Atari 2600 Cassette Games With The Starpath Supercharger
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- Опубліковано 24 чер 2024
- Can you load games from cassette on the Atari 2600? Yes you can! Let's take a look at the Starpath (formerly Arcadia) Supercharger and see what some of the games were like. Thanks to PCBWay for sponsoring this video! pcbway.com
Be sure to subscribe to my second channel / @retrohackshackafterhours
10 Technical Things Video: • 10 Things You Didn't K...
Interesting blog on Starpath (formerly Arcadia): thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpre...
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:30 - History/Overview
07:09 - PCBWay Ad
07:36 - Setup
10:39 - Escape From The Mindmaster
15:49 - Phaser Patrol
22:32 - Killer Satellites
26:45 - Channel News
Music used by permission:
“Fakebit World” and "Rise And Shine" by Malmen
/ malmen
Other music from the UA-cam Audio Library
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#Retro #Computers #atari #atari2600 - Наука та технологія
I was there in that era and Cassettes had one thing that cartridges didn't have... You could make copies of them with a simple boombox.
I had one of these, that I connected to my boom box to load the game off a cassette 😮 great memories
I had dragon stomper and escape from the mind master. I really enjoyed having the supercharger. I was able to make “backups” of the games.
Nice
Until recently I had no idea these cassette games existed for the Atari 2600. I'd imagine they came and went so quickly that most people completely missed them. I'm curious to try some of them out on my Retron 77.
Wow never heard of these. That 'Escape from the Mindmaster' would have been mind blowing back in the day, 'Phaser Patrol' actually looks better than Star Raiders (1979) on the 800, I loved that game back in the day the 800 was a real beast! Great video😁
A really nice channel! The good production value and interesting topics. Keep up the good work!
Thank you so much! I appreciate it.
I learned about the Supercharger from an article in Joystik magazine, and it looked fantastic. Interestingly, they used the name Arcadia, with a footnote at the end that the name has changed to Starpath as they were going to print.
The physical mod isn't even needed to play most 2k or 4k games. The ROM binary can be converted to a .wav or .mp3 with a conversion program like Bob Colbert's, and then loaded in the same way as you demonstrated for Phaser Patrol. A fairly small number of games won't work properly because they accidentally (or purposely?) trigger the Supercharger's bank switching or erroneously write to RAM, so the mod provides a switch to prevent that from happening on problematic games. Nice review, keep up the good work!
Thanks for the info, Robin!
Is that conversion program from Stella Gets a New Brain? 😉
@@Mrshoujo The conversion program (maybe called bin2wav.exe or something like that) predates Stella Gets A New Brain by several years, but it was probably included on the Stella CD.
So the supercharger is an "everdrive" of sorts...?
I had that. I thought it was awesome. I recently accumulated these games again and they still work!
Awesome
Had one of the Arcadia versions when it first came out. Mindmaster, Rabbit Transit, Frogger, Phaser Patrol, and DragonStomper. I believe DragonStomper was the only multi tape game, 4 I think. Took multiple days to beat it, and there was no way to save! Had to switch back to antenna when someone else wanted to use the TV, and hope the atari didn't get unplugged. I remember they later came out with a modem and subscription service, but the long distance phone calls would have been way too expensive for me. The supercharger came out right at the tail end of the 2600's life, and in my case definately gave it 2-3 years more lifespan.
That brings back memories of using the switchbox that way. Good times.
The phoneline device was Gameline. Not related.
Hey man, I just found your channel. Very Cool. I got a 2600 for christmas 1981, and I had the Basic with the keyboard controller. It's how I first learned to program. 40 years later, I'm a retired programmer. I love that machine. Yeah the graphics and sound was great, but still. I never saw that cassette adapter, wish I had.
The Starpath Supercharger is a pretty sweet add-on. I knew nothing about it back in the day and only found out about them maybe 10-15 years ago.
Glad I am not the only one. I wish I did know about it as a kid.
You ABSOLUTELY need to try DragonStomper. It's hands down the best 2600 game ever produced, IMHO.
I will. Thanks.
I loved Escape from Mindmaster and wrote a short story about the game when I was a kid. I got an A too :)
Wow. That's awesome
very good arron ..i remember this from 82...i had a colecovison not an atari but grear product!!!cant wait to chexk out after hours!
