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Idea: 2600 highscore cart


Lumpbucket

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I just had an idea that might be quite cool. A highscore cart for the 2600. Now, I know that games would usually need to have built in support for a highscore cart, but I have a crazy idea that might just work. Now, I'm more of a software guy than hardware, so for all I know it could be too expensive to bother with, but the idea is this:

 

A cart containing a ROM, and some sort of NVRAM, sits between the Atari and the game cartridge. On powerup, the 2600 first executes the ROM on the high score cart. The cart gets an MD5 checksum of the game ROM (or uses some other technique to get a unique key from the game cartridge). The highscore cart has a list, like this:

 

key,address,size,score

key,address,size,score

key,address,size,score

 

(key is a unique game key, address is where the game stores the highscore, size is the size of the score buffer, and score is a pointer to the last saved score in NVRAM, or zero if no score has been saved for this game).

 

If it finds the game key in the list, it then somehow sets itself up to trap reads/writes to the address (where the game stores its high score), and keep a copy in its NVRAM. It then banks out the highscore ROM somehow, and starts up the game.

 

Would this be possible, and if so would the hardware be affordable?

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