Downloading Roms to a real Cartridge

[PhotoGuitarist]

I have my original Heavy Sixer & My Kids Love playing it. But I don't have alot of games for it. I want to know if there is a way to Make an old cartridge with an empty RAM chip on it. Then build an adapter for my PC so I can download the roms that I have for my Stella Emulater to the empty Atrai 2600 Ram cart. And play the game on my real Atari on a real TV. Using all my woderful Original Atari Equipment. I hate playing the games using my PC Keyboard.

 

Thanks for anyhelp anyone can give me.

 

I'm new here and love this site.

Thanx,

 

--PhotoGuitarist

[DanBoris]

This is possible, but a little tricky to build. I don't know of any place on the net to find documentation on how to do this either.

 

Another good option is to get ahold of a Starpath Supercharger. This was a device that originally allowed you to load games on the 2600 from an audio tape. You can actually hook it to the audio output of a PC sound card and transfer any 2K or 4K ROM image to it so you can play on the real hardware. You can get more details here:

http://members.cox.net/rcolbert/schookup.htm

 

Things get much trickier for games that are over 4K. These would require extra hardware to simulate the bank switching the games used.

 

Dan

[The Piper]

What did you say about the starpath charger?!?!?!?!!?!!??!!!!!!!!!omg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[ 04-21-2002: Message edited by: The Piper ]

[The Piper]

recording roms onto cassettes huh??

Bless you.Thank you.cool.(lol)

[The Piper]

Sorry its me again...so this will work for my c64,vic 20 ,trs,ti,etc with a regular datasette or casstette recorder, right?

[MattyXB]

@ The Piper,

 

please edit your post with the many !!!???. Its to long.

 

Yes, you can play some games on the SuperCharger, but you must change the bin files to Wav files. You must use a programm calls makewav. Then load the wav files in the SuperCharger. You can hook your SuperCharger on the Computer speaker. Or burn the an Audio CD with the Wav files. Then you must hook up your CD-Player headphone exit to the SuperCharger or too Speaker Exit.

 

But not all games work good on the SuperCharger. Only 2k and 4k but some games work too not and reset in the gameplay.

[Ze_ro]

Just to add a little more information on the Supercharger, I've actually burned myself a CD of games (You're limited to 99 per disk, as each one is a seperate track), and it works quite well... except for the fact that it's a bit of a hassle to actually hook up audio equipment to the Atari (A friend of mine wanted me to build the Supercharger into an Atari and brand it the "Atari CD" ) I should probably point out that the Supercharger will only hold the game until the Atari is turned off... it's not like burning a PSX game onto a blank CD...

 

Anyways, if you're actually interested in trying this out, I'd suggest you look for a Supercharger on eBay. I got mine for about $20, and they're not overly rare (Although you won't likely be tripping over them in the streets). Once you've got one, check out this page for programs like 'makewav' and 'playbin' that you'll need.

 

You might also find the Cuttle Cart to be a bit more useful... although harder to find, since it's been discontinued. Good Luck!

 

quote:

---

so this will work for my c64,vic 20 ,trs,ti,etc with a regular datasette or casstette recorder, right?

---

 

I'm not sure what you mean by this... the Supercharger simply has a headphone jack on it, so it can be fed from any audio source. You can use the program 'playbin' to convert ROM files (the ones you use for emulators, and can find on AtariAge) and send them through your PC's sound card into the Supercharger. For something a little less obtrusive, you can use 'makewav' to make a simple sound file from the ROM, and then record it onto a CD or cassette.

 

--Zero

[The Piper]

Sure, I'm gonna make a cd of them.What I meant was to record for instance a c64 rom onto an actual cassette.Then put the cassette into my regular commodore tape"drive".It may work,may not.I know nothing of the makings of computer hardware really, just figured audio signal for supercharger/atari would be the same type of signal as that for a c64 tape, therefore it would work.A long time ago I tried to dub a c64 tape in my stereo and it did not work, though.It sounds all too easy for the Atari, yee haw!!!Thx.

[Ze_ro]

quote:

---

Originally posted by The Piper:

What I meant was to record for instance a c64 rom onto an actual cassette.Then put the cassette into my regular commodore tape"drive".It may work,may not.

