Coleco Telstar arcade games

[Swami]

Is there any truth to the tale that the games for the Coleco Telstar Arcade are all in the console and the cartridges just activate them? If so, I was wondering if anyone had been able to activate the games without the cartridges and, specifically, the advertised, but never sold, Cartridge 5 and 6.

[Keatah]

Rather the reverse. The cartridges had an MOS MPS-7600-00X series microcontroller which contained 512 bytes of ROM on-chip.

[TheProgrammerIncarnate]

Yeah, I can confirm from looking at the die that it's a custom micro-controller with a ROM on board. Interestingly it's not 512 bytes, it's actually 256 13-bit words of programming, plus a bunch of large lookup tables that hold other data. I'm not entirely sure about that as it's not been simulated though. Also, there was a 5th and 6th cartridge advertised? I've never heard of that! Do you know where one can find more information about those?

[spacecadet]

19 hours ago, TheProgrammerIncarnate said:

Also, there was a 5th and 6th cartridge advertised? I've never heard of that! Do you know where one can find more information about those?

Not sure how much more info there is than this...

 

[Swami]

On 11/11/2019 at 9:45 AM, Keatah said:

Rather the reverse. The cartridges had an MOS MPS-7600-00X series microcontroller which contained 512 bytes of ROM on-chip.

I'm surprised there have not been repros made of cartridges, then. At least cart 3 and 4, which are hard to find.

 

Edit: 11/21/19: Then again, I see on the Coleco Telstar Community Facebook page there are only 41 likes...but I'm sure they would still sell moderately well if the word got out to owners.