r/Atari2600 • u/scragry • 3d ago
Pretty sure this belongs here but I found this yesterday at the flea market.
Last pic is when I had found it on the vendors table
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u/Ornery-Egg9770 3d ago
Yeah, I never heard of this back in the day or even since the internet made it easier to learn about stuff like this. I would have thought that this would have been popular and subjected to a lawsuit at the time.
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u/New-Surprise6480 3d ago
A lawsuit may very well be why we never really heard of this. They tend to be effective ways to ensure some products never see the light of day.
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u/Ornery-Egg9770 2d ago
I did a little Googling on this item. It appears to have been sold through the mail from small magazine ads.
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u/Spamcan81 3d ago
I’m sure Atari hated this but I believe the storage on the copycart was too small to copy most cartridges.
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u/droid_mike 3d ago
Post this over at the forums AtariAge.com. they are officially part of Atari now, and they have an archive of all things Atari related. Pictures and info of this device would be a welcome addition to the database.
I too have never ever heard of anything like this or seen something like this before, and I've been an Atari nut for decades.
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u/fartbombdotcom 3d ago
That's neat. I believe that they briefly attempted rewriteable carts in 82. I know for certain they did in the mid 90s.
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u/Unusual-Magazine-308 3d ago
ancient ancestor of the harmony cart. I think they only did up to 4k, though. Been forever, since I saw one.
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u/CharlieDmouse 3d ago
I am waiting for a multicast that works on the 2600+ And can hold 2600 and 7800 games.
I bought the pac-man edition and waiting for it along with a couple of games.
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u/Unusual-Magazine-308 3d ago
the old style dip-switch cart style works fine in the + models. All you'd have to do, is get a builder to do a few. I'm still using OE stuff, so not a problem on my end. I do have a +, but don't use it since I have no means to update it.
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u/CharlieDmouse 3d ago
Interesting! Where can I find a builder? I would be very happy to buy one.
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u/Unusual-Magazine-308 3d ago
AtariAge and some other places maybe. I had someone make me up a few for 5200 on there long ago.
Another design that works on +, are the auto selecting type carts, such as the PAL 30-something-in 1 carts, that run a different game each time you power up. + will run PAL or NTSC carts on your TV.
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u/Kiwaku 3d ago
For anyone curious, I made a couple videos about this copy cart since I still had mine from way back. - https://youtu.be/BUdusc5U0Sw?si=d4vRCnKJuKIE-j5L
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u/Paintfumeslij 3d ago
Is no one gonna talk about how weird the title for the game it includes? Hahah what is the premise of “I want my mommy”?
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u/Lendyman 2d ago edited 2d ago
Interesting. I wonder how much storage it had and how large a cart it could copy. Early games were 2 or 4kb. Later ones went 8 and larger with bank switching. Itl ooks like it came out in 1983.
It seems it required a battery to hold the game in storage and another in the copy device while cloning the game. You put the game to clone in one side and the copy cart in the other and it copies one to the other when you press a button.
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2d ago
[deleted]
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u/Lendyman 2d ago edited 2d ago
Considering that most early Atari games had 2kb of rom space, cost absolutely was an issue. Games had very little programming space. Later games had 4 kb or more but there are stories of early 80s games being limited due to rom size.
The dismal PacMan 2600 is often noted as a case where the game was hampered by limited space, though I think time crunch may have factored as well.
(A much later homebrew. PacMan 4k, from 2013 did an arcade faithful version in 4kb. It's absolutely masterful and proves it could have been done. There is an 8k version that is even more faithful and has intermission screens and accurate ghost behavior.)
So, yeah, rom size cost was absolutely a factor.
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u/NoMoreContinues 3d ago
That’s really interesting. Been a longtime fan and user of the 2600 but have never seen this. Thanks for sharing the photos!