Right cart slot

[Nateo]

I have my 800 with me now, I'm looking at it, and, dang, what is that right cart slot for?

[Jetboot Jack]

A few programs (Monkey Wrench springs to mind) used the right slot, but only a handful - hence Atari dropped it from later machines....

 

sTeVE

[Nukey Shay]

Yup, the right cartridge was intended to supplement left cartridges. But a few things prompted Atari to drop the port:

It can only provide 8k of space.

A 16k left cartridge occupies the same memory as a 8k left + 8k right cartridge.

Each port=added production cost & testing.

...and the number one reason:

Atari never made any right cartridges...they were all third party companies.

[Albert]

Andrew Krieg has a nice list of Atari 8-bit carts, which includes details on which carts use the right cartridge slot. Looking over his list, I see:

 

- Austin 80 Console Software

- KISS (No, not the band..)

- Monkey Wrench, The

- Magic Dump

- Magic Dump II

 

The right cartridge port was certainly an interesting idea at the time, but I'm not surprised that Atari killed it off in later generations of 8-bit hardware. As Nukey Shay said, Atari never produced any carts that used it, and as you can see above there were very few third-party carts.

 

I also like how the carts were neatly tucked away under the "hood", and that also got canned in the much "cheaper" (certainly to build) XL models. That would have presented a problem for my SpartaDOS X and R-Time 8 carts, both of which allow another cartridge to be plugged in on top.

 

..Al