Thanks
What a great add on! Be cool to see some homebrews made for this!
Agreed!
Someone converted 4K Homebrew Pac-Man to mp3 and I've played it on mine! I load from a little flash memory MP3 player powered by a single AAA battery.
I have the Starpath Supercharger for the Atari 2600 VCS and the first four cassette tapes in the series. I unfortunately was never able to get the Frogger cassette tape and when I thought that I was going to finally going to get it, it turned out that the seller listed the cassette tape but actually sold to me the Parker Brothers cartridge instead.
I bought one back in the day, and I have to say it was my favourite accessory.
Being the nature of the games were on cassette, they were also easy to share with friends as well because they could be copied.
As a side note, you can also load the binaries to a Harmony cartridge. It's certainly less cumbersome than playing from a cassette player.
Epic! learned something new;
Thanks. Glad to hear it.
I believe that I have that cartridge and a number of those games on cassette like Escape From the Mind Master and also Phaser Patrol for it buried in my closet with my 2600. I completely forgot that I owned it until I saw your video here! Unfortunately, my closet gets VERY warm and humid in the summer and I hope that the cassettes still work. They have been in that closet for MANY years now. I also have a very similar cassette tape player as yours, but the only thing is is that the belts inside have degraded to a sticky, gooey mess and need to be replaced for it to work again. I have to get into that now jam packed storage closet to find those, but it's SO cluttered in there and you have to stoop low to move around in it that it kills my extremely bad back! Damn.....I REALLY WANT to find that stuff now! 🤔
I don't remember ever owning a VCS/2600. It was an interesting system, and certainly makes the most of its very limited hardware. Congratulations on your 100th video! The link to your second channel was initially hard to find (it wasn't BLUE) but eventually I realized it was a UA-cam "embedded" link (not sure that's the right term...). SUBSCRIBED, and thank you again.
I wonder if the model number "2600" was inspired by the 2600 Hz tone made so famous in phone phreaking? I've tried the old Captain Crunch whistle trick (just for research purposes, mind...), and it actually did work. (Wish I still had one of the whistles. It would be a great historical curiosity.)
For sure! It's one of the things I always keep in the back on my mind in the odd chance that I will come across one when I am out and about.
I had the Starpath Supercharger... Used to play Escape from the Mindmaster and Communist Mutants. It really was pretty cool.
Man that's a really impressive accessory
The cover art reminds me of early Spectrum and C64 games.
Talking of those, an unusual thing with how the Supercharger handles multi-load games, on all other tape systems I've used(C64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and Atari XE), you would typically have the game "engine" on side A and level data on side B, because it would save loading when you get a game over and need to return to stage one, as it doesn't need to load the data from side A again and saves about 2-3 minutes a game.
Guess they hadn't thought of that in '82. The dual sided games I had are typically from '85 or later.
Yeah. Could be. I bet part of it comes down to the controller IC in the cartridge. I want to find out more about it. It is branded Arcadia, but I am not 100% sure if it is custom or not.
@@RetroHackShack I don't think there would be any technical limitation for it, even with the hardware, it's just they hadn't thought of it yet. Maybe with the meagre storage available they couldn't code in the "turn the tape over" message.
The IC is very likely to be custom considering all the other chips have Hitachi logos, the custom chip likely just being there to convert the audio to bits and feed it to the RAM, with the ROM having the drivers(or Firmware as they'd call it these days) for it.
I can’t believe I didn’t know this existed!
I know. Me neither.
Why would anyone want to skip over a repair video? That's what brought most people here in the first place.
Why didnt they just use cassettes for all their games, this is amazing.
The reason cassettes didn't catch on is because the tape can wear out,get snagged and break,get crumpled ect. Carts have none of those problems and are easier to make and store.
before flash carts we used to mod these so we could boot all 2 and 4k games from a pc hard drive. a toggle switch was soldered in and a wave converter was used to send the game from pc to starpath
That maze game was really impressive. Especially the stairs animation.
On the pcb, any clue what that big spiral trace was for?
I am pretty sure it was a cheap way to add some attenuation instead of using a resistor. I have seen that in other PCB designs when you need to really fine tune something on your board.
