Unanswered questions arising from Cartzilla

[Tonks]

Happy New Year Vic 20 fans!!!

I was having a good read through Cartzilla the other day (a brilliant document detailing all known Vic 20 carts - a must read if you haven;t yet done so!!) and it got me thinking about some of the questions Ward Shrake poses throughout it. So I decided to post a few here and see if any have been or could be abswered 10 years after Cartzilla was produced.

1. Commodore's missing cartridges.
Ward points out that there are gaps in Commodores numbering of their Cartridges, with numbers 1903, 1934, 1936 and 1940 missing. Have these ever shown up? Also, have any cartridges after 1941 ever shown up?

2. Ward mentions a few vaporware game carts that were widely advertised and then never released. Have any of these shown up, particularly Joust, Stargate and Wizard of Wor? I definately remember seeing ads for Joust in a couple of British magazines.

Also, has anyone got more information about the game Space Ric-O-Shay?

What about the proposed Vic Rabbit Atari 2600 adapter that was supposed to enable the Vic 20 to play Atari games. Has this ever been discovered?

What other Vaporware has recently shown up?

3. Ward makes the suggestion that Atari's Defender may have been written by HES, and possibly Jeff Minter himself. Ward says that inside the code it says, "COPR.HES,1983 V1.1x" Anyone able to shed more light on this one?

4. Finally, anyone have any idea of the connection between Cosmic Jailbreak and Ape Escape? Did someone blatantly copy or was the game sold to two different publishers?

Well, there is a fair bit there, but hopefully it will get a few Vic fans thinking.

[ral-clan]

Okay, first of all remember that Cartzilla is out of date and a bunch of those games have been confirmed as existing since it was written.

Quite of a few of the "confirmed but unarchives" cartridges have since been archived and are available on the 'net.

There are quite a few more RAM expanders in existence than are mentioned in Cartzilla.

As for the missing Commodore cartridges. No actual copies have ever been found. The most information on what they would have been is in Cartzilla:

Commodore [Vic-1903] May be "Bridge; teach and play"? Brent Santin
sent Ward some Sep 1982 promotional literature
that lists that name as a planned cartridge.
Commodore [Vic-1934] Name needed. (See comments for # 1940, below.)
Commodore [Vic-1936] Apparently a clone of the arcade game Phoenix.
Brent Santin found a third-party catalog from
Sep 1982 that said this one was going to be
"Space Vultures" when it was released. An ad
in the Commodore-published "Power Play" mag
(volume 1, number 1, page 29) advertised a
game called "Lord of the Skies" saying that
"Killer birds and their UFO allies are out to
get you. As the birds become more valuable,
the bombs fall faster and faster. Kill the
bird before you get blasted." It was listed
under "Space Games". Never released, but may
have been programmed to an unknown extent? It
most likely never went to market since Atari
owned the rights and was sueing competitors.
Commodore [Vic-1940] (See also # 1934, above.) These two carts are
narrowed down to two potential titles, but we
are not sure which is which. Brent Santin's
third-party Sep 1982 promotional catalog lists
"Wizard of Wor" and "Dog Patch" as soon to be
released, as of September 1982. An ad in the
Commodore-produced magazine "Power Play" (vol
1, no 1, pg 29) confirms that "Wizard of Wor"
was planned and "coming soon". How far these
were developed, we do not know? It seems the
release of the Commodore 64 put an end to the
development of these carts, but they might
have been completed before being abandoned?
We know that "Wizard of Wor" was released on
the C64 as a cartridge. When you plugged that
cartridge into Commodore's new "Magic Voice"
add-on device, it had audible speech. "Dog
Patch" would have been a home port of a 1977
arcade game. (A version of that game had been
released on the Bally Home Arcade system.)

I'm the Brent Santin mentioned in Cartzilla. I sent Ward the only document found so far that gives a clue as to what these cartridges might have been (a very early dealers catalogue from Nova Scotia - hand-typed with no pictures). Since Commodore had a deal with Bally-Midway in the early 80s, it makes sense that games like "Dog Patch" would have filled these gaps.

As for SPACE-RIC-O-SHAY: it does exist. I have the cartridge and sent it to Ward for archiving in the 1990s(?). I don't know why this isn't mentioned in Cartzilla.

Actually, I think that you're reading an older version of Cartzilla. The version here:

http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/ ... t-2.10.txt

mentions:

Brent Santin loaned me three carts; "Squish 'Em" and "Vic Rabbit"
and "Space Ric-o-shay". (Vic Rabbit was actually an EPROM and
not a complete cart, but the info inside it is just as valid.)
Squish 'Em came on one of Romox' special cartridges, meant to
allow a special machine to reprogram it with any game they were
permitted by license to "sell" to customers. (I'm glad we got
all three of these, before they had succumbed to bit rot! A big
thanks to Brent, for his help on both this and the CD Project.)

...that's me again!


As for WIZARD-OF-WOR: no copy for the VIC has been found, but a mock-up of the game's screen was printed on the back of the all-cardboard version of the VIC-20 box as sold in Canada.

Alphabet Zoo: I think there is a ROM for this floating around (archived).

Several copies of HANDIC's "Bridge" have also shown up in the past year.

[carlsson]

I don't know about several copies; Mayhem knows someone who found one copy of Handic's Bridge. If there were more, they have passed by without me noticing. The question is if this happens to be the same Bridge game that Commodore early on planned to release, but perhaps was delayed and at a later point in time was released by Handic themselves.