I've got a woody! Well, an Atari 2600 Woodgrain that is! And this one had a nice surprise too! :)
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- Опубликовано: 9 сен 2024
- Piracy has always been rife in the computer industry - but this early attempt for the Atari 2600 is very interesting.
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That board inside the cartridge was actually a mail order kit. We had 100% the exact same board for our Atari 2600 back in the late 70's. Back then, you could go to a local store and rent the cartridges... and we had an EPROM burner that could also read them... you didn't need to remove the EPROM from the Cartridge... it simply plugged into a slot adapter that was also inserted into the EPROM programmers ZIF socket. From there, you could "copy" the contents from one EPROM (or PROM) to the target EPROM. The programmer also included a EPROM eraser on the left side... basically a UV lamp on a timer.
We had hundreds of EPROMs in a black static mat inside a big box we could pick from. Loved it.
I'd guess that the LS74 is actually mounted upside down and has had its pins bent over which is why it's marked on the underside; Clive probably laid the circuit out with the plan of mounting it on the same side as the EPROMS then realised he couldn't fit it in the case, and rather than have to redesign the circuit he just put the socket on the bottom and flipped the pins. (And not to diminish his achievement, but using LS74s for chip select logic to combine address space across several chips is standard practice so I very much doubt an oscilloscope was involved at all.)
When I was an intern, in the early 80s, we had access to EPROM programmers and erasers plus tons of chips that were deemed too old to be used in operations so, yeah, we had a lot of 2600 piracy going on ;) I didn't have a console though as it was expensive for me.
Thank goodness for people like Uncle Clive. I enjoyed the video and look forward to future installments.
I can remember my cousins having an Atari 2600 they was brought into Australia by a friend from the USA. This was way before multi-standard TVs were a thing. The PAL TV did manage to sync to the NTSC 2600 with some tweaking of the vertical hold control... but was in B&W and had no sound 🙂
That's what is known as a Light Sixer. The Heavy Sixer is a bit rarer and more sought after.
I'd love a woody, however I know I'd just turn it on, play with it for, lets say, a few minutes, then I'd return it to it's box and put it in my attic for a couple of decades. It'd be a great find for the next person to venture into the attic though eh!
that 74 series logic is used for bank switching. You basically use it to turn on/off the chip/select pins on the EPROMs when the highest address bit is enabled, effectively allowing you to split the ROM into 2 banks of 2k each. It's a classic trick to increase storage on a limited address space, and was even used on the SNES in their own custom MAD-1 logic chip to allow bank switching between two Mask ROMs and the SRAM address spaces.
Grew up on that thing... after school and evenings.. hours of gameplay with friends. Good memories of that woody vcs sitting on rust orange carpet floor surrounded by woodgrain wall paneling, a spider plant hanging in the window by macrame cording.. and Def Leppard Pyromania just came out.
The logic chip with the part number on the bottom… - if you re-bend the legs you can then inset the chip into the wrong side of the PCB -I would suspect that the logic chip should’ve been mounted on the same side of the PCB as the Ziff sockets.
Maybe someone mirrored the 74ls04 footprint on the board and simply bent the legs of the IC over to fix the problem. Pretty brilliant solution ;-)
Probably meant it to be on the top side with the Ziff sockets.
Or it was supposed to go on the other side, next to the ZIF sockets.
Really ingenious setup for the time. I wonder what other computer he had, connected to the EPROM programmer? As a teen who really wanted one, I recall those programmers could be quite expensive in the late 70's/very early 80's.
As for the origin of the ROMs: Do any of them show any sign of modification? It seems to me that teams dumping them to BBS's would have tried to add their own signatures/touch somehow. I wonder if uncle Clive did not also create a cart interface for that aforementioned computer, so that he could dump the contents of friends carts or rented carts?
Maybe several years after the system in the video would have been created, I added a switch to the power/data lines on my C=64's cartridge port so that I could power up the system then re-enable the cartridge port after I was safely in SuperMon. All my friends brought over their carts, and we dumped them all to a single floppy. I made a bootloader that could load them into RAM and flip the 6510's I/O flags to swap the BASIC/KERNAL ROMs with the underlying RAM before jmp'ing into the game code. Uncle Clive sounds like a guy I would have loved to buy a beer and ask a million questions.
