What the Fruck is Frying?

[dan2357]

ok my ignorance in gaming comes out, People are always talking about this when refering to eeggs or glitches. What is it?
Sorry if subject is out of line.

[NoahsMyBro]

On the Atari VCS / 2600, if you inserted a cartridge, and then very quickly cycled the power switch back and forth, weird effects/glitches would show up. This practice was termed 'frying'. My intuition suggests this is not a good idea if you are interested in the long term health of your gaming equipment & games, so I never did it myself.

I did noice though, that in the case of Space Invaders, you could play game one on the cartridge with 2 shots onscreen rather than the usual one by holding the reset button down as you power up the system.

Unfortunately, when you do this and you score 2 hits simultaneously, only the lesser point target is added to your score, so you end up scoring fewer points.

I assume frying works on other systems as well, but I don't know for sure.

[retrogmr]

There are some Intellivision easter eggs (if you can call them that) that were only induced by frying. Much easier to do on an original Intellivision, impossible on a Intellivision II (due to the way the power switch works).

I think one of the old FAQs I put together 5 years ago has a few of those tricks listed; there's a link to it on the Digital Press FAQ page.

[Jorpho]

Yep... There was that version of Asterocks inside Astrosmash, wasn't there?

My old ColecoVision never did anything terribly interesting, beyond screwing the graphics up in creative ways. Ditto with a flaky NES I once used.
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