Chimera Teaser
I've posted about this a few times on AtariAge but I thought I'd reveal a little bit more here on my blog now that there have been some recent developments...Along with my Supercharger programming contest, I'm trying to bankroll the production of a Supercharger replacement cartridge, codename Chimera. Delicon is doing the hardware design. I will do some of the VCS firmware code, at least initially, and I'm helping make decisions on features and the programming model.The goal of this cartridge is two-fold1) To provide a viable Supercharger replacement for thsoe who want to develop or play Supercharger games. In order for it to be viable it must be generally less expensive than the market rate for Superchargers.2) To provide a self-loading cartridge for finished homebrews so that game authors can have the same visceral satisfaction in having their games published to cart as those who target any other cartridge type for the 2600. I've been told that this has been a stumbling block keeping coders from using the Supercharger.Because of the need to use modern components, enhanced features over stock Supercharger support is a given.The cart will have some flash memory on board. We don't anticipate removable flash storage. A serial port will provide a means of loading the flash, or it can be used to directly load games. It's unlikely that we would have any less than 32K RAM available for enhanced mode games.I have made the determination that whether the cart is a standalone or an embedded version (with the game preloaded), all carts will be equally capable at the chip level. Most likely you would need to buy or build a cable to enable serial on the embedded version. We've also been discussing the idea of copy-protecting the preinstalled game and perhaps having it unlock programmability upon hitting a score threshold.We have some very interesting new features beyond the Supercharger support that will come pretty much for free because of the chips we're using. I am waiting to see these features operate successfully before I reveal it formally so as not to disappoint anyone.I can reveal that our approach does involve the use of a 2nd CPU on the cartridge so we want to make sure that processor has maximum time available and maximum access to the cart RAM to provide coders with as much flexibility as possible in using it to assist the VCS. These new features could enable a whole new way of coding games for the VCS. Homebrewers should be able to get very creative in how they exploit it.More info later....
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