SWEET!!!!
edit.. I remember when I was a kid, taking the cartridges and the 2600 apart to see the insides... I was 7 (in 77) and it was so cool. I've always liked to take stuff apart. I don't do it so much now, but I still love building PC's
The 2600 started my love of computers and computer programming 🙂
That is super impressive for the time!
I had a super wild card for my SNES, copied games I rented from blockbusters :D
Very Familiar as i’m still running 3 restored and active Atari BBS’s today. Docs for such “hacks” for the 2600 and other carts plus warez readily available back in the day. Great to see one of the eprom carts still in good hands!
Would it be possible to gain access to the BBSes? I would love to swim through the docs.
Another great video, thanks! A few years back at my former company (construction industry) we were looking for a voiceover artist for some promotional videos we were doing and in hindsight you would've been perfect - clear, relaxed, characterful and dynamic - just right ☺️
In the 80's there were lending libraries through the post. There were also guys who used to go around with pirate videos in their cars selling them, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was a game lender going around in their cars too.
I have a "Heavy Sixer" (Atari VCS 2600/6 Switch/Woodgrain) that I modified with a part from an old tv converted the old RCA jack to a Coax, and I now have a RG-6 Cable running through it and can be used on a modern TV.
I ran across a fellow named Jay Miner. He designed the costom chips for this. He went on to do the same for the Atari 800; II met him through the Amiga commuty. He designed it.
Yeah that things was king of our TV in 1980. So many fond memories with friends and family. I have like 5 or 6 of these consoles & a slew of games packed up in storage and I’m sure they’ll fire right up and play today. Was too scared to take the cartridge apart to see inside for fear I couldn’t get it back together and functional. Cool story
Never had any piracy devices for my 2600, but I still have a SNES floppy drive unit. Yes, very naughty boy indeed, but in my defence, I was a middle schooler.
As for the machine itself, Combat really brings it back for me. I mean REALLY brings it back, I must've been 4 years old at most, but have clear memories of being amazed at Tank and me and my brother playing for hours on end.
An interesting challenge(if possible) might be trying your hand at making something like this that has the expansion RAM or memory mappers that allowed for more than 4k. For all I know, though, it may be impossible to get a hold of the right chips. Maybe you could get a dead Pitfall 2 from somewhere and revive it if the custom graphics chip still works.
I know how unlikely that is, but a bloke can dream.
I've actually been thinking that a cartridge like this could be the basis of covermounts on retro magazines (especially Zzzap 64). Instead of a tape or a floppy, have a one-off purchase of a cartridge with zif sockets, and each issue have an eprom or two with games on them
I remember once when I was a little kid, I took a 2600 cartridge apart to see what was inside, expecting to see some kind of tape device in there as all the computers I had seen up until then had loaded games from tape, so back then that's how I thought cartridges worked.
My uncle had a "Rambo console" (atari 2600) clone that also had the cassette support. That was technically my first console experience in on a small 17 inch black and white tv. My personal first console was a famiclone around 98.
Now this takes me back. Many many hours playing Asteroids and other great games on this. Thanks for the vid (and also the BBC Model B series which I'm working through belatedly).
Wanted one, never had the cash.
As an aside, I ran a BBS for years. We had ‘cop’ problems. I ran a legal BBS, no porn or warez, but I constantly got cops trying to get access to the ‘good stuff’ and they were a total fucking pain in the ass.
I ended up telling them that the phone number to call for verification was the local police station, and using a number that wasn’t in the directory. The results when it wasn’t a cop were hilarious.
Were they local? How did they find out about the BBS? It's a few years before my time (more of the 90s IRC era), but it seems like this would be way over the heads of most cops.
@@GLAAAAAR
Local cops. At least the phone numbers were all local, so at the time I assumed local.
I’ll tell you it was absolutely hilarious calling and asking for the woman in the house, and then telling them that their guy was looking for porn and that they should slap their son down.
The funniest was the one where the woman broke out laughing and said, “You’ve been busted,” and a male voice whining in the background.
It was one of the most hilarious moral panics ever. Blew over in three months. All the local sysops ended up laughing their asses off over it. They probably did manage to catch someone, but I don’t remember them having any real impact.