Are you moving EWW to the second channel? I have subscribed immediately, that's a favorite of mine!
Yes. EWW will live on @retrohackshackafterhours
Have you listened to the program tapes? I'd guess that there is a tone or data continuing after the game data that tells the system that the tape has not been stopped until it is. Starting at 3:57, spiral traces on the PC board to act as RFI blocking inductors? Phaser Patrol on 2600 hardware is AMAZING and the tape loading times were fast because of how small the assembly language programs were.
Yeah. I will go back and listen to the audio again to see.
@@RetroHackShack Combined with that wav file from phone game loading method, I'd love to see someone make an FPGA clone of these once they get more expensive than they are now. For now, some seem to sell for around $100. I'm sure that will increase with time. Look at what heavy sixers are going for these days!
Hi Aaron, I am curious, how is possible that MP3 been a format that loose quality to be able to reproduce the content of the binary tape with no problems.
Love the end of the video with the TRON movie line "End of Line" 🥰
The detection of stop is probably by lack of tape hiss over the audio out. I've only seen one deck that didn't generate more hiss when rolling on pristine tape than when stopped - and that was a Nakamichi professional studio deck in a professional context. Non-pristine tape? Even the Nakamichi had more hiss while rolling than not.
Maybe so.
Definitely bad release timing heh, but a really good idea that I'm glad it came out. Probably one of the harder things to do in the past, loading custom programs into game consoles.
I have to laugh at all the "formerly Arcadia Corporation" stamped all over the place since it's kind of an eyesore. Must have been a strict legal matter since I think most people then and now are more familiar with their Starpath name.
Definitely had some strong games for the product, so many other peripherals historically have had weak initial support from the company's that released them Eg. the Power Glove. So very sad the market dropped out for them.
Lol Apple "Legacy support, what's that?", the cutting edge is all that matters to them and wired peripherals don't exist.🙄
Arcadia 2001 was my first console
Awesome!
As I've come to find out, there was a Supercharger clone made in Brazil! Reports say those cassettes won't work on the U.S. Supercharger.
Being from Europe, I grew up with the ZX Spectrum and cassette-loading games. But once I got a floppy disk system for the Spectrum I was blown away by the improved load times, and never wanted to go back to buying games on cassette! Cartridge-based consoles too; no loading time at all.
I really need to get my specy out and repair it.
I got the starpath in the 80's. Phaser patrol is an awesome game. I think you were forgetting to bring your shield up. Lol. Thats why you were taking so much damage. Escape from the mindmaster i think was so advanced for its time. And Survival Island is a more resent game i been playing. Didnt have it as a kid that i think its very good. You actually reach the island and you play in the island too. Something you did not see back in those days. And to this day at my job when I talk to a customer says something that is so mistaken when I hang up the phone I call them a communist mutant from space . And know one from work knows were I got that from lol 😂
That's great. Yeah. Didn't know I had a shield. RTFM 😄
*recent
The Starpath was AMAZING in comparison to regular Atarci VCS games! Dragon Stomper & Escape from the Mindmaster STILL haunt my dreams! Very AFFECTIVE games!
*Effective
Regarding pressing stop: I can't think how it would 'know' that you'd pressed stop, and I'm wondering if its more likely that there's some kind of background carrier tone on the tape? And when the tone stops, it knows that the tape has been stopped too. Just a guess. Cool video!
Thanks. Yeah. I was thinking about that too. I'll have to listen to the tape again when the audio jack is not connected.
That must be it since the mp3 stopping triggered it immediately.
I bought one of these Supercharger cartridges a year ago and it doesn't mention the Starpath name, only Arcadia. It was in a bundle with an Atari 410 deck and a few games on cassette.
Must have been an early model.
16:35 LOL, look at the symbol labeled Dracon Occupied Sector.... That's a Recognizer from Tron. Maybe the guy who wrote this game was a fan of the movie?
With 6 kilobytes of RAM and using cassettes ment it could do a game way over 64 kilobytes of ROM which was the largest rom cartridge released on the Atari 2600 in the early 90s towards the end of its retail days. As an audio cassette could hold over a megabyte of rom data.
But some people complained about the games not instantly loading. It was like loading a C64 tape and they didn't fuss about C64 tapes taking time to load.
