TI-99/4A Videogame House - Tutankham Prototype
Tutankham
TI-99/4A PROTOTYPE CARTRIDGE


NAME: TUTANKHAM
MANUFACTURER
: PARKER BROTHERS
PRODUCT NUMBER: PB 1630
PROGRAMMER: STEVEN A. ZEDECK
DATE: 1983
A treasure chest!

Tutankham Cartridge


Tutankham Prototype from Parker Brothers. The RLS.1 on the cartridge refers to "Release 1", meaning the game was considered a completed project. There is one GROM chip on the board as well as an 8K ROM chip. Parker Brothers was one of the few companies allowed to produce their own GROMs for cartridges (from a license with TI), GROM stands for "Graphics Read Only Memory."

The game itself is a very faithful conversion of the 1982 Konami arcade of the same name. The game play is fast and furious without any flicker or slowdown, which helps keep it true to the arcade and also much more entertaining (who wants a slow game that is a flicker-fest?). Everything you would expect to find in Tutankham is here: the Flashes, 4 different stages (which have to be beaten 4 times around before you can claim yourself as victor), bonus lives, etc. Overall, there are no complaints for this game as Parker Brothers delivers yet another outstanding conversion to the 99/4A. Although, I guess this should come as no surprise since the programmer was a big fan of the arcade original!

Something you might notice is how similar the graphics are to the Colecovision version of Tutankham. The TI-99/4A and Colecovision used the same graphics chip which allowed the programmers of both systems to share graphics data. Both the TI-99/4A and Colecovision versions were in development at the same time, roughly early-mid 1983.



Take that you monster! Snake
Explorer Better hide! There's too many monsters in here!
Looks like a secret passage! Key
Sphinx I wish these creatures would cut me a break!
Yahooo! King Tut himself!

King Tut!


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