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