Making Cartridges from Supercharger Games

[Joel D. Park]

Has anyone came up with a way to make BIN files from Supercharger tapes??

 

I know the multi-load games probably wouldn't fly.. But I'm thinking about PartyMix in particular.

 

It's got 4 or 5, 4 player games with really good graphics.. I dunno how big the games are but they would make excellent cartridges.

[rasty]

The SuperCharger had 6k RAM onboard to be used for both program code and as scratch ram (afaik), while cartridges have ROM..

[Joel D. Park]

I kind of assumed the ram on the super charge was more or less a holding place for the cartridge once it was loaded in from tape, I didn't really think it would serve more of a purpose than that.

 

6K is odd I think that would be simular to the SuperRam carts or whatever that CBS made?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

I kind of assumed the ram on the super charge was more or less a holding place for the cartridge once it was loaded in from tape,  I didn't really think it would serve more of a purpose than that.  

No, it's used for more, else the superior graphics (e.g. Frogger) would not have been possible.

I'm quite sure the programmers where using such nasty, but efficient tricks as selfmodifying code which is only possible in RAM and offers a lot of chances to get a better display kernel.

[Nukey Shay]

True that...

If you look at just the display of SC games, there is a LOT of screen updates which would be unworkable in cart form (unless it too included it's own Ram).

[san-d-2000]

Rabbit Transit is available in cartridge form, Atari licensed it but never released it.

 

-Sandy.

[jsoper]

Kevin was able to do it in his Bankzilla project, so it's possible.

[ubersaurus]

Well, what if you made a cart that was effectively a dedicated supercharger that would load only that game? Thats about all I can think of.

[Keir]

Well, if anyone figures out how to do it feel free to send your old tapes that you no longer need my way! :wink:

 

I recently went through a Supercharger phase and I was determined to get every tape for it. After all, there are only 12 so it can't be that hard, right? After losing many an eBay auction to bidders far more saavy than I, I now have 1 Supercharger and 3 games. Two of them are Commie Mutants!

[cschell]

Kevin was able to do it in his Bankzilla project, so it's possible.

 

Kevin's Bankzilla has the Supercharger custom chip installed in it along with the 6K of RAM. If I recall correctly, he feeds it a simulated audio stream from the microcontroller that runs Bankzilla.

 

The Cuttle Cart has a complete emulation of the Supercharger special chip, and it's a large part of the code that makes up the Cuttle Cart. You could make a cart, but it would have to copy ROM to RAM, then switch to emulating the Supercharger bankswitching and RAM writing. Not really worth it IMO.

 

Chad

[davidbrit2]

I'll bet it could be done, but probably not the way one might suspect. The cartridge could be equipped with 6 KB RAM, and have several banks of ROM that would hold the various program sections from the tape. A small microcontroller could emulate the behavior of the Supercharger, so that the calls to load the next portion would cause the corresponding ROM bank to be dumped into RAM for execution. It would probably work, but it sounds like more trouble than it's worth for one game.

[krisjohn]

Going back to the original question, but ignoring the subject line, Stella Gets a New Brain contains .BINs for all the Starpath games. I got my copy when I bought my Cuttle Cart. The old StellaX emu that I've got on my PC seems happy enough with the games.

 

Making carts is a whole different thing, but the .BINs are done.

 

BTW: Commie Mutants is probably the best Supercharger title, though the Frogger is much nicer than the normal 2600 version. Possibly I'd enjoy the party mix more if I had some paddles that didn't stutter, or some friends who showed an interest in 2600 stuff. MegaDrive is about as far back as most of them will go.

[Joel D. Park]

Totally off subject.. But did you try spraying some WD-40 or some other kind of penetrating old down the shaft of the paddle to the inside, takes care of studdering 100% in most cases. Just pop the handle off by pulling strait up and spray down around the White shaft were the handle hooks on... Move it around a little and it ought to take care of the problem.

[krisjohn]

try spraying some WD-40

 

Thanks, I will try that.

[ubersaurus]

I really enjoyed Suicide Mission, as well as the original version of the game, the Asteroids clone.