First report on the swag gathered at vgXpo
Arcadia Supercharger (they changed their name to Starpath in 1982 or so). I never knew anyone that had one when I was a kid. But we read about it in the magazines, and saw the promises.
This device plugs into the cartridge port, and it has a bunch of RAM in it, and a cable coming out. You plug it in to a standard cassette player, and the games come on cassettes. Takes about a half a minute to load on the slow side (10 seconds on the fast side, if you have a good tape).
I can attest to the statement that the games ARE, in fact, much better graphically than their ROM-based counterparts. Without actually knowing how they are coded, I am guessing that some of the RAM is used as a frame buffer, which allows for much more complex graphics.
For those that don’t know, the Atari 2600 VCS had only 128 bytes of RAM in it. There was no video RAM, and so no frame buffer like we are accustomed to now. The 2600 programmer that I spoke with told me that you had to repaint the entire screen every frame, which didn’t allow time for much in the way of complex graphics. But with a frame buffer, you can take longer than one frame to draw the whole screen, and the parts that don’t need to be refreshed every frame can just kind of sit in the buffer and be redrawn by an interrupt routine.
Anyhow, I have two games for it, and it is pretty neat. The graphics ARE much higher resolution than most of the ROM carts of the day (1982). I’ll need to play more to get a better feel for it, but it seems that they had something there. From what I can find, there were less than 20 games ever released for this monster. Even 20 years ago, any hardware that didn’t come with the system was unlikely to enjoy any major support.
Well, the next task is to acquire the rest of the Supercharger tapes. And there are programs out there that let you put ROM games into the Supercharger, so I may try my hand at Stella development too.