Are Atari 2600 Cartridge PCB's interchangable?

[Jeffmark71]

I have three 2600 units (All Vaders) and have been stacking some cartridges from garage sales recently and I have endless troubles getting Activision games to run in all units.

As I have read in the forum, a good cleaning & multiple insertions usually get's them going eventually, and i find that is true for all but one, MegaMania... I just bought a second copy of MegaMania from an online retro game store and it does the same thing, random vertical colors, with random buzzing tone, black screen or no signal at all. All my Activision games behave this way, but MegaMania will not run at all on either cartridge or any system regardless of how many times i reinsert it.

It seems from what I am reading that Activision pcb's are not really the best quality or too thin and flake out faster than others..

That got me thinking, Can i pull the chip from a MegaMania cart and solder it to an asteroids pcb, are the pcb's universal. I see some have different shapes.

If not all, are some interchangeable or are all pcb's unique to the chip?

 

Sorry if this is a ridiculous or repetitive question, i'd just love to get my Activision chips on new higher quality boards, so i don't have to fight with the games before playing.

 

Thanks for any info or advise

[Video]

I believe the pcbs are different mostly depending on the size of the rom, like a 2k pcb probably wouldn't run an 8k chip.

 

I haven't looked the size of the games you mentioned, but if their different sizes they probably aren't compatible.

 

This is added complexity with Activision pcb being different from Atari ones due to the carts accounting for screw orientations.

 

You'd just have to take them apart, see if the number of ic's on the boards are the same, and if so, track the traces from the chip to the card edge and see if it all limes up.

 

Some Activision games seem more unreliable than others, I ran through half a dozen kung fu master carts before finding one that worked.

 

Maybe there are other parts that are bad? Some carts have additional things, resistors or ram chips that can go bad, those are replaceable, but some may have custom chips that can't be replaced like pitfall 2 dcp chip.

[Jeffmark71]

That makes a lot of sense.

I have done some tinkering and had no luck....

I'm going to look up ROM sizes and tinker a bit more on the weekend.

I'm thinking of getting an identical pcb created and moving the chip to it if all else fails

Thanks for the reply!

[Jstick]

This might help:

 

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/311158-activision-and-parker-brothers-cartridge-fix/