Thanks, great find !!
Yeah, the BW era was where every company had the same games.....probably not licensed.
Still.....very interesting machine because there is nothing available on the net about it. The reason that there is now a 2nd one in Europe would lead you to think it _might_ be a Euro thing only BUT Atari didn't have the Irish factory at that time.....
Would be interesting to know if there are type plates with "made in" on them....
There was one in the UK known already (Archer had it last time i heard of it recently) , and now this other one has turned up.
I had a look at the first Splash years ago when it surfaced, it uses a bootleg crash pcb, and was made by Atari-France. It appears that Atari-France were into licensing as well as bootlegging. Atari-France was not an office of Atari as you may think, it was a company in france that set itself up and virually paid Atari to use the name and handle their french operations, almost like a franchise...
In my book, it was a bootleg, but 'licenses' of games in the 1970's often dont carry the hallmarks of licensing that was done from the 80's onwards, ie there is no mention of the original manufacturer or any markings, and the pcb is a copy not a real pcb as you might expect.
I have seen another cabinet that was a conversion but it had an atari-france badge on the back, but the game was originally nothing that atari produced. One day i might find the photos again, not sure what happened to the cabinet.
Still, Atari Splash is an interesting anomoly, and i know the new owner, he lives about 20mins away from me, so i'll get some good pics when I visit him to get my cabinet that came from the Ship
Sadly i was in Fiji at the time the unloading happened so was unable to meet you all, but i have been sitting on a nice selection of photos from our first trip last year of the rest of the internals of the ship...
enjoy
