orrimarrko Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 Kind of a newbie here, so take some pity. I was wondering whose Air Raid was used for the picture in the 2600 rarity guide on this site? For that matter, how many people actually have one of those things? Any additional information or stories about this rarity would be much appreciated. Thanks, Steve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CincYnoTi Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 go look in the rarity guide forum. there are two post for rarity=9 and rarity=10 games which lists all the people on these boards that claim to own these games. pitfall harry is the only person here that owns Air Raid. one of the Al's would have to say who submitted the Air Raid pic on this site. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pitfall Harry Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 Kind of a newbie here, so take some pity. I was wondering whose Air Raid was used for the picture in the 2600 rarity guide on this site? For that matter, how many people actually have one of those things? Any additional information or stories about this rarity would be much appreciated. Thanks, Steve Hi Steve, The Air Raid cart in the AtariAge Rarity Guide is owned by This guy (Can you see my dog Chip in the pic?) How many people own Air Raid? That's something I've tried very hard to figure out myself ever since I found mine five years ago. My best guess puts the number of Air Raid owners at no more than six, and even that may be a high estimate. I've only ever seen one other cartridge scan of Air Raid other than my own, and have spoken directly to only two other collectors who I can be fairly assured actually own a copy. Rest assured, Air Raid is not a borderline 10 on the rarity scale. Ben Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fretwobbler Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 (Can you see my dog Chip in the pic?) That dog has some serious camaflauge talent! Took me 10 minutes to spot it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joeybastard Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 I've been staring at it longer then 10 minutes, where is there a dog in this picture? EDIT: I just spottted him, jeez he should work for the CIA! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oesii Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 How can you miss him? He's all-white! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Godzilla Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 yes but is he all-white with you? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orrimarrko Posted March 22, 2003 Author Share Posted March 22, 2003 Hi Ben, Thanks for replying (and for the pic!) Is that a greyhound or whippet by chance? Just wondering because I have one of each. Anyway, there is much discussion that Air Raid might be the rarest 2600 game period - even more so than the Video Life game. Since I'm new at this, I was wondering about two things. 1. Where did you find your copy? At a store, or garage sale? I'm curious. 2. Is it NTSC or PAL? There are rumors that Air Raid was PAL only. Can you end the speculation either way? Again, thanks a lot for your time! Steve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the 5th ghost Posted March 22, 2003 Share Posted March 22, 2003 That's an impressive lawn that guy has! Look how GREEN it is! Nice Air Raid cart too Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pitfall Harry Posted March 22, 2003 Share Posted March 22, 2003 Hi Ben, Thanks for replying (and for the pic!) Is that a greyhound or whippet by chance? Just wondering because I have one of each. Chip is a lovable mutt, a mix of breeds of which I cannot be certain. From eyeballing the wall poster at the local vet, I suspect he's predominantly a Jack Russel Terrier, like Eddie on the TV show, Frasier. Apparently I'm not alone in that opinion. The former owner, who left Chip in the care of the animal shelter where I adopted him, had named him Eddie. Anyway, there is much discussion that Air Raid might be the rarest 2600 game period - even more so than the Video Life game. Air Raid is definitely among the rarest of the production (i.e. non-prototype) Atari 2600 cartridges, and quite possibly the rarest of the rare. Video Life also has a strong claim to the title. Over the last five years, however (and with much less effort), I have seen more label scans, more reports of sales, and I've heard of more credible collectors claiming ownership of Video Life than I have for Air Raid. Due to the fact that production numbers for Air Raid are unknown, which of these two extreme rarities (or perhaps some other lesser known title) is THE rarest, in all liklihood, will never be definitively known. Since I'm new at this, I was wondering about two things. 