@@GLAAAAAR
As to how they found it, I was running a WWIVnet node, and it was publicly listed. I was writing Shareware at the time, and it was my distribution point.
I guess the chip is not marked on the bottom, but the leads were bend. The pcb design is made for all chips to be on one side, but then the zifs and the inverter should be on the same side. Uncle clive decided to bend the legs and mount the chip as its mirror image on the bottom to retain it inside the case.
my fav xmas gift, I remember coming home from school and my mom would be in my room playing breakout
i can' t wait for the rest of the series!
I had one... received it for my birthday. I remember an accessory, a supercharger?, that I used quite a bit. Still have that console around here somewhere. Might have to do some serious house cleaning to find it.
You need the logic chip for the chip-select. The highest address-line would be used as a chip-select-signal for one eeprom and inverted for the other one.
yeah that 74ls04 is installed upside down into the bottom of that PCB. No room on the top side to do it normally
There was a depot in Cheshunt back in the day which had their bins raided almost nightly by us kids as this unassuming place was a storage depot for the VCS and the subsequent games. Countless consoles were put together using the bits from the bins and games galore could be found often before their actual release....ahhh the 80s.
I wonder if any of those old home assembled machines are still out there.
I still have my 6 switch woody that I got for Christmas in 1980. It sits proudly underneath my 70inch TV and still works. Looking forward to your next video about the atari 2600.
The biggest thing when restoring/repairing a 2600 is Deoxit on the switches, especially the power switch. Console5 makes a nice cap kit, and the end of the service manual shows/explains the service upgrades, your Light Sixer may or may not need.
Oh, interesting.
That 74ls chip is upside down. He bend the pins 180°!!
Uncle Clive's heavy sixer definitely needs a good scrubbing!
Awesome!!! Cant wait for an update on this!
That inverter looks like it's just had its pins bent in the opposite direction (because even the notch is on the bottom), probably because they designed the board to have the chip on the other side but it didn't fit the cartridge so they just put the socket on the other side and flipped the chip.
((Just a guess mind))
Jam in new caps and a TRS-1 2450. TDK 0.22 film caps, and 104 ceramics. And the composite mod. And a couple electrolytic caps from Wurth.
The writing is not on the underside, the pins are bend over and the chip is put in with it's top down.
Our original Atari 2600 had quickly developed a hardware issue that caused its output to be extremely corrupted with analog noise, which could only be temporarily fixed by tapping / fiddling with the plug where the power cord entered the unit. So at a certain point, way, way after the crash, I decided to pick up a used Atari 2600 from a pawn shop. Fast forward decades, and it turns out that the unit I picked up is some ultra rare specimen: A heavy sixer manufactured somewhere besides Sunnyvale. Unfortunately, the market is not aware of Atari 2600 model rarity, so knowing it's a rare unit doesn't really mean much. Maybe someday, though.
lol, it would be quite the _usual Brit understatement_ to refer to Sir Clive Sinclair as 'a bit of a tinkerer'!
very interesting, I believe he designed that little board to have the ic in the other side but the something got in the way so instead of re designing the board he just fliped the directions of the pins to install the adapter on the other side
Interesting video , people have been pirating stuff for an awfully long time and bootleg music, concerts etc. were pretty common, more as the price of recordable media came down so pirating games was just a logical extension.
Pretty simple to build an adapter to read out Atari cartridges in an EPOM burner so there's no need to desolder the chips or even open the carts.
The 74LS04 'marked on the underside' is just a bog standard chip with the pins bent under, probably to fix a cockup in etching the board
I was made in 1977, too! Awesome video about a great console. I do this kind of tinkering, but unlike Uncle Clive, I have the entirety of human knowledge at my fingertips. Very impressive.
Is a sixer a Woody? Doesn't matter I figure. What you have is better, and more sought for than a 4 switch Woody.
With the upgrades, it is a really great gift.
I'm now 52, a tad older than Atari. All my life I have been an Atari fan. Later, I would be a NES freak. There's certainly enough love for both of them.
There are a few other retro consoles that I really really enjoy. But Atari started the fire in my heart.
I play new games too. Rocket League and Beat Saber mostly. If I make it to 90 years old, I'll probably die with a controller in my hand.
That 74LS04 has had it legs bent completely up, I imagine maybe a physical foul up mounting on the other side?
