MANUFACTURER:  TIGERVISION

  PRODUCT NUMBER:  7-008-99

  RELEASED:  1Q/1984

  PROGRAMMER:

   ORIGINAL RETAIL PRICE:  $34.95
 
 

SOUND CLIPS:

Miner2049er Theme

*Sound Clip Submitted by Joachim Wöllner

TOUCAN'S TRIVIA: Miner 2049er was created by Big Five Software in 1982 and ported to a large array of systems (through different manufacturers). The game made its way to the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 400/800, Colecovision, Commodore 64, VIC-20, and Gameboy just to name a few. The goal was to put Miner 2049er on every system that could reproduce it faithfully, which is the reason there are so many ports of this title to numerous systems. To read more about the history of Miner 2049er check out The Miner 2049er Information Page.

TOUCAN'S TRIVIA: Miner 2049er won a number of awards back in the 80's for its addictive game play and unique concept. Three of the awards it won were the "1984 Electronic Game of the Year" (Electronic Games Magazine), "1984 Outstanding Software Award" (Creative Computing), and "1983 Best Seller Award" (Softsel).  Pictures of these awards and more can be found at the official site of Big Five Software.

TOUCAN'S TRIVIA: The TI-99/4A version of Miner 2049er only contains 8 of the 10 original screens. Most other ports included all 10 and the Colecovision version even added an extra level to bring its total to 11. The reason for the exclusion of 2 levels (Stations 1 and 8) probably had to do with memory constraints more than anything else.

TOUCAN'S TRIVIA: The first thing you might notice about the TI-99/4A version of Miner 2049er is its weird cartridge shape. This is due to the fact that it plugs into the system's expansion port (where the Speech Synthesizer plugs into) instead of the normal cartridge port. Most likely Tigervision did this because TI would not license out its GROM chips to many 3rd party developers. The GROM chip allowed for greater amounts of memory to be put onto a single cartridge, and without the chip you were limited to 8K of ROM. Therefore, in order to fit Miner 2049er onto a cartridge Tigervision made it plug into the expansion port, which allowed for more memory than standard cartridges.

TOUCAN'S TRIVIA: There is a small square hole on the side of the Miner 2049er cartridge where a start button could go. However, Tigervision only put start buttons on their Espial cartridges which were released later in 1984 (after Miner 2049er). Interestingly, the Espial manual tells the player to push the red button on the cartridge in order to start the game (and not to go through the cartridge selection screen). This leads one to believe that the start button was a way around TI's Version 2.2 consoles which blocked 3rd party cartridges from appearing on the selection screen. By using a button to start (and also reset) the game it completely bypassed any GROM check that the system might have had. Pretty ingenious idea!

German Miner 2049er Manual
	1984 Tigervision Catalog

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