1. Where did you find your copy? At a store, or garage sale? I'm curious. I found my copy of Air Raid in a thrift store not far from where I live in southern California. Thinking the bright blue plastic oddity was a misplaced toy, I plucked it from the top of a box filled with Atari cartridges and set it aside so I could dig in to the "real" cartridges. I picked a dozen or so carts from that box that I really needed, mostly label upgrades, but there were a couple of mid-rares in there too like Frankenstein's Monster and Spitfire Attack, which really had me excited! And each cart was sticker-priced at a very reasonable 99 cents. Woo hoo! Not one to leave a mess, I piled the sifted-through, unwanted carts back into the box. Finally, I grabbed the funky blue-handled toy and was about to place it back atop the pile of carts where I had found it when something about it made me take a hard second look. The label bore no title, indeed it had no text of any kind. But the brightly-colored, illustration depicting satellites and flying saucers and lazer fire raining down on a city screamed VIDEOGAME to me. I turned the oddly-shaped toy around in my hands and was somewhat surprised to find out that I was right. Staring me in the face was a row of metallic contacts, which experience told me, had to be the edge connector of an Atari videogame cartridge! Now, I was really excited. What could this thing be? I was very familiar with the then-popular VGR cartridge list and rarity guide, and I knew pretty much what every cart on that list looked like except for one. I had never seen a scan of Air Raid. Could this cartridge be it?! Could I have finally found my first UR? Naaa! I dismissed the thought at once. The label art looked too crude to be a production cart. It had to be a pirate of some type. I'd heard about pirates, too, but I still had never seen one at that time. So, I was excited to be getting a dozen rares, label upgrades and my first-ever pirate cart! I placed my stack of carts on the countertop as I waited in the checkout line and dug ithrough my pockets. Eight dollars. Damn! I had to leave a few of my carts behind. But which ones? I wanted them all! Luckily, a hard decision solved itself for me when I spotted the hand-drawn sign by the front door. "Today Only! All toys 50% off" Hmmm.. A videogame is a game and a game is a type of toy, isn't it? Yes, it is, I convinced myself. Now to convince the girl at the checkout. She rang up my carts, all 12 of them, and asked me for $11.88. That's when I pointed at the sign and said, "What about the 50% discount for these video GAMES?" She looked confused. A wave of panic swept over her face. "Oh My God," she must have been saying to herself, "dealing with this guy has all the markings of compulsory thought!" "No," she said. "The discount is only for toys, not electronics." I wanted them all. I was buying in volume. Didn't this girl ever hear of a volume discount? I'd asked for volume discounts before and had gotten them. My competitive spirit got the better of me. "Look, I said," jabbing a finger at the word GAME printed on the label of one of my video GAME cartridges, "It's a GAME! Sure, it's an electronic game, but a game is a game and a game is a toy and if I don't get all twelve of these GAMES for 50% off, I'm not buying a damn one of them! It's all or nothing." And I meant it, too. She snatched the cartridge from my hands. "I'll have to ask the manager," she huffed and then disappeared into the back room. She returned a few minutes later with the manager. I sighed. I thought I'd have to make my case once more. But the manager surprised me, made an abrupt left and headed for the front door. "That will be $5.88, please," the cashier girl said to me. I threw the six dollars up onto the counter before somebody could change their mind. Clutching my bagful of mid-rares, label upgrades and my first-ever pirate cart, I was all smiles as I passed the store manager on the way out the door. She had just finished ammending her sign with a black felt tipped marker. The sign now read "All toys 50% off, except videogames." When I got home and popped my "pirate cart" into my VCS I got the shock of my life. There at the bottom of the start-up screen was the name, MEN-A-VISION, and I knew at once what that meant. A cold shiver knifed though me when I thought about how I might have quite easily missed getting the rarest cartridge in my collection -- the rarest game I have ever found or ever will find -- all because I insisted on saving 50 cents on a 99 cent cart! Sometimes, even fools get lucky. Is it NTSC or PAL? There are rumors that Air Raid was PAL only. Can you end the speculation either way? I don't think I can put an end to the speculation, but I may be able to assist you with yours by telling you what I know about PAL, NTSC and Air Raid. Please bear with me, a bit of technical detail is unavoidable. The NTSC standard calls for 525 horizontal scan lines per TV frame. For whatever technical reason (i really don't know), the figure of 525 is divided by two to give 262, and 262 is the number of horizontal lines drawn per TV frame for a correctly programmed, NTSC Atari 2600 videogame. The PAL standard calls for 625 horizontal scan lines per TV frame. Dividing by two, this means that a properly programmed PAL game needs to draw 313 horizontal lines per frame. So then, can one distinguish a PAL game from an NTSC game simply by counting the horizontal scan lines per frame? In theory, yes. However, there are complications to this method, as not all PAL games were programmed to use exactly 312 scan lines per frame. Most PAL games, in fact, have been observed to display 314 horizontal lines per frame. Not all NTSC games use 262 scan lines per frame, for that matter. Also, note that the PAL standard actually varies somewhat from country to country, resulting in differences in the ideal number if scan lines per frame