To do bigger and mega games on the Atari 2600 the Supercharger with cassettes was about the only solution in those days.
I tested Starpath games when I was a kid. They gave me numerous prototypes to test. Most of which I still have. I can’t believe it, but they still work!
How cool. Being a game tester was the very kids dream job.
@@RetroHackShackit still is, my 9-year old would love to do that! 😂
Did you playtest any games that didn't get released? It'd be great to archive those!
@@8_Bit I believe I did. At the very least Sword of Saros, Sweat, and Survival Island that I can recall right now off the top of the head. Ive got prototype copies of these. I’ve also got copies of many of the released games in various stages of development as well.
How did I never know about this?
I know, right?
The one I own is the Arcadia supercharger, not using the starpath name.The starpath version is a later release. I assume that everyone calls it the starpath supercharger because starpath is what they changed their name to. The starpath version is probably the more common version. I load games on mine from a burned cd on an old cd player.
It was a lot of fun to see this Supercharger enhancement product for the Atari 2600.
Thank you!
Once I saw the title with the 3D maze, it reminded me of a great game called, "Tunnels of Doom" that I played a lot of on my first computer, the Ti-99 4/A.
I got that computer a few years after having the Atari (technically, the Tele-Games system), and so, if I had seen this cassette loading line in a store, I would have wanted one. Being that I already had the experience of loading games through a cassette recorder with a home computer, it wouldn't be foreign or laborious to me.
However, I do think that without cassette data loading experience (at the early age of 12 years old, approximately), it may have appeared to be too much of a risk on a gimmick, or extra work for the average Atari-only user. I could be wrong, but I think that it would require good marketing to persuade both minor users and their parents for purchasing.
At a later age, of course, it has a quality of being a previously unknown novelty item categorized somewhere in the "what if" area of Atari.
Oh, and the other thing worth mentioning, is that I got an Atari 800xl computer in the early eighties with a floppy disk drive which would lessen the probability and interest in trying to supe up the 2600 when I already had an "advanced" gaming system that I really enjoyed. I would think that many may relate to my experience, in this regard.
With that said, thanks again for the descriptive presentation. It's greatly appreciated.
That inside view of the SuperCharger at 4:29 is really weird. There are two disconnected resistors just dangling over the ROM chip, and what are those two long spiral maze traces?
Yeah. So, I didn't want to take mine apart (rare for me😁). That image was from AtariAge where someone discovered that the previous owner had started the 7800 mod, but never finished it.
In my timeline this product never existed when I was a kid.
I got in trouble for "borrowing" my brother's cassette player around this time.
Lol
I had that and basically w ray game it had. Escape from the mindmaster rocker. I achieved the “awesome” rating on that game.
Cool
I'm just impressed that you can hook up a 40 year old Atari peripheral to a smart phone and it works....😆
I know. I have 7 or 8 of these and even the junkiest most abused one I have worked the first time I tested it. I haven't done a repair video for the 2600 yet because I can't find a dead one.
8:15 - Was the vodka/orange juice there incase the tape player caught on fire??
I had one of those..... It was such a pain in the ass that I never used it.
The baud rate when loading doesn't seem to be inferior to later 8 bit computers since with these small size games loading times are accordingly quite short!
Surprisingly fast compared to tape loading on other systems.
Would have been good to see what the best VCS devs could have done with this, imagine a David Crane or Carol Shaw utilising it?
David Crane and Carol Shaw are of course great, but so are the programmers behind these games, like Dennis Caswell and Stephen Landrum. More games for the system would have been welcome, but Escape from the Mindmaster and some of the other titles were pushing the SuperCharger pretty much to the limit.
K7 shouldn't be read K seven, but cassette, 7 is sete in Portuguese and K sounds like CA in cassette... Those are Brazilian products by the way 🙂
Good point! Please excuse my ignorance. I also forget to say "Zed" sometimes instead of "Zee" for the letter Z when talking about British products like the Z80. There must have been a thriving Atari scene in Brazil back then. I got lots of comments from Brazilians on my last video.
