if there was unlimited ram how good could a 2600 game get?

[TheHoboInYourRoom]

Huh! I wonder what I'm thinking of then. Maybe I'm just thinking of Pitfall 2.

Probably. I just looked through the list of bankswitch schemes Stella supports, and DPC is the only back-in-the-day scheme that uses a coprocessor.

[louisg]

Probably. I just looked through the list of bankswitch schemes Stella supports, and DPC is the only back-in-the-day scheme that uses a coprocessor.

 

I figured out what I was thinking of: The Sara chip, but that just seems to be extra ram.

[+SpiceWare]

I figured out what I was thinking of: The Sara chip, but that just seems to be extra ram.

No "just" about it - the Atari's cartridge port lacks required signals needed to support RAM, so they had to figure out how to work around that. They ended up repurposing an address line as the Read/Write line; that works, but it makes the code a little more complex as something like this:

 

INC CART_RAM

---

won't work with the added RAM. The code has to be rewritten like this:

LDX CART_RAM_READ
INX
STX CART_RAM_WRITE

---

which uses more ROM for the code (7 bytes vs 3) and takes longer to execute (10 cycles vs 6)

[louisg]

 

No "just" about it - the Atari's cartridge port lacks required signals needed to support RAM, so they had to figure out how to work around that. They ended up repurposing an address line as the Read/Write line; that works, but it makes the code a little more complex as something like this:

 

INC CART_RAM

---

won't work with the added RAM. The code has to be rewritten like this:

LDX CART_RAM_READ
INX
STX CART_RAM_WRITE

---

which uses more ROM for the code (7 bytes vs 3) and takes longer to execute (10 cycles vs 6)

 

 

Aha! So it is a sidekick processor or controller of some sort, just not in the way I assumed Somehow I imagined it having graphical functions on it. This makes the late era 2600 games even more impressive to me.