mos6507's Blog

Hmm, lots of interest it seems in creating supercarts for the 2600. I think your real challenge is going to be hitting that price point (although I don't think a SuperCharger is that rare or expensive).

 

I think you also need to think about what your target market is. If you are creating something to stimulate interest in SC homebrews then making it capable of more makes anything which uses the additional functionality not back-portable to the original SC. And where SC really shines is in it's multi-load capability, which might be difficult to emulate solely on-cart.

 

Hmm, let me think about that. From the SC bin PoV it provides the load # to a subroutine. Okay, that load # could then map to a page in the extended ROM, which then contains a extended ROM page to 6K page table (24 entries). (So really. we could have less than a page per load.) Okay, so you have two page mappers required - the traditional SC bank register, and an 18 entry page LUT. Might be possible.

 

Then the question becomes how much ROM. Hmm... max would be 100 separate 6K loads, like 1Mbyte. 128Mbytes (1Mbit) would be able to store 98 Leprechaun levels.

I have heard a lot of arguments for why people don't code for the Supercharger. One argument is availability, and the other is not being able to ship their final product on cart. This project addresses both concerns. (It's just too bad that the project is not in good sync with the contest. I was hoping everything could happen in sync to help incentivize development.)

 

On the availability front, you have to do some digging to find them. I found a couple loose carts listed via google, and you see them on Ebay.

 

Chad's Cuttle Cart 2 is in stock. It's a great piece of kit but it's only for the 7800 and it's $150.

 

I want this new cart to sell for less than $30 if possible. Hopefully a lot less.

 

I want to make it so that you can just order a brand new unit without any hassles. I also want to reappropriate the remaining Stella CDs from Hozer so I could actually ship the standalone Chimera preloaded with the entire Starpath catalog on flash.

 

I also like the idea of people getting a Supercharger inadvertently by buying a finished homebrew like Leprechaun. The game could remain read-only and it would still be a fully functional serial-based Supercharger in that case. It's up to the game authors under which conditions they might want to allow the game to be erasable.

 

The embedded carts would be large enough to store as many loads as a particular homebrew requires (including Leprechaun). Whatever extra space leftover could be provided for storing a few extra small games.

 

The programming model would not have to change vs. a Supercharger. The BIOS routine internally would be different.

 

If people start coding for the enhanced features, yes, it would break compatibility with people who own Cuttle Carts or Superchargers. If these new titles ship on embedded Chimeras then the only problem would be some people with Superchargers wouldn't see the works-in-progress. It's worth it to expose these features and see what happens. But I think if a game can be targetted to the stock Supercharger that one should first try to stick to that.

 

I haven't really layed out what the enhanced features are because it's subject to change, but at its core it would feel a lot like a natural extension of the Supercharger. The goal is to provide an environment that provides all of the strategies that have proven to be most successful in helping out the VCS simultaneously, while adding some features nobody's ever seen before.

 

That will really help give the project a reason to exist besides merely being a "supercharger replacement".

 

If it seems like nobody is going to use the new features, I'm okay with that. The homebrew phenomenon isn't going away overnight. For all I know someone might pick one of these carts up years down the road and write a homebrew on it. Even if the embedded carts aren't being made anymore then, he could be content in the knowledge that 300-500 people out there could potentially play the game via serial. You have to think long-term. We're talking about developing for consoles that are almost 30 years old after all.