A small collection of Development Cartridges

[+Andrew Davie]

This group happened to be sitting on my work desk today, and I thought I'd take a family photo.

 

 

Harmony Cart.  This one is really handy for the CDFJ games testing, because it's the only dev board I have at this point that I can test CDFJ binaries on.

I bought it as a dead unit from @Spector, so there was a huge risk, but a bit of fiddling about and it came to life.

I guess I'm just too cheap to buy things new.

 

 

Next along is a prototype Krokodile Cart -- http://www.arminvogl.de/KrokodileCartridge/ -- from Armin Vogl. Brilliant thing.

This was from about 2003, and I used it extensively when testing Boulder Dash(TM) during development.  Look at those chunky chips!

As it was a prototype, I guess I didn't pay for it.  I'm clearly just too cheap to buy things new.

 

Bottom left is a UnoCart. This one was a gift from Shawn Smith @SS and I used it for development of and it still gets occasional use.

I was too cheap to even pay postage on this one.... well I offered, honest I did.  It has been very useful.

 

Bottom middle is a PlusCart Duo.  This is a PlusCart with SD card support. Pretty cool. I did a fair bit of work on the UI on this, but the whole thing is really @Al_Nafuur work of genius.  This was pretty much the first cart to offer (near) fullscreen text.  32 chars wide, and some beautiful fonts too, designed by (ahem) some 3-pixel-wide font magician.  I made this one up myself, using a China board factory, and components that cost me a total of about US$10.

I'm too cheap to order things locally and pay quadruple the price - I'd rather save $ and wait months for stuff to arrive.

 

Bottom right is a prototype PlusCart. You can probably guess how much I paid for this.

It was sent to me by @Al_Nafuur when I first expressed interest in the PlusCart project. I think I've contributed "fair value" with my contributions to the project, but you can bet your bottom dollar I didn't pay much/any actual hard-earned-cash for this!  The board itself is quite thin, something changed in later versions.  Still works beautifully though!

 

I do have a Supercharger buried deep in a box somewhere. I never used it in anger, but I originally bough it (from "AuctionWeb" as it was called back then).  That's eBay to the uninitiated. I've been a member since 14 September 1996. Can anyone beat that?  Anyway, I think I paid something like $5.. because, you know... I'm cheap.

 

What I have never had, and always wanted are:  a Cuttle Cart, and a MagicCard.

Not to be, I'm afraid... because they're expensive these days and I'm way, way too cheap for those.

MagicCard ran Video Life - so my own "Life in Space" makes an interesting comparison between technology back then and technology now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mr SQL]

Cool dev cart selection, I have a similar one minus the Kroc!

 

The SuperCharger is my favorite for being a valid retro programming reference model. 

 

I wish I had a CBS RAM board like the Sara development boards because of all the different Schools of thought.

 

[alex_79]

 

Quote

What I have never had, and always wanted are:  a Cuttle Cart, and a MagicCard.

Same here. I actually had "Cuttle Cart" as a saved search on eBay for several years...

 

I'm also fascinated by the Magicard, but luckily in that case there are alternatives to an (expensive) original cart.

 

In fact, all of the dev carts shown in the picture above can run the Magicard rom. You only need a pair of keyboard controllers in order to use it. I think that currently the Pluscart might have issues with the "emulation exit" triggering unexpectedly when you press the reset switch with that rom, but I'm unable to test on real hardware at the moment.

 

I built the cassette interface as described in the manual years ago, but couldn't make it work. Anyway I've since found a few schematics of similar interfaces that seem to be promising. If/when I feel to come back more actively to the atari, I might give it another shot.

 

I think it would be possible to build a "standalone" Magicard replica using the basic Unocart/Pluscart hardware (without sd card nor wifi) that just loads the rom at startup. And of course it is possible to run it on a Melody board, which is a stripped down Harmony cart.

 

Edited January 25, 2022 by alex_79

[SS]

On 1/24/2022 at 9:00 AM, Andrew Davie said:

What I have never had, and always wanted are:  a Cuttle Cart

I passed on the original Cuttle Cart because I already had modded one of my Superchargers to do a good bit of what the CC1 did.  I did get a Cuttle Cart 2 for my 7800 when it was released though and it was the main way that I played 2600 games for years until the Harmony came around.