I did that too back in the days with not eprom but a static ram where I connected batteries for backup during 'transplant'. I used to program it with my BBC B that has empty ROM/RAM socket and load atari copyied rom games from floppies
There is piracy and there is archiving history.
I feel its archiving history when it comes to systems of this age.
My uncle Dan who worked at Intel in Arizona. He gave us an Atari with about seventy eprom games. One eprom each game unlike this. You would place the cartage in and flip the little metal lock and place the eprom in and play. I still have it in storage.
Wow so ahead of its time! Can't wait to see the next episodes.
The VCS/2600 was my first console, although it wasn't my first game system, that honor goes to my father's Coleco telestar combat. But no, I never owned any bootleg games back then.
not just has the 74ls got the markings on the underside... it also has the index hole for pin1 on the underside :P any chance this is some production screwup of texas instruments or did uncle clive simply design the pcb 'upside down' and thus just bent the pins the other way around to get it to work :P
back in those days you probably still could get the dip packages with the pins not bent at all. for some sort of primitive 'smd' mounting which was also still done back then (simply solder them onto a single sided pcb without holes). people did weird things in the 60s and 70s :P
Another thing I threw out when I was much younger to add to my regrets of old tech I parted with. I’m so angry at myself
That's fascinating, a clever solution.
I got a VCS back in August. Modded it for SVideo and I've enjoyed the library that came with it. I do plan on getting a "naughty" cartridge for it, and then having a go at building the additional controllers. (Already have paddles built for my Atari 800xl, but a second set so i can play Warlords may be on the cards)
I’d bet the inverters are used to decode the high address line into twin and opposite chip select lines. That’s what you’d need to use two chips instead of a single larger one.
Back around 2000 I knew a guy who was a bulletin board game pirate.
One night I was at his house hanging out and I said, "So what's this internet thing Ive been hearing about?"
He took a heavy sigh and said, "You dont want to go there, man. It's boring and it sucks."
Has that 74 chip just had its legs bent over? maybe clive designed the PCB bass ackwards so had to invert the chip? looks like the notch etc. was on the underside too.
Great video, my Facebook friend donated the Atari and told me about the video, I have since subbed and will look forward to more content from you. Andy has a great joking personality and regularly makes me crack up with his comedy, seems you know what I'm talking about, lol. Top stuff.
Wow, 4K gaming all the way back in 1977? Nice.
Buying a new Atari game cost anything up to £30 at the time. Many places saw they could rent the carts as they were super durable (charging a fee if the box or cart were damaged) so carts could be rented for a few pounds. Grey imports were also available, I had a friend who got Popeye & Empire Strikes Back, neither of which were legally available in the UK at the time.
I believe you could use a test clip to dump the ROM chips in-situ. No desoldering required. 🤔 (Or, honestly, a homebrew cartridge reader cable, since as you point out Atari carts have nothing else going on inside them and the edge connector maps directly to the ROM pins.)
My old man was a bit of a tinkerer, did a lot of homebrew computer stuff, like building a RAM expansion for our Apple II from a kit, so he could run a C environment (which then allowed him to do stuff like write an interface to make a Compugraphics phototypesetter do things it wasn't meant to) and I distinctly recall at one point seeing on his workbench one of those early black label 2600 games, hacked up, with a ribbon cable coming out of it. Something him and a friend were messing around with. 🤔
I remember one from when I was much younger and just retrieved it - rats had eaten much of the game boxes and I need to give the console a deep clean before messing with it. Not sure if it is working or not but will be a fun project perhaps.
These were sold at SEARS, we had this one.
... vielen Dank für das informative Video. Ich bin gespannt, wie es weitergeht. - .many thanks for the informative video. I am excited which way it will continue.
Uncle Clive was a damn cool dude.
On the logic chip he has bent the pins upwards so the chip can go on the back of the board.
Great video - look forward to seeing what you can do with this. But.... when playing River Raid - dont shoot the fuel!
LOL Everyone thinks the world began with the internet.. These kinds of things were old hat, even back then. Look at Creative Computing, Byte, and Radio Electronics magazines from the time period. Most hobbyists didn't have a scope, you can do most of this in your head easily. Helps to have a logic probe though, and they were fairly cheap compared to a scope.
Most of the internet already existed since the early 1900 range, and was called the library and magazines.
