Well today my Pac-Man cart arrived in the mail today.
As the seller told me, she ended up putting a home made label on this cart since it had no label at all. Story goes she thinks she picked it up from a craigslist seller out of Louisiana
Like with any interesting oddity item my first idea was lets open it up and see what I can see inside. The first think I checked was the board. C015783 Rev. A with the initials RJF. This is the same as the C015783 Rev A board in my CPS 810 cart. The Pac Lo and Pac Hi labels seem to be in very good shape still and holding up well on the EEProm chips.
Plugging this game in on start up showed screen that looks like the final version. The woman didn't know if it was a complete game or a partial or what it was. The start screen looked a little different. ( I can manage to replicate this on the final version on some reboots, so I dont know if its a glitch to the game or what that was later fixed ).
I did manage to record a little game play on my cell phone ( when my main PC gets fixed ill upload everything ) but plays the same and didnt notice any real differences in the first 2 minutes of play.
As I discussed with Tempest about this title. It could be an employee in house burning a copy for himself , a tester/reviewer copy of the game, or a final stage prototype , but he was leaning towards an employee making the game for himself, but the only way to know is to match up the code from a dump. Which will most likely be the next option for me. There was some glue stains on the top of the metal cart ( where LEFT CARTRIDGE is located). Not sure if there was an Atari company logo or something after Atari , will never know.
Also Ive seen a few posts on Atari Age about 1st article copies of Pac_Man. 3/782 i think and 4/8/82 i think. Still trying to find out what that is about and working on getting board pics of those to compare to what I have incase what i have is a 1st Article copy ( and then I will research who and what they did ).