Supercharger Impressions

[boutell]

Just bought a Supercharger on eBay. There have been many different stories about what does and doesn't work, how easy it is to work with as a development tool, etc.

 

So I'll just mention my outcome: 100% positive. It works fine straight off my laptop's audio output jack, I didn't need any adapters. wplaybin works great (even in XP) and even 4K ROMs cross the wire in just a few seconds (I know, it's funny to be bragging about how fast we can more 4K in 2007, but the point is it works). I sometimes have to hit play more than once but it's never a real problem.

 

I gather there are some memory addresses that you can't touch in an unmodified supercharger or something, which might be why I experienced a crash while playing a recently posted 4K Pac-Man demo, but it hasn't been an issue for my own development so far.

 

Testing on the real thing has been vital - kernels that have a solid display on stella roll like crazy on the real hardware. But the stella debugger (hit the backtick key and be amazed) has been enormously helpful in fixing same - it's great at displaying how many scanlines are in a frame!

[djmips]

You can disassemble bins and modify them to work with the Supercharger.

 

In your own code.

 

ORG $FFF8
.word 0	   ; for supercharger
.word 0	   ; nmi vector
.word START   ; start vector
.word START   ; brk vector

[Nukey Shay]

Yup...$xFF8/9 need to be totally unused by the program. No called data or program instructions allowed to ensure Supercharger-compatability (tho this can be avoided by modding the unit itself).