Anyone remember 80's "flash" cart?

[TheDevil'sCompass]

Never owned an Atari 800, but a friend I grew up with had one. One day his dad came home with a cartridge that was just a PCB with a few chips mounted on it and a stack of games on cassette tapes. The cart came packaged in a ziploc with an instruction sheet and a golf tee. Not sure which slot the cart was placed in, but I don't think you could leave it in if it wasn't being used. The golf tee was wedged in the cartridge lid switch because it wouldn't close with this special cart inserted. I can't remember if he had to type any commands or flip a switch on the cart to activate it. Games were then loaded from cassette tape. Don't know if these were rom dumps from cartridges or disk games saved on cassette. I don't recall any of the games being on more than one cassette. We'd often start loading a game and then go do something else because the load times were insanely long. Sometimes we'd check on the progress and find out that a load failed for some reason. I seem to recall Blue Max taking close to an hour to load. When the system was turned off, the currently loaded game was lost. This would have been in the early 80's and I suppose it's possible a local guy made it. At the time I just assumed it was some sort of underground pirate device since I'd seen a similar one for a friend's Vic-20. Anybody own one of these or know what it was called?

[oo7]

36 minutes ago, TheDevil'sCompass said:

Never owned an Atari 800, but a friend I grew up with had one. One day his dad came home with a cartridge that was just a PCB with a few chips mounted on it and a stack of games on cassette tapes. The cart came packaged in a ziploc with an instruction sheet and a golf tee. Not sure which slot the cart was placed in, but I don't think you could leave it in if it wasn't being used. The golf tee was wedged in the cartridge lid switch because it wouldn't close with this special cart inserted. I can't remember if he had to type any commands or flip a switch on the cart to activate it. Games were then loaded from cassette tape. Don't know if these were rom dumps from cartridges or disk games saved on cassette. I don't recall any of the games being on more than one cassette. We'd often start loading a game and then go do something else because the load times were insanely long. Sometimes we'd check on the progress and find out that a load failed for some reason. I seem to recall Blue Max taking close to an hour to load. When the system was turned off, the currently loaded game was lost. This would have been in the early 80's and I suppose it's possible a local guy made it. At the time I just assumed it was some sort of underground pirate device since I'd seen a similar one for a friend's Vic-20. Anybody own one of these or know what it was called?

So first. Games on cassette such as bluemax existed for the a8. 
 

 

the load time sounds correct. The amount of data a cassette holds makes sense that it would always be only 1 tape. The flash cart makes no sense.

 

 

i loaded games off tape all the time. It was normal on computers back then. The “flash cart” what did it do? From your description you were loading tape games that go by bye when you power off.

[TheDevil'sCompass]

3 hours ago, oo7 said:

i loaded games off tape all the time. It was normal on computers back then. The “flash cart” what did it do? From your description you were loading tape games that go by bye when you power off.

Yes, I know tape was used by computers back then. At the time I had a TI 99/4A with a cassette drive. Another friend had a Vic-20 with a cassette drive.

 

The copies of the Atari 800 games would not work without the cart. Beyond that I don't know what it did. I assumed at the time that it functioned similar to the cart a friend had for his Vic-20. The one for the Vic-20 loaded cartridge rom backups from tape and could also create tape backups from any cartridge plugged into its passthrough connector. Don't know if the Atari 800 one could make backups or not.

[oo7]

2 hours ago, TheDevil'sCompass said:

Yes, I know tape was used by computers back then. At the time I had a TI 99/4A with a cassette drive. Another friend had a Vic-20 with a cassette drive.

 

The copies of the Atari 800 games would not work without the cart. Beyond that I don't know what it did. I assumed at the time that it functioned similar to the cart a friend had for his Vic-20. The one for the Vic-20 loaded cartridge rom backups from tape and could also create tape backups from any cartridge plugged into its passthrough connector. Don't know if the Atari 800 one could make backups or not.

Odd. Maybe a memory expansion. On my a8s i ran tape back ups, no cart for it

[Mclaneinc]

It sort of sounds like The Pill, but the tape thing then confuses that.

[Rybags]

It would be the Pill or a similar cart.

The media loaded from doesn't really matter though I don't know if these things supported tape, though probably did.

The cartridge would either have a hard switch, supposedly later ones used software - to activate the RD4 and RD5 lines on write cycles which makes the system think that $8000-$BFFF contains ROM and not RAM.

By doing this you stop writes to those area from affecting the RAM so that cartridge protection systems no longer work.

 

This would be 100% effective for copying linear ROM game types but useless for banked types, e.g. the OSS language carts and many of the later XEGS and grey carts.

 

Additional - these are fairly simple devices and supposedly plenty of homebrew clones were made.