for a PAL game. It's also important to be aware that the figure 312 is not an absolute. A game programmer targeting a PAL market could willfully stretch or compress the displayable height of the screen to suit their needs by writing more or fewer than the recommended 312 scan lines per frame. Or one could deviate from the recommended figure out of ignorance of the prevailing standard, with the programmer figuring that so long as the picture is stable on his or her development TV, then it's good enough to sell. The same considerations are true for a programmer targeting a game for the NTSC market, with the target of 262 scan lines per frame being the only difference. Not surprisingly, there are many Atari 2600 games whose horizontal lines per frame are neither 262 nor 314, but somewhere in the middle. Let's look at GI JOE (NTSC) and Action Man (PAL version of the exact same game) as an example. The Z26 emulator has a command line switch, -n, which will display the number of scan lines per frame for whatever game you want to play. Here are the results for the emulations of GI JOE and Action Man: GI JOE (NTSC): 262 scan lines per frame ACTION MAN (PAL): 314 scan lines per frame These figures fit quite well with our expectations of what is PAL and what is NTSC. Now, if we examine AIR RAID with the same emulator, we get 290 scanlines per frame. Vexingly enough, this is virtually DEAD CENTER between what we would expect of a PAL game and what we would expect of an NTSC game. The absolute center is 288, so one might be tempted to classify AIR RAID as PAL, however the conclusion is tenuous at best considering how close to dead center the game's scan line count is. The Horizontal Flip Test is another method which has been employed in the past to distinguish NTSC games from PAL games. That is, if a cartidge of unknown TV standard is played on equipment which is exclusively of a particular TV standard (Be it PAL or NTSC), then an unstable picture when the game is played on that equipment strongly suggests the game is of a TV format different from the format of your equipment. The trouble with the Flip Test is that it simply is not reliable. I have known PAL cartidges that "flip" on my NTSC TV screen on some days but not on others. I have PAL cartridges that always flip on one NTSC TV, but never on another NTSC TV. Some flip faster, some flip slower, some never flip, some flip after playing them for awhile -- even though they are all PAL games. For what it's worth, my copy of Air Raid flips the screen on my TV, sometimes. Another format distinguishing method is the Color Test. If the colors "look weird" on your NTSC equipment, then the game is probably PAL. If the colors look weird on your PAL equipment, then the game is probably NTSC. Again, this method is not foolproof, as TV's differ somewhat in their color displaying abilities. Some games were programmed with "weird" colors to begin with, so if you only know the colors of one format of the game (and aren't all that sure of the format of that!) without the other, you can't really be sure the colors you see are closer to the one format or the other. When I play my copy of AIR RAID, the colors look okay. The sky is blue, as it reasonably should be expected to be. Where the game was distributed is a strong indicator of the format of the game. But Air Raid is so rare and so little is known about MEN-A-VISION, nobody really knows for sure where it was distributed. However, we can look to where copies of it have been found in the wild -- that should give us an idea of where MEN-A-VISION distributed their game, and therefore its intended TV format. I found my copy in a thrift store in So. Cal, in 1998. One year prior to that, another collector claimed to have found a copy of Air Raid in a Dallas/ Fort Worth area flea market. His description of the game convinces me that this was not a hoax, and the ebay record shows (Showed. It's no longer in their database) that a blue T-handled game of unknown title but with label art depicting a city under seige by alien spacecraft sold for $252. I don't know who bought it. In 1999, another copy of Air Raid hit the ebay auction block. I contacted the seller -- who also had no idea what the title of his game was -- and I asked him where he'd found his copy. He said he found it four or five years earlier in a thrift store in the St. Louis Area. Finally, by researching the public record of usergroup pastings (Now available through Google Groups) I tracked down another collector who claimed he found the first discovered copy of Air Raid. Via email, he informed me that he found his copy in a thrift store in California, and the only way he knew the title of the game is because "Air Raid" was printed on the box! Additionally, he recalled having read from the box that the company, Men-A-Vision, was also located in California. His is the only known boxed copy of the game in existence, as far as I know. I tried for years to get him to scan the box but to no avail. He dropped out of the active collecting scene years ago, and all his games are scattered in staorage locations he's just too busy to go looking through. Eventually, his email address changed and I have since lost contact with him. The fact that ALL copies of AIR RAID that I've ever heard of having been found in the wild were found in the United States strongly suggests to me that the