A friend gave me his broken 300 baud modem damaged from a lightning strike. Fixing that and getting a 'free' 300 baud modem was my first real board level repair in 1982 when I was 12. It wasn't long after that when I was running stepper motors out the back of the user port on my Commodore 64, and doing socket hacks and copying EPROMs on cartridges similar to these.
Joust was my favorite arcade game for ages, and a real version for the C-64 never really got released. I got an 800XL and downloaded and burned ROMs just like this to play joust, basically the only thing I ever played on that 800XL. The real cartridges were already difficult to find in like the 1987 time frame. It's simply how you did things back then, half everyone into computers and hardware either had an EPROM burner or had a friend who could burn them. Most of the hardware people I knew could do this off hand. But of course if he was doing this in 78 or 80 he was a bit ahead of most people, a lot more came in around 1982 when prices started dropping. C-64 was $500, then quickly dropped to $250 then $200 around 1982, and the 1541 price dropped 6 months to a year later. Basically when I got mine, so easy to remember.
i have the 4 switch and 6 switch, one i use the other came with some games i bought, that one needs a small repair with the power socket. both of them are the woody.
Andy's got a Woody, because Andy is the name of the boy that had a Woody in Toy Story.
Uncle clive knowing what he was doing
Gotta love that funky tune at the start!!!
I never got to experience a 'Woody,' I got a Binatone instead :(
Thanks, made me chuckle as usual, I like your presentation style.
"Back in the day" one of the main reasons many people had a Commodore 64 instead of a console was the ability to easily copy games! Most people didint have the knowledge much less the equipment to copy a console game. Even then the cost was about the same as buying the real thing!
I had many atari 2600 throughout the years
a microswitch mod on the joystick possibly too?
Funny I watched the whole video and still have my Atari 2600 with my collection and now I wanna play
I have 2 Atari's one was from my childhood and the other was my grandmother's
Looking forward to the next episode of this!
Nice video shot, keep it up, thanks for sharing it with us :)
This video reminds me on a story i read back in the 80's about early game copieers, so i just did some Google-fu and found out there where four main brands: unimex, yoko, homevision, and vidco. (yes this is cp from a the atari age forum) Seen a few YT video's on it, and this is realy facinating stuff.
OT: I wonder how his uncle pulled this off, this is a very interesting device.
I still have a light sixer like that one, working lovley. Its almost complete too, I just need to get around to replacing the felt disk around one of the switches.
I have a UnoCart-2600 : it's with a SD card reader.
He may well have made a cartridge reader to output the two ROMs.
Brilliant! Did the 2600 have speakers? or is it ventilation?
Just ventilation :)
Oh my! 😅
I remember my parents taking me and my brother to an out of the way electronics store to pickup a special gift. It was the original Atari (how I explain it to my kids). The experience of buying it felt magical. Owning such a device was even better. So many great times shared with family and friends playing those games (we'd share the few we had with a friend who also only had a few). We appreciated all of it.
If that is indeed a Sunnyvale model heavy sixer, please do not modify it! Get one of the mass produced later models to do that to.
Of course it's not a heavy sixer! You can see that at e.g. 2:14.
Not really piracy but we all were members of video rental libraries that included 2600 carts. I think I could rent a game for a week for a fraction of the price of buying the game outright.
oh yes, what a retro feelz just seeing it. i'd start my morning with pacman, vanguard, space invaders, and frogger.😄👍
ohh that reminds me about the 6 or 7 2600's sitting under my bed waiting for TLC .. i made a cart pcb for these that accepts a 32k/64k rom so can hold 16 games via dip switches .. i think that inverter on yours will be using A12 (atari side) and feeding the eprom c/s..
Why use 2 chips instead of 1?
About the next video . There is an elegant way to composite mod without disableing the RF modulator and keep it's functionality as well
this is awesome!
If your woody lasts longer than 4 hrs call a doctor.
clive sinclair didn't like games he also hated people playing games on the Spectrum and other computers
He thought computers were more educational for learning and programing etc etc
Still nice that you make the comparison with Clive.
I had a Philips G7000 at the time 1978
Al did look at the games in the shop in those days was still a boy yepp Atari
Yes few years later I had Commodore 64 and all the games illegally 😂 and the best connections....