EPYX Carts With Eproms In Them

[Tempest]

Has anyone else found an EPYX cart that had EPROMs in it? I got a Pit Stop cart off Ebay awhile back that had an odd "Grip Style" case (as opposed to the normal round plastic case) that had two EPROMs in it both labeled with the cart's part number. I assumed this was an early demo or review cart, but I just got a NIB Silicon Warrior cart and it had the same strange grip case with two EPROMs inside (no labels though).

 

How common are these? Were the first few batches of carts made this way? Anyone see any titles other than Silicon Warrior and Pit Stop in this style?

 

Tempest

[DanBoris]

I cannot speak about these games specifically, but I have seen production Colecovision carts that used EPROMS instead of mask programmed ROMS, so it's not unheard of for software company to use EPROMs in a final production cartridge.

 

I imagine that if a relativly small number of cartridges where going to be made it may be more economical to use EPROMS then ROMS. In certain cases it may also have been a question of time, they may not have wanted to wait for ROMS before doing the release.

 

Dan

[ndary]

All Epyx "Grip Style" case has EPROM in there

 

PitStop, Silicon Warrior, Jumpman Junior..

 

The light Plastic ones have ROM inside

 

Nir

[Tempest]

Any idea why? Were they the first batch of carts released? I can't imagine that the EPROMs were cheap.

 

Tempest

[Callipygous]

Making a masked Rom is expensive and cost effective if you make a few thousand carts. Eproms would be cheaper for a few hundred. Epyx, of course, made a considerable volume of these, but maybe in the beginning they weren't sure of how many to make or perhaps the process was delayed and they burned eproms to fill the orders they had.

 

BTW - All ROMOX carts are eproms. Not just ECPC, but all labeled ones that I have ever opened are Eprom. I sure there are eproms in a lot of other companies carts too.