Hello, today I am showing a copy of Bachelor Party for the 2600 that I believe MAY BE a prototype. To tell the truth I am not sure since I have never seen a pic of the board inside a copy since to get a pic of the board one would have to destroy the label on the front to unscrew the case. If it is not a prototype it may be a reproduction, but I believe that to be unlikely, because the seller I acquired it from at a flea market had a few dozen 2600 games that were all original with their label fully intact. What puzzles me about this game is that it is the only game in the lot that did not have its original label, and it appeared to never have one, because there was/is no evidence of sticker residue on it. ( I have never cleaned the case) and unless the original owner some reason completely took off the label and cleaned it well I believe it never had the label. Also the board inside the case has an EPROM, which is unusual since I have never seen/heard of a regular run of the mill game cart having one since they are more delicate than regular rom chips. Also the 2 chips on the board are not soldered in, but instead appear to be removable, because they are placed into small holes similar to a socket, but they are glued in. View attachment 4011 Bachelor Party Board View attachment 4012 Cover of Bachelor Party cart View attachment 4013 Genuine 2600 dev board I have for comparison View attachment 4014 Standard 2600 game with metal shield that used to cover rom chip View attachment 4015 2600 reproduction board for comparison
Some Spectravision game carts (and few other lesser 3rd party companies) has EPROM instead of mask ROM and it was not unusual at the time. Uncommon but not unheard of. Spectravision games I checked had 7404 hex inverter between connector and EPROM but otherwise it looked like production version that used prototype board without socket. I do not have Bachelor Party to check with but I wouldn't be surprised if that is normal.
I'd suggest covering up those chip windows if you want whatever's on those prototypes to stay much longer. UV light wipes them.
Something much worse: an erotic Atari game. Never mind the fact that Atari graphics are about as sexy as Lego blocks.
Yep, that is exactly what it is, I have only played it for a couple seconds, because it is not really a game you want anyone to see you playing.
I don't think you have a "prototype", but who really knows, in some cases there's no discernible difference since most VCS games are little more than a 4K ROM... Add a socket and you've got a more or less authentic "dev cart". Even your presumed dev cart is just that, I highly doubt the PCB was made specifically as a dev cart and without provenance it can't be proven. In that era it was very common to ship games with EPROMs, the price gap between EPROM and mask ROM was small since the games were still small. One thing's for certain: the game didn't ship using Atari's mask ROMs. Atari mask ROMs have an active-high chip enable signal which simplifies address decoding, on the other hand it's typical for off the shelf memory such as EPROM to have active-low chip enables. That's the reason behind the 74LS04, it inverts an address line for decoding. Many retail games apparently do this and it's something you should actually expect from the smaller publishers who would shop around for mask ROMs or more likely just use EPROM.
