ATARI ST programs on cartridge ?

[Lord-Chaos]

I have on program , the Omikron BASIC on a ROM cartridge , similar to ATARI 8 Bit carts.

 

This program was officially released on cartridge , but later distributed on disk - only (Omikron Basic become the official ST BASIC in Germany in the early 90s I think).

 

Were there more carts for the ATARI ST ?

 

Would be interesting to have a ATARI 520 ST (without the drive) running games or programs from cart.

 

Anyone knows more about this ?

[Inky]

I actually started a topic about this wayyy back, but no, there weren't many carts released for the ST. The only game I can think of is RC Aerochopper, and that's because of its cool controller... I know a couple scanners used the cart port

[Lord-Chaos]

I actually started a topic about this wayyy back, but no, there weren't many carts released for the ST.  The only game I can think of is RC Aerochopper, and that's because of its cool controller...  I know a couple scanners used the cart port

 

Is there technical information about this (making carts) somewhere ?

 

Maybe it would be possible to build a "RAM-drive" for the ST , so that it would be possible to copy programs from disk to this cart an use it without diskdrive.

 

I think several games would fit on a 1 Mbyte cart since the ST did not have many multi-disk games (my biggest ist Space Ace with 4 or 5 disks ?).

 

Thimo

[+rdemming]

Also released was the "Ultimate Ripper" cartridge. THis cartridge took control over the ST after a reset and then you could search the memory for graphics and music files.

 

The cartridge can also be programmed with a simple file system so you could store multiple programs on it.

See http://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n12/STCartridges.html for more information about this.

 

The cartridge size is maximum 128Kbytes but using bankswitching techniques you can increase the capacity to almost infinity.

The Dela Epromdisk used this technique. This was a cartridge with space for 576KBytes of eprom chips. Using special software (also on eprom) the cartridge acted as an ultra fast readonly disk.

 

Robert