Paul Slocum Posted January 11, 2002 Share Posted January 11, 2002 I think the best you could do on a cuttle cart is 15 2k games. You can't do 4k games because they would access the bankswitching memory area at some point and crash the Atari. And you'd only get 15 because there's no way I can think of to put two 2k games in each 4k slot. -Paul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mvigor Posted January 11, 2002 Author Share Posted January 11, 2002 Okay, maybe this question is just silly and maybe I'm just thinking too much. But... Is there currently any menu driven multi-game cart whose dumped ROM can be played on the Cuttle Cart? If so, that would be pretty neat because you could hack the ROM to contain your choice of games and hack the menu to display the names of the games you selected. WHY? For giggles, I guess. I know that it would be just as easy to burn multiple tracks to a CD, and that my way would increase load times...but I just want to know if anyone thinks it can be done. It would also, of course, be a way to test your menu-driven mini-multi-cart's ROM before burning an EPROM. I see that Sean Kelley's newest multi-cart (December release) has a on-screen menu. I wonder if that software could be modified to allow 15 4K games or even 30 2K games to be used? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eckhard Stolberg Posted January 11, 2002 Share Posted January 11, 2002 There are some multi-games with menus by HES. But on all of them the games were slightly modified, so that they wouldn't interfere with the bankswitching logic. The Cuttle Cart offers a 64K mode that is similar to the Tigervision bankswitching. It has one 2KB bank fixed at the end of the address space, and can map in the rest of the 64K in 2KB chunks at the start of the VCS ROM space. If you re-assembled some 2KB games to use this assress space, you could fit 28-30 games into a multi-ROM like this, depending how much space you need for the menu display. But you would have to program the menu yourself. So either way, without at least some basic VCS programming skills, you wouldn't get far. Sean Kelly's multi-cart probably uses it's own bankswitching scheme, that makes sure that the games don't accidentally switch the bank while they are playing. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rasty Posted January 11, 2002 Share Posted January 11, 2002 Humm how do you access the game menu in multicart games? if you can only access it when turning the power off and then back on, this could be a bit of a trouble as it would mean reloading the whole program with the CuttleCart! Reset would only reset the current game... greets, Rasty.- Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Slocum Posted January 11, 2002 Share Posted January 11, 2002 Hehe. That would be a problem. I didn't think about the fact that you would have to re-load. Here's a similar idea I had a while back: Using a 32k ROM image, make a sort of video game olympics. You play several hacked shorter versions of classic games as "events" and the scores are somehow combined to deterimine an overall winner. It would be similar to the Epyx games, but the events might be River Raid, Space Invaders, Berzerk, etc. Hopefully I can start working on the programming this summer. -Paul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rasty Posted January 11, 2002 Share Posted January 11, 2002 Wow, that would be a heavy hack... and very good idea too! Let me know about progress! (I'll be patient) greets, Rasty.- Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cschell Posted January 12, 2002 Share Posted January 12, 2002 You probably could put a multicart into the Cuttle Cart, but I'm not sure why you'd bother. As someone mentioned you would have cycle power to get back to the menu, which would require reloading everything. If you used Cuttle Cart mode you would have access to all 64K of RAM, but only one 2K window at a time. Since you have to reload anyway, you could have your menu copy the appropriate game page into the lower portion of the Cuttle Cart RAM, doing this tediously with code running from 2600 RAM and swapping the source and destination pages in and out. Then you could set the appropriate bankswitching mode of the game, and jump to it's start address just like the Cuttle Cart does normally at the end of a load. (Once out of Cuttle Cart (or Supercharger) mode you could not change the bankswitching mode again. Someone once mentioned they were going to make themselves a menu program like this so that they could put more than 99 programs onto a single CD, loading a batch and then selecting the game they wanted. I never did hear back from them regarding this though. Chad --Growing increasingly annoyed with the lack of signals brought to cartridge ports on classic gaming consoles. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted January 12, 2002 Share Posted January 12, 2002 quote: Originally posted by C. Schell: You probably could put a multicart into the Cuttle Cart, but I'm not sure why you'd bother. As someone mentioned you would have cycle power to get back to the menu, which would require reloading everything. [..entering dream mode..] A USB version of the Cuttle Cart that can be better controlled from the PC would be awesome. You could select what game you want to play and *POOF* the Cuttle Cart would load it, automatically resetting the 2600 so you wouldn't have to turn power off and on. Plus the loading would be (practically) instanteous, not that it's horribly lengthy now.. Could also open up the possibility of interactive debugging. Heh, heh, heh. [..exiting dream mode..] ..Al [ 01-11-2002: Message edited by: Albert ] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cschell Posted January 12, 2002 Share Posted January 12, 2002 quote: Originally posted by Albert: [..entering dream mode..] A USB version of the Cuttle Cart that can be better controlled from the PC would be awesome. You could select what game you want to play and *POOF* the Cuttle Cart would load it, automatically resetting the 2600 so you wouldn't have to turn power off and on. Plus the loading would be (practically) instanteous, not that it's horribly lengthy now.. [..exiting dream mode..] Not anytime soon by me. I don't see people coughing up the money to cover the costs of that one. USB pretty much requires sticking a microcontoller of some sort on the device. I don't think the 2600 can keep up with the USB port, especially not if you want it running as a supervisor. I must say building something with a USB connection to figure out exactly how to implement it does get tempting from time to time. Chad [ 01-11-2002: Message edited by: C. Schell ] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ubersaurus Posted January 12, 2002 Share Posted January 12, 2002 How's the production of the intellicarts coming, while I'm thinking about it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Slocum Posted January 12, 2002 Share Posted January 12, 2002 Say you've loaded and are playing a game on a Cuttle Cart. Then without turning off power, you start loading a new game. Is there a way that a slightly redesigned Cuttle Cart could automatically reset the Atari itself and start up a different game? It doesn't seem possible from a software perspective, but maybe there's some trick I'm overlooking. It appears to boil down to: how do you interrupt the game program and reset the program counter? -Paul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cschell Posted January 12, 2002 Share Posted January 12, 2002 Well, the first problem is that the Atari is actually responsible for monitoring the audio line in the Cuttle Cart, so there would be no way of detecting the start of a new load. (Not to mention I would NOT want this behavior, you've just finished loading your game but don't stop the CD, so the next game starts loading right away. Or, you're playing your game, noise appears on the audio line and your game resets. Bad.) But aside from that I don't know of any safe way to reset the 2600. There are no interrupts available, and the reset line is not brought to the cartridge port. The only method I can think of would be to momentarily short VCC to GND using a relay, sending the 2600 into brown out, which releases your relay and might reset everything, or it might just glitch everything. And it would not be good for anything, especially your regulator. Not something I would ever do. Chad --See, still more lack of signals to the cartridge port. See the prototype problems thread for the worst of it on the 2600. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Slocum Posted January 12, 2002 Share Posted January 12, 2002 You're right -- probably wouldn't be the best design decision. I was more just curious about whether it was even possible. I did have an idea, though. When the cartridge wants to reset the Atari, it could usurp the running program and feed the Atari 3 or 4 NOP commands and then a JMP $0000 command, then switch banks back to the loader program. Seems like if you after 3 or 4 NOP commands you could be sure the processor will be expecting an opcode next. -Paul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ubersaurus Posted January 13, 2002 Share Posted January 13, 2002 Doing a multicart on the cuttle cart makes little snese to me, since isn't it a multicart, sort of? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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