@@RetroHackShack not really ignorance as Portuguese isn't as universal as english, just wanted to tell that we used K7 as an easy way to refer to cassette tapes 😁 by the way, great video 👍
🇵🇹interesting
@@andrecondesso8057 are you from Portugal? Did you use K7 as well? Curious about it 🙂
@@ducasp yes i am,but in the 80's and 90' s K7 signified an Helmet would you believe ( capacete/ K7 in portuguese)so we said cassettes.and we used tons of them for the Spectrum micro even today we enjoy those games in emulation (try Bruce Lee)and those covers are delightfull.them the Amiga came up
Who knew undertale was a clone of escape from the mindmaster
Not No idea about the Grminicompatible with Colecovision VCS exoansion moduke either. Supercharger is too wide to completely fit in and circuit boards don''t quite touch. Should work with the Intellivision expansion module...I think.
No idea about te Gemini.
Yeah. Apparently there is an adapter you can use that will get it to fit better.
I had the Arcadia and it fits the Atari expansion module
I was able to plug & play my supercharger on my 7800 with no modding required
Interesting! Now I have to try it. All the forums I ran across while researching said it wasn't supported natively.
@@RetroHackShack Logically there's no reason why it wouldn't be, since it's essentially a jacked up 2600 cartridge with an RCA input from which to load the game ROM. The 7800 BIOS would still read it as a 2600 cartridge and boot into 2600 mode.
Where the hell did you get that T-shirt?!!
This one I found online. Some of mine I make. I can't sell all of them in my shop due to copyright.
Marketing must have been horrible for this thing... never heard of it when I was a kid.
Me neither. I just discovered it about 6 months ago.
@@RetroHackShack It seems really well designed and easy to use. Could have been a big winner!
I bought a supercharger at the mall one day because it was steeply discounted. I can't recall the year but it was likely 1983 or 1984. My memories of the purchase are well faded at this point. Nonetheless, I mastered Phaser Patrol and some time later I bought "Fireball"...which was a great "breakout" type of game. A juggler sprite replaced the breakout flat bar that bounced balls upward. I feel very lucky to have experienced it back in the day. Playing Frogger would have been epic back then!
Nice!
The idea that you can use an MP3, a file type that can hold way more data than the cassette tape to actually load a 4kb game seems kinda funny to me.
mp3 (=lossy) compressed audio, works?? --> wow!
this thing must have excellent error correction...
Yeah. It works better than most systems I have tried with mp3s.
Would this work on a 7800?
Some have said that it does, but there was also a mod to get it to work. Perhaps it depends on the version.
Maybe it's just an effect of the way the video was filmed, but the colors look really off. Phaser Patrol's border should be Navy Blue, not sky blue.
Check the direct capture I did from Stella and see if that looks better
"mwah-RAY"
😁
its dumb but you can get an audio adapter port for your smart device.
Would be really cool to see how you convert the normal Atari 2600 Rom Files to the Starpath Tape files and then load them from the cassette player. I guess it would not have been possible to do that back in the day. How would you of dumped a real Atari 2600 cartridge in the first place to obtain the Rom File ? If you could of been able to do that then this thing would of sold very very well i guess.
Here is the link where I found the details on the wayback machine from Bob Colbert. Hopefully all this is also archived elsewhere on AtariAge, etc. web.archive.org/web/20090605073820/members.cox.net/rcolbert/index.htm
*could've
*would've
"Of" is NOT a replacement for "have"
Worship the Woodgrain CD does what you mention.
@@Mrshoujo It is just my British Slang I am from a place like where John Snow comes from in Game Of Thrones. Thanks for the CD Worship info though. Seems like with that you don't even need to modify the Star Charger. but saying that i think i will just stick to the Harmony cart route.
The drink man....the drink.....
Regular people in USA didn’t use cds till the the early 1990s music or games including movies till the end of the 1990s
3:34 Communist Mutants from Space? Really? 🤣🤣🤦♂🤦♂🤦♂
Uh yeah… the supercharger hears the “sharp click” the tape deck made when you stopped it. Lol. What a dullard. Anyways back in the day it was Dragonstomper that converted me to a fan.
It knows exactly when you press play or stop then it continues.. it does it by paly= noise on the signal input and it knows when you press the stop button because of the noise no longer present on the signal input.. if you press FF or RW it would think you pressed the stop button because it would have no noise on the signal input.. it's not very technical..