![]() |
![]() |
![]() | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
![]() |
||||
"Have you played Atari today?" | ![]() |
![]() April 25, 2002 |
![]() |
|
![]() |
Atari Demonstration CabinetAhhh, remember the days of heading down to the local department store with your parents, and making a beeline straight for the video game aisle? If you were lucky, your store had an Atari Demonstration Cabinet with a wide selection of playable games. I spent many hours at my local Sears, dreaming of actually owning one of those glorious machines. At least one lucky collector has one of these units, although I'm sure there are more out there. Although this one isn't exactly like the cabinet I used to play at Sears, I'm still green with envy! This is essentially reprinted from Wim Rumping's web site, with permission. All text and pictures are his, and if you have any questions or comments, you can email Wim Rumping. This unit was found in a shed in East Dubuque, IA (April 1998)
The panel has 2 joysticks, two fire buttons for the joysticks, two paddles, two fire buttons for the paddles and 3 other buttons. The other buttons are for game select (pressing the left button increases the game number by 10, pressing the right button increases the game number by 1) and for `start game'. Pressing this button will start the selected game. I guess it also `presses' the `reset' button internally somehow as the games start immidiately after pressing it. Pressing a game select button while playing will bring up the intro screens again in order to select a new game. Since there are no regular reset, difficulty or select switches on the panel, those options cannot be accessed it seems. The PCB can easily be pulled out of its metal casing and looks like this: Looking carefully at the PCB, you can see there are tons of jumpers. These most likely set which games can be selected. There are empty sockets for 5 more games, there's a socket into which a regular cartridge can fit (when the unit is in the metal casing, this will not fit) and there's an expansion port of sorts (which can not be accessed when the PCB is in its casing). The connector on the right side is where the panel hooks up to the PCB. The two wires are power and antenna. I have not experimented with dip-switch settings (there are two blocks of dip-switches) or jumper settings yet. I will do that in the future when I am in the US again. If anyone has any documentation of the jumper settings, expansion port usage or the functionality of the dip-switches, please let me know in email.
.
|
![]() |
Top | 2600 | 5200 | 7800 | Lynx | Jaguar | Back | ||
Atari News | Message Boards | Features | Trading Post | Links | Store | ||
Home | About | Contact | Submit News | Contribute | Mailing List | ||
![]() | ||
©1998-2002 AtariAge. | ||