Back in 1996, I took it upon myself to
write a game for the Atari 2600. I used an Amiga
1200 with the DASM assembler, Makewav development
program, Play16 .wav player, a modified
Supercharger, and an Atari 2600 jr as my development
system. After I wrote Okie Dokie for the
Atari 2600, it quickly became apparent that there
was quite a demand for it in cartridge (cart)
format. I investigated the idea, and decided that
I would do it. It would be the culmination of my
childhood desire to make a game for the Atari
2600. Now, not only had I reverse engineered the
Supercharger tape format, created the Makewav
development tool, and written a game for the
2600, but I would actually hand make 100 Okie
Dokie Carts. Once word leaked out that I was
going to make the cartridges, my e-mail began to
fill up. I made early promises to friends that
they could buy multiple copies of my game, never
realizing that the 100 copies would be spoken for
so quickly.
The task of making 100 Atari carts is not
something to take lightly. The first order of
business was to round up a few common carts and
see what the easiest ones were to convert to
EPROM carts. Activision carts work great for
making multi-carts, but I wanted to put some nice
labels on Okie Dokie and Activision carts have
"wrap-around" labels. I decided that
standard Atari carts worked fine with some minor
modifications, so I rounded up slightly more than
100 carts (thanks to Patrick Wickwire and John
Earney) and began the quest.
The first step in creating an Okie Dokie cart
is pretty obvious, you gotta get the label off.
Well, I tried various methods of attack. First I
tried taking the carts apart by poking a hole in
the label to get at the screw and unscrewing it,
disassembling the carts by hand (kinda tricky, I
don't think they were designed to come back apart
:). I then filled a bathtub up with water and let
about 20 of the carts tops soak for an hour or
so. Much to my dismay, the labels were still
pretty stuck on. Those 20 carts took me HOURS to
clean off with Goo-Gone. I needed a new approach.
I decided that heating the label up might make it
easier to remove the label, and I was very happy
with the results. I placed 2 or 3 carts in front
of a space heater for about 45 seconds, and then
the label peeled off with ease -- all except for
the silver label carts, they must have foil in
them or something!? Here are pictures of me heating
up the carts and peeling
off the labels.
Even though the labels came off easily, there
was still some residual glue, so each cartridge
case needed to be cleaned. Goo-Gone was the hero
here, you should be able to find this at most any
hardware store, it softens up the glue and you
can wipe it away with a cloth. Now that the label
was off of the Atari cart, I needed to see about
obtaining EPROMS. I really didn't have to look
very hard, Jameco
has quite an assortment of electronic devices at
great prices, they also have the 7404 invertor
needed in the cartridge! I bought 25 EPROMS to
start out with, but I didn't have an EPROM
burner! Well, thanks to my brother Ray for
letting me go over to his house and burn the
EPROMS. Unfortunately, his EPROM burner is
attached to an IBM XT computer sporing a 5
1/4" floppy drive. Seeing as I had an Amiga
1200 with a 3 1/2" drive, this was a
problem. Luckily, I had purchased a 5 1/4"
floppy drive for my Amiga some time back for
reading in Apple // disks for emulators. This
drive, with the proper driver, would allow me to
write MS-DOS disks. Problem solved :) EXCEPT,
since I decided each cart would have its own
serial number burned in the ROM image, I needed
100 seperate ROM images! I wrote a program in C
that generated these ROM images. The problem was
that I needed to load a new ROM image each time I
burned a new EPROM. Needless to say, this was
VERY time consuming.
After I had the EPROMs burned, I had to look
at modifying the circuit board in the Atari
cartridges to accept EPROMs. I made a few
prototype cartridges to test different production
methods. I started out by desoldering the
original game ROM, making sure each pin-hole was
clean, and then installing the new EPROM. This
was horribly time consuming, and if I was going
to finish 100 this century, I needed to find a
new way. I settled on using a Dremel tool to cut
the old ROM off of the circuit board, leaving the
bottom portion of the chip's pins still in the
holes. Next I cut about half of each pin off of
the EPROM, squeezed the pins closer to the body
of the EPROM, and inserted the EPROM inbetween
the two rows of pins left from the old ROM.
Certain pins were bent backwards to prevent
connection to the old pins. The EPROM's pins were
then soldered to the old pins. Next, a few cuts
were made to traces on the circuit board, a 7404
invertor was installed on the back of the board,
wires were added to complete the circuit, and
WHALA! You have a working Okie Dokie cartridge,
well hopefully. I tested each circuit board after
its creation, and verified that the serial number
was correctly labeled on the EPROM. Here can see
the cartridge case and circuit board in various
stages of this process.
Now that the circuit board was complete, I
could insert it in a clean case! This took a
little trial and error to figure out. It's a
little tricky getting all of the parts placed
correctly and snapping the case back together
before the springs shoot across the room. Once I
put each circuit board in a case, it was time to
test it again -- last chance to find a problem
before the label gets applied. Applying the label
was also a challenge. I found that spray adhesive
worked well, but could get rather messy. I had to
spray it outside because the glue tended to get
where it wasn't appreciated -- and it was COLD
outside :) I generaly went into the garage to
apply the glue. Here you can see me spraying
the glue on some labels. After the glue set
for about 30 seconds, I applied the label.
Making the Okie Dokie cartridges was a very
rewarding experience. Here you can see a
picture of the first 25 Okie Dokie carts made,
plus a prototype. The process was very
time-consuming. While I was making them, my
"computer room" was quite
a mess. I had a lot of fun writing the game
and producing the cartridges. Here's hoping that
those who own the game enjoy playing it even half
as much as I enjoyed creating it!
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