Cart 1 of 3

[pheedback]

Would a game than spans multiple carts be too much? I was thinking that it might be cool to extend a game out that far. I know it would only sell on two premises. 1.The game is kick ass 2.The game is cheap. So if this is a possibility would anyone be interested in something like that?

[pmpddytim]

I had the same idea awhile ago, and I know that I wasnt the first to think of it. Here's a link to that thread.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.p...4827&highlight=

 

-Tim

[Mord]

I had the same idea awhile ago, and I know that I wasnt the first to think of it. Here's a link to that thread.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.p...4827&highlight=

 

-Tim

 

Out of curiousity since I'm no hardware guru, beyond messing up the game in progress is there any hardware risks to removing a cartridge with the power still turned on? If there wasn't, you could potentially set it up for the game to load a small loop function to run in RAM that would just keep checking a rom location for a specific value, staying in the ram loop until it detects it and continuing gameplay at a predetermined location. Essentially this way you could have multiple cartridges for a game, each with a specific value in the same location of rom which indicates the cartridge.

 

Was an idea I was toying with on paper since christmas. If it was possible to do this, even a large rom-sized cart wouldn't be limiting. Even if there was risk of damage to the VCS by yanking out cartridges like that, there are other ways around it.

[Nukey Shay]

Nah...you missed a very important detail. The 2600 is very limited and doesn't even have an OS hiding in the shadows to take over when the rom program is yanked out. So the computer would crash irreversibly...no matter what values are being held in ram, they would be impossible to access again (short of turning off the console and putting a rom back in).

[killersquirel]

What about adding some kind of password feature?

 

-mike

[Mord]

Nah...you missed a very important detail.  The 2600 is very limited and doesn't even have an OS hiding in the shadows to take over when the rom program is yanked out.  So the computer would crash irreversibly...no matter what values are being held in ram, they would be impossible to access again (short of turning off the console and putting a rom back in).

 

That's why I mentioned running some code from ram and jumping the Program counter to it so it wouldn't be trying to get it's code from rom. What had me thinking of this was seeing someone either here or on stella talking about running small procedures in ram like this (otherwise I wouldn't have even thought of it!) I had presumed that the program would normally crash when you yanked the cartridge out due to the next opcodes being required being invalid/not available if it was looking for those in the rom range like it normally does.

 

I was betting on the fact that the 2600 didn't have an OS to balk when the rom was removed from the circuit, with the cpu just continuing on happily wondering why the rom was useless junk while reading a program from the ram address range.

 

 

--

Mord

[Paul Slocum]

Someone on [stella] wrote code that ran in RAM, and he was able to remove the cartridge and then insert another cartridge and read data from it (he was interested in making an easy cart dumper). But it didn't always work. If the pins make/break contact in a wrong order, it'll crash. There's a discussion about it on [stella].

 

The best way to do it would be with a password, but we now have a working 64K board, and that's a much more cost effective way to make a big game. The Homestar RPG will have a password system, so it would be possible to use your character in another game.

 

-paul

[Nukey Shay]

Of course, it would be bad marketing strategy to make a sequel game operate solely out of passwords aquired from the first installment...or else you'd just be selling the sequel to a subset of the purchasers of the first game. Makers of games like the Ultima series avoided this pitfall in the "avatar" trilogy by having both methods available (character import + character generation)...the player could choose which to use.