---

 

Well, you'd need different utilities to do this for a C64. But, it *is* possible to do this... there are programs out there that will play a .t64 file through your soundcard so you can record it to a tape (you can also hook an old 1541 to a PC)... but I don't have any links to stuff on this at the moment.

 

--Zero

[The Piper]

Ok starpath/atari hooked to pc and working!!

I came across a rom with pl ending,and the screen kept flipping.Is that what happens to a pal game? or is that result of starpath.?

P.S. Is Ewok Adventure 2k or 4k?I need the rom either for use in stella or starpath to see if my proto is any different.Tia.

[Thelen]

i have made a programmer which can read out cartridges and can write to a ram cartridge, and a ram cartridge with a parallel port plug on it, it can be made but you need a litlle knowledge of electronics... but you could do it. the starpath supercharger is a easier way to do it.

 

thelen

[mos6507]

The only reason to use anything besides a Supercharger is to support the larger ROMs.

 

This is a pretty big reason, though. If enough people want it, maybe Chad will make more Cuttle Carts.

 

I know he doesn't want to, so it's probably a matter of how much of a sense of obligation to the community he feels. The more people come around late who never heard of it but now want it, the more of a chance he'll change his mind about another run.

 

To design something on your own would be tricky because it is going to have to support lots of special bankswitching routines. You'd just wind up redoing most of the work Chad already did with the Cuttle Cart for no real reason.

 

As for the process of loading games, if you really wanted to, you COULD use a C64. There is a program for it that will take a ROM image and play the starpath audio format out directly via the SID chip, no tape step necessary.

 

I wish there were something like that for the Atari 8-bit also. It would be more fitting that way. The original Starpath tapes were mastered using the tape interface of an Apple II, but I don't think it was the same format as the Apple II.

 

The format itself is not the same as the C=64 or the Atari. It's much faster than most home computer tape formats, and is very reliable. By faster it's actually not a fixed datarate. It's variable speed and as long as the signal is clean, it can be pushed very fast. It's probably the best tape format ever designed when compared against known systems for home computers. Even if your original starpath tape has some dropouts, it will probably still load if you use the slow datarate side (not that there wasn't still a compelling reason to remaster these to CD--old standard bias tape as a medium are hardly a secure data archival medium).

[The Piper]

I noticed the games load incredibly fast on the supercharger,yes...If the C64 way only loads the same files as my pc, then it isnt worth it.But I will like to learn eventually how to get files from pc to c64, just for use on the c64.

[Eckhard Stolberg]

@the Piper:

Ewok Adventure is an 8KB game with Parker Brother's version of bankswitching. Therefore it wouldn't work on the Supercharger. An easy way to to find out if your game is PAL or NTSC might be the colours. If you play the PAL version on an NTSC VCS/TV, the terrain in the main screen would look purple. Also the upper or lower status bar might not be visible due to the fact that PAL games have a higher resolution than NTSC games. So if your Ewok Adventure game shows both status screens, and the main game screen is mostly green, then you probably have a NTSC version of this game.

 

To be fully sure if the ROMs are identical or not, it would be good to have a ROM image of your cartridge. This could be compared to the existing ROM image. It would make creating screenshots with an emulator much easier too.

 

Reading out the contents of the game ROM is quite easy with the right device, and can be done without causing any harm for your cartridge. I'm sure there is someone in the Boston area who could help you out with this, without you having to send away your cartridges.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[The Piper]

About Ewok, every time you go "thru the screen" it changes the shade of green, but it IS green.The At-St's appear kind of purple instead of white,but the stormtroopers are perfectly white, and the ewoks are brown.I want to use the rom on Stella anyways,to see if something i noticed happens in that version.Of course,lol, I'm gonna throw rocks at the Ewoks themselves right? So when I tried, the rock made a noise, but was invisible, then when i moved away from the Ewok,the rocks I threw were brown for a moment.It was pretty cool.

[smf_4ever]

Oh Damn.. I am gald I got my Cuttle Cart when I did.. I love the damn thing. The only problem I have.. is the cheap CD player I was using skips when te volume is too high.. thus.. making a bunch of the track not usable. So the PC is my "Hard Drive" for the 2600