Any chance for Papercart integration?

[+Gemintronic]

I really want to create paper cards that hold mini games.  The problem with the Papercart was that it didn't connect with a real 2600.  This project kind of solves that by using Stella as a real console.

 

Any chance the Papercart could be used with this project?

 

 

[+rbairos]

Would you want the paper to encode active hardware? or just 2k /4k games?

[+Gemintronic]

26 minutes ago, rbairos said:

Would you want the paper to encode active hardware? or just 2k /4k games?

 

It looks like QR codes can barely fit a 4k game on two sides of a card.  So, just bog standard 4k ROM.

[Arno1978]

I had once thought of this long ago too before I heard of papercart, but what I imagined was an image of pixels - 128x128 with 16 available colours for each pixel. This would provide 8kb of space.. if my math is correct. 2 pixels would be one byte. Just need to figure out a way to scan all the pixels and interpret the colours. Easiest method is with a camera. It is a really cool idea. It would be the neatest thing to have an entire game on a paper card.

[BigO]

When I read this, I think "Supercharger".

• Scan and decode 2D barcode (QR, DataMatrix, what have you)
• Encode as audio (FSK?) compatible with supercharger.
• Stream decoded audio out through a Supercharger compatible phone plug.

Supercharger allowed for multi-tape game loads, so the scanning of multiple 2D barcodes should be workable.

 

Superchargers seem to be fairly rare so probably not an ideal solution.

 

I don't know the architecture well enough to answer myself, but I wonder if an alternate firmware for a multicart (e.g. Harmony) could make it receive a digital stream via the USB port and load the stream contents to RAM like it would otherwise do with a file from an SD card.

 

I know this is kind of circumventing/bypassing/ignoring the StellaRT as real hardware angle, but I thought I'd ramble it out here anyway.