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ST cartridge slot?


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I have a Romantic Robot cartridge and FAST ST BASIC and at the time even my first sampler for an original 520ST was for the cartridge port too (although Clarity 16 appears to have a serial port connector from what little Google images showed me but maybe that is the Amiga version I am seeing in the results as I was sure it was a cartridge device for the ST).

 

But yeah it was not meant as a games machine and so the cartridge port is more akin to the thinking behind the Commodore 264/VIC-20 range where there were all sorts of project type cartridges to control things not like the NES or 2600 which is ALL cartridge and all of them are games software (2600 ROMSCANNER, Keyboad BASIC cart combo and Starpath etc excluded).

 

Games on cartridge was such a dumb idea (which yanks didn't agree with of course going potty over the NES in the mid 80s to early 90s) because realistically due to cost they would all be less in size than the total free ram of a single loading 520ST game anyway and the ST disk drive is not that slow as to go out and buy $60 games on cartridge like the people who bought an NES and ended up paying more than a brand new Amiga 1000 + 30 new games over the ownership of a machine (!!) And, of course, the NES is not even the best 8 bit system ever made...that would be SMS, Gamegear, CPC+/GX4000 or PC-Engine or even the 256 colour SAM Coupe Spectrum compatible machine. The NES looks and sounds like a doorbell :)

 

The Amiga doesn't have a cartridge port really but the side expansion Zorro slot of the A1000/500 I guess is the same sort of thing more or less in terms of getting data into the machine but sod all except memory or hard drive interfaces were ever made for the Zorro 1 side expansion slot. Memory was too expensive to make even 256kb carts let alone games the size of Dungeon Master for the 512k BUT not having a cartridge port really knackered low end stuff like digitizers and samplers using the serial port or even parallel port on the Amiga.

 

The Atari ST really was suited to the BBC Micro upgraders (as opposed to people who ONLY played games on their C64 or ZX Rectum, really nice all round home computer that's a lot less annoying to use than windows 10 today even if you had to the the 4 inch drop trick to reseat the GEM ROMs lol (45 minutes from first power on to being able to use my brand new expensive Wintel box, ST seconds...Amiga 2000 with booting Hard disk card 20 seconds).

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  • 6 years later...

https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/ATARI_ST_MV16_Sound_Audio_Card_Cartridge_BAT_e1c2ad3a.html

 

reMV16

 

Tested on ATARI ST and STe.

 

Compatible with:

B.A.T.

B.A.T. II

Music Master

Some MOD-Players

Audio Sculpture

Digi Composer

TCB tracker

Noisetracker 1.5

 

Audio sample in the attachment. First half, YM output. Second half, reMV16 output.

 

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