Interesting post from System Failure's Message Board...

[Blackjax]

Personally, I do not put any credibility into this post from my board, especially considering that this person didn't even name the system correctly, but I suppose I'll come over to the experts here.

 

this was the post I got:

 

quote:

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Posted by Jesse (161.184.63.178) on November 26, 2001 at 21:22:55:

 

Alright, I am sorry if im just being an idiot, but I have found evidence that it IS fake. Even unencrypted 7200 roms will not be able to store a sentence viewable in notepad...

 

In reference to the rom, inside the .bin is the sentence "IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU'RE TOO CLOSE.GCC©1984". Although this could be a coincidence (A VERY RARE ONE), it is doubtfull.

 

Being a 7200 programmer back in the day, id also have to tell you the format of the data is invalid even for an unencrypted rom.

 

Thank you for your time! And remember collectors, dump your prototypes!

---

 

Now, I think this is just a crackpot trying to get me to post something insane, but here's my evidence that this is real:

 

1) This ROM was dumped (or dumped for) Curt Vendel of http://www.atari-history-com , someone who I find to be a very credible source of Atari and Atari-related information. If it was fake, he would have been able to tell from the cart itself, and it would never have been dumped.

 

2) The copyright date on the prototype's main screen (I haven't updated the page yet, sorry Dan, but Real Life has taken over my time, but I do appreciate the ROM and will get it up sooner rather than later) that runs in emus displays "1984," which would put it in the correct development era with launch games for the 7800 and games that work with the high score cartridge.

 

3) If the hardware wasn't finalized at the point that the game was burned to EPROM, why would they bother encrypting it? The encryption key probably wasn't on the test units at that time and why wouldn't they make unencrypted carts?

 

Any other opinions?

 

p.s. If Curt is reading this, I'd love to stuff it down this guy's throat with a cart scan

[DanBoris]

I can discredit this pretty easily, here is the reply I posted to the message:

 

"I don't think this proves it's fake, there are a number of 7800 games that have ascii text in the cart data, Ace of Aces and Alien Brigade to name just two. I assume that when the 7800 programmers developed a character set it just made sense for the characters to be in Ascii.

 

Also, the encryption wouldn't have anything to do with text being viewable or not, since the encryption doesn't change the cart data, it just appends a key to the end of it."

 

Also, I just noticed, if you look at the release version of Asteroids the text "TOO CLOSE GCC© 1984" still appears at the end of the rom, just the first part is chopped off.

 

 

Dan

 

[ 12-03-2001: Message edited by: Dan Boris ]

[RK Sparxster]

yeah, i beleive those messages are real, and not showing anythings fake. if you open the pit fighter rom in a hex editor you see the words near the beggining: ACTUAL CART DATA STARTS HERE. weird eh?

[DanBoris]

"ACTUAL CART DATA STARTS HERE" isn't part of the orignal cart data, it's part of a special header that I developed when I wrote my Atari 7800 emulator. I wanted something in the header that made it clear where the header ended.

 

Dan