game was distributed to that market and hence was intended to be an NTSC game. I attribute the 290 scan lines per frame to the poor programming practices of a grossly unexperienced programmer who wanted to cash in on the videogame market as quickly and with as little effort as he could get away with. Perhaps the reason the game virtually does not exist at all is because so few copies were produced from a fly-by-night company to begin with, and a good number of those who bought the game returned it because it made their TV's flip. My verdict: Air Raid is NTSC. Your speculations may vary. Thanks for your questions. I hope I was able to answer them. Ben Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPUWIZ Posted March 22, 2003 Share Posted March 22, 2003 Ben, would you dump yours if I send you the means to do so ? Cheers, -R Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pitfall Harry Posted March 22, 2003 Share Posted March 22, 2003 I would, except that I lost ownership of the game about an hour ago. I'll be mailing it off to its new owner first thing Monday morning. Ben Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPUWIZ Posted March 22, 2003 Share Posted March 22, 2003 I would, except that I lost ownership of the game about an hour ago. I'll be mailing it off to its new owner first thing Monday morning. Ben I would have bought that cart too. I bet it's going to be shipped to Holland. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Weis Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 I would, except that I lost ownership of the game about an hour ago. I'll be mailing it off to its new owner first thing Monday morning. Ben I would have bought that cart too. I bet it's going to be shipped to Holland. CPUWIZ,i would not bet too much on that!! BTW the game will be dumped!! take care, rick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GrizzLee Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 What is so special about this copy of Air Raid? Is it different that the copy already out there? -Lee Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Weis Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 What is so special about this copy of Air Raid? Is it different that the copy already out there? -Lee not that i know of...Ben? i just said i would get this one dumped since CPUWIZ wanted it! take Care, Rick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
badbrad Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 Why does it need to be dumped? Is it different than the rom thats on AtariAge?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPUWIZ Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 The ROM on AA is PAL. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pitfall Harry Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 The ROM on AA is PAL. I seriously doubt a dump of my copy of Air Raid will be any different than the ROM image in the AA library. If distinct PAL and NTSC versions of Air Raid had been created for production, then surely many more copies of the game would have surfaced by now, not to mention at least one other copy in a country besides the U.S. Ben Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orrimarrko Posted March 23, 2003 Author Share Posted March 23, 2003 Ben, Thanks for all of your answers and the information! Very, very helpful. Does your other comments mean that you SOLD this cart to someone? IF so, are you just not collecting anymore? I would think that by letting go of something you may never get again would either indicate one of two things: 1. The price was too good to ignore. 2. You aren't collecting anymore, so why not cash in. (Of course there are other possibilities, those are the first two that came to mind. ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
san-d-2000 Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 Does the new owners name by any chance start with a M?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeV0 Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 Ok Now im belting myself with a baseball bat. There was one of these in a shop in sydney for $25 bout 6 months ago, I didnt buy it because i just though it was a common pirate. Anyone from sydney aus just pm me for the sellers url, st address etc,,,,,,,,,,,, BTW, basically everthing from combat to quadran is $25, Just luck of the draw with what they have, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BoOchan! Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 Ok Now im belting myself with a baseball bat. There was one of these in a shop in sydney for $25 bout 6 months ago, I didnt buy it because i just though it was a common pirate. Anyone from sydney aus just pm me for the sellers url, st address etc,,,,,,,,,,,, BTW, basically everthing from combat to quadran is $25, Just luck of the draw with what they have, You realise that you could've sold it for A$1500 Hey? Any games with a T-Grip are Quite rare. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marco Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 To straighten things out: I did not buy it Cheers, Marco Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sonnenhexer Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 I did not buy it So you traded it? Greets Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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