Hi there everybody, I'm Matías "Peter Pepper" Bianco, an Argentinian video game collector and the webmaster of the unique site in my country and in all South America dedicated to classic video games and collecting (Arqueología Digital, http://arquedigi.8m.com) and now I'm the staff writer of this DP column which speaks about the collecting in South America and all the obscure stuff that you can find here. Well, no more intro and...let's start!

The Atari 2600 clones in Argentina.

Let's start with one of the most desired machines in my country, the famous and always nostalgic Atari 2600. In the 80's the machine came to Argentina and a lot of people bought them, but, this country always had and have economic problems, so a group of companies, most specifically named "EDU Juegos" and "Dynacom" appeared as the "saviours" of the people who couldn't bought the original machine, so a lot of clone machines where launched at the market, for example, the "EDU Juegos 2600", which contains the machine with two stick joysticks, a manual, an AC adaptor and a cart with 4 games. The machine is a Pal-N system. This is the basic models, there are another ones, but the structure is always the same. Also there are special carts from EDU juegos for this machines, with one or more games in each cart. There are also other companies that creates this kinds of carts, like Dynacom, Age, Arktaris, etc.

The other machine with a lot of models is from Dynacom, another Argentinian and brazilian company, the carts where the same as the EDU juegos and the other companies. After the apogee of this two machines, appeared other companies like Froggy 2600 with some games built in the machine which also accept the original 2600 carts. The TV Game from "King Karol" is other example of this machines, which cointains 64 games built in the system, some of them are the same hacked or modified in some aspects. I played some of this machines and the EDU Juegos is the best of all. A curiosity is that this machine also accepts strange obscure clones, for example, i bought a Pac-Kong cart pirate (which i didn't know that was pirate) and this cart works in the EDU, so, if you bought a pirate cart, try it in this machine and you can play it easily!. In Argentina this kind of machines and carts are obviously easy to try, but other curiosity is that sometimes they are more expensive than the original ones, why?, because most people try them not for collecting and they sell this carts to another countries like Brazil, USA, England, and other european places all around the world and this is because in this countries this carts are like treasures for most people, the same as the brazilian clones, like Dactar, Polyvox, etc. I don't usually bought this carts or machines unless I found it for a very good price, for example, i bought my EDU Juegos 2600 complete for only $ 5 (around $ 3 dollars). The brazilian carts are like the Argentinian ones, and my favorite of this carts are ones that you can change the game with a little switch in the cart (this happens usually with some Dactar models or some rare Argentinian carts). After this, a lot of strange and rare companies create this clone carts, for example, a friend of mine discover a homebrew of a video game house of Buenos Aires called "CQ". Other companies are "Argevision", "Cony 2600" (which also have a machine), "Linky games", "Ningame", "Takson" and "Yocarant". Some of this carts are rare also in Argentina. Well, that's all for the moment, i expect that this article was interesting for everybody and if you have a cart and you don't know what the hell means or you couldn't identify, only e-mail me. Best regards for everybody and keep in reading for the next month article!. I'll show you now other pics of Argentinian 2600 carts.

Bye  bye.