the cutting room mirror

Sector Alpha

Sector Alpha is a rather rare ColecoVision title that had all of its cartridges shipped with a defect that prevented 10% of the game data from being accessed, which in turn resulted in all ROM dumps being corrupt until the issue was finally discovered in mid-2014. Not only did the game finally get a proper dump as a result, it was also discovered that a simple hack of the cart's PCB will allow the game to function as intended on real hardware.

(Source: AtariAge)

Sadly, this wasn't the only time a ColecoVision game was mass-shipped with a cartridge defect.

To do:
Cover the uncalled 2KB of data on a Bugs page. Detailed here.

Unused Code#

The code that makes the player character move and shoot in the demo is located in the uncalled data. As a result, the player character will do nothing while the demo plays (if it doesn't automatically end after starting).

Build Date#

Present at 0x24:

25-08-83

(Source: Original TCRF research)