition of frying? it'd be nice to have a list made of known fryables and their result. I've never done it.

 

IIRC it's the result of a ram location not holding a proper AND value for a bit test (so that the "which player shot?" test always ends up to be player 0). Switching game selections would automatically fix the glitch, because then the initialization routine runs and gives it a valid value. So it's not intentional (though it can be made to be, such as in Beast Invaders and SI Deluxe).

BTW "known" frying effects are posted in Scott's Digital Press pages for most of the popular games.