8K RAM cartridge

[+Ksarul]

I was going through a bunch of odd cartridges a good friend of mine gave me when I visited her in Florida this summer and found one that piqued my interest. The cartridge has a paper label and a switch on the front. The label identifies it (in very faded text) as an 8K RAM--Non-Volatile. It also said that it had Disk Fixer loaded in it. The cartridge didn't show on the title screen when inserted (somewhat expected, as it has been in storage since the late 90s). I then opened it up to find a really neat perf board with wires all over the place, a socketed 8K RAM chip, and a 3V lithium battery that was beginning to disintegrate. I may try and put it back into a functional state, but it is definitely a really good example of the interesting homebrew creativity that came out of the German users groups back in the late eighties and early nineties.

 

I'll try and get some pictures of it later to facilitate permanent documentation. . .this one looks like it was probably unique, but one never knows.

 

Further digging in the box of odd things identified something else I had never seen a physical copy of. Asgard (and programmer Mike Bishop) were working on an educational cartridge that had three programs in it: Giving, Letter World, and Speed Key. The box contained an Asgard prototype of this cartridge. It appears to have the same revisions of the programs that were included in the 512K compilation cartridge, although the version of Giving in this cartridge may be slightly more complete, as it is V1.05 as opposed to the V1.04 seen already.

Edited December 9, 2018 by Ksarul

[+FarmerPotato]

was there an E/A grom in there? I wonder how else you could load anything into it. I made one following the June 1985 Jon Clulow Micropendium article instructions.

 

Here's the thread on 8k supercarts.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/210852-8k-supercart/

 

and the maimbyte page http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/supercart/supercart.html

[+Ksarul]

It is not a Supercart. I have a suspicion that it was made to work with a combination of the E/A cart and a Navarone cartridge expander, as once the desired program was loaded into it, the data would remain in place more-or-less permanently because of the lithium battery. I thought it might be a Supercart before I actually opened it, but then I saw what was actually in there and had to revise my opinion.

[iliketurtles]

There was also Funware's Driving Demon missing the whole label, and a Micro-Tennis by DataBioTics.

[barry.peterson]

That sounds like a Romox cartridge with a battery added. I bought a few of them in Oklahoma many years ago and replaced the EPROM with a socket and a 6264 RAM chip.

[Omega-TI]

I'd love to see a photo of it. You're probably spot on with the E/A cart and Widget, but it's possible it could have also used a disk based loader program.

[+Ksarul]

The E/A was what would give it the disk loader capability. TI BASIC doesn't have the capability to load an Assembly loader program without using something that wasn't available back then: the Playground. With that, the only possibility was to use a cartridge expander to make multiple cartridges available simultaneously (or to tape over the reset land on the cartridge connector and hope you didn't reset the machine while changing cartridges--something I also did a lot of BITD).

 

Still an interesting cartridge. I made a couple of pictures of it (and the Asgard cartridge--after I covered the EPROM window), but I still need to shrink them for the forum. . .