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About us
Love8Bit is the culmination of years of personal enthusiasm about publishing game cartridges.

An example of an unpopulated PCB in one of our 0.25% smoked black PC plastic injection 2600 cartridhge shells.
Around 35 years ago; our founder and CTO, Stephen Mitchell, contacted Atari Corp and obtained an Atari Lynx development kit and publishing deal for Lynx cartridges.
“Back then Atari needed orders in multiples of 6000 pieces plus advance payment of ninety days or more before delivery, then retailers would need ninety days plus to pay you if they managed to sell your stock.”
“Being out of pocket for over 180 days was more than I could afford at the time, so I sold my work to Atari, for royalties, instead.”
“Today, many indie-developers may see manufacturing as too difficult, but would love to help fund creating their own retro games by selling limited editions.”
“In recent years I met up with retro game enthusiasts and was pleasantly surprised that they felt retro consoles, such as the 2600, still had demand for cartidges.”
“Atari, through AtariAge, have an excellent service for making either one off or several game cartridges of Homebrew or licensed titles, but costs and capacity may not always make this ideal for the indie developer or independent store to easily monetize. Plus, I feel, making your own cartridges is personally rewarding.”
“Rather than 3D printing or destroying old games to recycle their plastic shells, which was often referenced online as the best way to make small runs of cartridges, I worked with a tooling house (near where I lived at the time) to make my own injection mould for making 2600 and 7800 compatible cartridge housings.”
“Also, thanks to the great online home-brew 2600 community, I was also able to find open PCB designs, various STL file suggestions and even PLC logic code that supported many types of 2600 games.”

Recycled PLC (logic chips) that can be used in the Pixels Past 2600 PCB design.
The future?

Prototype:
Risc chip based ROM and Superchip emulation running through a Pixels Past edge connection.

PCB example
designed for retro “through the hole” parts
FAQs
“I’m a 2600 home-brewer, how do I use this site?”
You can list your binary with me for indie-retro game stores to license when they place an order for PCBs and 2600 shell sets. However, you will need to prove that you can legally license your game for others to do this (i.e. be the copyright holder and have conformed to any applicable laws or regulations in licensing a game for cartridge manufacture and re-sale).
Please use the “Contact us” page and to find out how to send an enquiry email to find out more.
If you have your own audience, you may want to order batches of 25 populated PCBs and shells from us in order to make your own limited editions. Perhaps do this to reward your backers or to simply sell-on, with some margin, where permitted by law.
“Is love8Bit a publisher?”
No.
Although we need your binary file to program EPROMs with before we solder them into a PCB (and we will test them with the EPROMs and PLC chips and logic code) we do not play-test, market or do compliance approvals for your game.
If you plan to retail these, you will need to comply with regulations for game content and for selling a final assembled product, as would any other publisher or distributor to retail have to, in your chosen markets.
Our PCBs are sub-assembly parts only, it is up to you to insert them into a cartridge shell, screw it together and then, optionally, assemble it with stickers, a manual and any packaging you may care to source yourself.
You might simply sign the shell with a sharpie and hand it to someone as a prototype or decide to go through the process of performing any remaining steps required to retail or license it for game cartridge final manufacture yourself.
I just want the plastic shells, is that OK?
The main purpose of Love8Bit was to supply the plastic shells so that indie-devs did not have to destroy old 2600 games to recycle the shells.
We can make other colors in either PC or ABS, please use the “Contact us” page to enquire about this if you have a need for your own special run.
We only added PCBs and a sub-assembly to help indie-devs who didn’t want to deal with that step.
Some Klax cartridges as we simply couldn’t bring ourselves to destroy them when recycling the shells. This is why we had a new tool made for plastic injection.
We’d much rather those Klax games were resold as new “old” stock to collectors rather than destroyed.
What is that prototype?
Although EPROMs and PLCs work for some of the classic ROM mappers, these are mostly “old school” parts and often have to be recycled by suppliers.
A more advanced solution, that could avoid these sourcing issues, would expand possibilities.
To this end, love8Bit is working with a factory and IC licensing business to develop a simpler and yet widely useful PCBA.
The prototype supports 2k / 4k / F8 / F6 & F4 ROM mappers already, but I am looking to add “Superchip” and dip-switch driven multi-game cartridge support. e.g. F8S, F6S, F4S and other similar banking methods may also become possible at the same or even lower costs than today.
Currently we only sell on the Pixels Past compatible solutions, but hope to offer this new board in 2025 too.