Starpath Supercharger

Entry posted by DoctorSpuds August 13, 2018

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When one looks at the 2600, they predominantly see cartridges, everywhere, more cartridges than one could shake the proverbial stick at, but far away… Across a sea of cartridges there is a dark corner. Nestled deep into that corner are twelve games, twelve pristine examples of innovation, of quality over quantity, this is the realm of Starpath. This realm is a maelstrom of quality, almost untouched by the hands of the casual consumer of retro gaming goods, because these games didn’t come on cartridges, they didn’t come on floppy disks, they came on audiocassettes, and tape reigns supreme! Starpath was originally founded under the name Arcadia, but was quickly changed after Emerson (Emerson Arcadia 2001) threatened legal action on copyright grounds (yeah that was worth it Emerson!!). In 1981 they released the Supercharger, an add-on that increased the 2600’s paltry 128 bytes of RAM to 6,272 bytes, and gave the system high(er) resolution graphics even though by today’s standards they’re still crap. The Supercharger had a unique twist though, instead of having games on conventional cartridges with expanded memory, they simply used cassette tapes, since cassettes could hold more data as an audio file, the games could be larger, more complicated, and with higher fidelity graphics, far outshining anything that was currently on the market, perhaps even the Intellivision. Despite being a hit with the critics (as these sorts of thing usually are), the supercharger had only mid level success, later the entire company was bought out by Epyx and subsequently vanished from the game market. Only twelve game were officially released by Starpath for the supercharger, with several more prototype games bolstering the library as well, the games in order of release are :

Phaser Patrol
Communist Mutants From Space
Fireball
Suicide Mission
Escape From The Mindmaster
DragonStomper
Killer Satellites
Rabbit Transit
The Official Frogger
Party Mix
Survival Island
Sword Of Saros

This will also be the order in which I review these games this week (and then some). I very much look forward to shedding some light on these games since there just isn’t enough love for the system out there. As usual review lengths will vary from game to game, since some will require more explaining than others, I’ll try to keep it over One Thousand words but no guarantees.

Let’s make some magic happen.

I've also managed to get my hands on an old Supercharger flyer, and I've included the 'Coming Soon' section, because some of these games never came out, and if they were programmed, have not been found yet.

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EricBall 239

Posted August 16, 2018

Hmm... from a programmer's perspective, I wouldn't call it 6K of RAM. More like 6K of writable ROM. Yes, the cartridge contains 6K of RAM (organized as three 2K banks plus one 2K bank of ROM "BIOS"), but writing to the ROM wasn't a single instruction, but a multi-step operation. (Because the 2600 cartridge is missing the signals needed for normal RAM.)

And there wasn't anything in the cartridge which inherently provided better graphics, but games could take advantage of the extra RAM to create displays not possible without it. (Like I did for my unfinished Lode Runner style game which used the extra RAM to store the level and the sprite data.)