Edited June 2, 2022 by Rybags

[Mrshoujo]

The Pill was a rare Right Cartridge and things copied using it then wouldn't work without The Pill. So while you could make backups, there was no giving copies away... Unless you knew what was going on.

[Rybags]

Right cartridge can only exist at $8000-$9FFF which wouldn't be very useful at all.

Left cart can overlay the entire valid cart area.

 

The "backup" part - dumping carts was easy.   You can practically hand-assemble the code to copy them to Ram.

The tricky bit was finding and removing the protection code.  Easy on early games but once they knew people were cracking them they put more effort into hiding and making it harder to disable.

[Mclaneinc]

Yeah, the old overwriting code stuff was fun, same way some games used the same trick if Omnimon was present.. The Pill seemed like it was more than it was because it was encased in epoxy. Had one, used it once or twice..

[BobJones]

On my 400 I had an internal mod that was basically a hex inverter chip and two switches, that I used to copy and then play carts. Big I remember correctly they could be saved to disk or cassette. I then moved to the pill that had a single switch but same concept. Then came the super pill that had no switch. I had disks of copied carts that we shared with friends.

Guessing that is what you are remembering.

Sent from my Pixel 6 Pro using Tapatalk

[Rybags]

I think the epoxy would be to try and prevent reverse-engineering.  Similar to how even in the modern day, lots of gadgets have the printing removed from some of the ICs because the device is usually very simple and otherwise easy to duplicate.

And that usually goes in hand with the practice of selling the thing for 10x what the BOM is.

[Mclaneinc]

Oh yeah, for sure the epoxy was an anti rip off thing and just that.. That and the IC's would have had the numbers scraped off..

[+Larry]

You can't blame him!  There was a dentist that x-rayed a Pill to see if he could determine what was inside!  And IIRC, on an 800, all you had to do was cut one trace and put in a switch, and you could defeat the cartridge protection (until bank-switching carts came along.)

[Mclaneinc]

And what was inside was not a lot, hence the epoxy not only protected what was in the cart but also gave it added weight that gave the impression it was a lot more inside than there was...

[cwilbar]

5 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

It sort of sounds like The Pill, but the tape thing then confuses that.

That was my thought exactly.  I had one years ago but used it with a disk drive IIRC.

 

[Sinjinhawke]

I used to use my friends copy of The Pill cartridge to load cart games off of cassette on my 64k 600xl back in the 80's.  It was almost magic to young me.

[TheDevil'sCompass]

Thanks everyone! This sounds like what I remember. Looked up an old advertisement for The Pill and it mentions supporting disk or tape backups. 

[oo7]

Interesting. All the cart games came on tape and disk anyway so this is kinda odd. I either forgot the pill existed or just somehow missed it. Mind you i was backing up disks and tapes in 85 86 and downloading in 87

[Rybags]

Few cart games were on other media before about 1985.

In some cases the tape/disk release was only in specific markets, e.g. UK and Europe.  And often they were by 3rd party, e.g. US Gold, Datasoft, Epyx.

 

Of course plenty of tape/disk versions were made by crackers and around early on.  But in either case you usually needed at least a 48K system to run them.

[oo7]

53 minutes ago, Rybags said:

Few cart games were on other media before about 1985.

In some cases the tape/disk release was only in specific markets, e.g. UK and Europe.  And often they were by 3rd party, e.g. US Gold, Datasoft, Epyx.

 

Of course plenty of tape/disk versions were made by crackers and around early on.  But in either case you usually needed at least a 48K system to run them.

I guess i missed out that early in. I got my 600xl xmas 83. Then through 84 i had on cart pacman,pole position, dig dug, galaxian, caverns of mars and cymbal games 20 sometime in 1984 then we upgraded to an 800 xl dad and i got into basic and outgrew the ram fast. Then I discovered copying games with friends. And the rest is history.

 

i was only 7 when i got my first xl so i guess i missed the true early atari 8 bit days.

[+Larry]

Anyone have the "Super Pill?"  The original Pill had a switch.  The Super is switchless.  I got a Super for something like $5 when CSS was blowing them out (in the 90's IIRC). 

[iamscuba2]

On 6/2/2022 at 9:20 AM, BobJones said:

On my 400 I had an internal mod that was basically a hex inverter chip and two switches, that I used to copy and then play carts. Big I remember correctly they could be saved to disk or cassette. I then moved to the pill that had a single switch but same concept. Then came the super pill that had no switch. I had disks of copied carts that we shared with friends.

Guessing that is what you are remembering.

Sent from my Pixel 6 Pro using Tapatalk
 

Do you have a picture of the Super Pill"?

[Heaven/TQA]

First time since 80s I read about a device like the Pill... Was such a thing ever released in Europe? Back those days I was aware of Happy clones etc but that device I can not remember to have seen.and not even I remember an Ad in Antic or Analaog mags but 40 year passed since 😂