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Krokodile Cartridge, by Armin Vogl
5/5
As a developer, emulation is great in that it allows you to quickly test your VCS creations on a computer system. The only downfall is that no matter how good the emulation is, it's not yet 100% accurate. I found this out the hard way when writing Medieval Mayhem - a change that worked just fine on the emulator caused all sorts of problems on the Atari. Testing on the real thing can be accomplished by burning an EPROM and building your own test cartridge, but that can take a bit of money and know-how.
As a gamer, emulation is great in that it allows you to play homebrew games that others are writing(and hopefully give some feedback on), as well as VCS games that you've not been able to acquire. Emulation isn't perfect though, and sometimes that distracts from the experience.
Armin Vogl to the rescue! He created the Krokodile Cartridge, which is flash programmable Atari cartridge. Just plug it into your computer via a serial port(or USB-serial adapter), attach a 6 VDC minimum power supply(note - your Atari's 9VDC will work just fine, but don't use anything higher than 9VDC), run the included Krokodile Commander software and transfer your game's BIN file in a matter of seconds. Unplug the serial cable and power supply, then pop it into your Atari.
Due to hardware limitations, the VCS can only address 4K of ROM space - plus it only has 128 bytes of RAM. Various companies came up with bank switching techniques to allow larger games and/or additional RAM. The Krokodile Cartridge supports a number of these, including one with 512K of ROM and 32K of RAM! For the games not supported, hacks can often be found that convert the program to use a bank switch method supported by the Krokodile Cartridge. A search of "+krokodile +conversion" in the Atari Age forums could prove useful for those so inclined.
As if this wasn't enough, the Krokodile Cartridge also supports a MultiCart mode, in which numerous games can be loaded into the cartridge at the same time. A nice menu(written by Thomas Jentzsch) allows you to select which game to play. MultiCarts are limited in that all the games must support the same bank switch schemes(Atari standard 4K, 8K, 16K or 32K), and no extra RAM is allowed. An exception to this is that 1K, 2K and 4K games can be included in any MultiCart.
The included software is Windows only. I wrote a command line program, krokcom, for Mac OS X. It's not as fancy, but it gets the job done. It can be found by doing a search on "krokcom" in the Atari Age forums.
Comes with an excellent manual, with some slick cover art by Nathan Strum.
Next up, Holiday Qb
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