@@legendsflashbacknope. Parker bros had one and Sierra had the other. SEGA had not the rights as they had licensed it forwarded to those two companies.
@@litjellyfish Frogger is a 1981 arcade action game developed by Konami and manufactured, published, distributed and licensed by Sega on the modded Namco Galaxian motherboard." Guess Konami let Sierra do tape and disks and parker bros do Atari carts etc (had to ask permission from Sega).
@@legendsflashback I think it’s actually that the forwarded licensing was handled by SEGA and not Konami. Remember at this time SEGA was much bigger and more established than Konami. For the arcade I think in the US SEGA was still seen as Sega / gremlin. Regardless for both US and EU console / computer market I am pretty sure it was through the SEGA label it was licensed to Parker and Sierra for as you say cartridge vs magnetic media. So not the typical console / computer as today. So yeah that is the reason there is two versions for Atari 2600 And as you say the Galaxian board. I love/ hate those early odd colors of those boards. Same with pengo and Zaxxon. Don’t remember if those where Namco hardware or SEGAS own?
OK, just to clear things up about the RAM... the 6K of RAM also had to hold the actual game which was loaded from tape. Of course the programmers could leave a bit more room for storage, but still compromises had to be made. And 6K was the maximum size of a game that could be loaded into the Supercharger in one go, so already 8K cartridges with 2 banks could be bigger than that. But the more of the 6K you needed for extra storage for the game, the smaller the game itself had to be. Of course you can make a better Frogger in 6K than in 4K, and they did that by color-striping nearly everything. But for the actual game variables you really only need the 128 bytes already in the console. This of course might be different for other games. Also keep in mind that the RAM in the Supercharger is a bit slower to access than that in the console because it's not part of the zeropage.
It should also be noted that at the time of the Atari 2600 and its original release in 1977, it cost several thousands of dollars to include RAM in the kilobyte range, which would have put it out of reach from most consumers. For reference, the Bally Astrocade, which was probably the most graphically advanced second-generation home console, had a baseline of 4kb of RAM and would have cost almost $1,450 if released in 2022.
Quite fascinating! Data East did a similar thing in arcades with the DECA system, releasing arcade games on cassette for a fraction of a board's price. Burger Time being the most famous DECA game.
Phaser Patrol which was included with the Super Charger was fantastic. It’s a bit like Star Raiders, but looks and plays much better and didn’t need another controller to work. It used one of the difficulty switches and the colour/BW switches to toggle shields and map/forward view Dragon Stomper was a multi stage RPG, and was one of the earliest game of it’s type for a game console
Phaser Patrol reminded me more of Activision's Starmaster game with the travel to fight and repair. only had this, Fireball (their version of Breakout), and Dragon Stomper which i also enjoyed a lot until my buddy introduced me to Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy on the NES
Two things: (1) Videos need to be 60fps. 30fps loses a lot of Atari's graphics (like Frogger, and the row he's on vanishes), Suicide Mission looks half empty in weird ways. The use of alternating graphics on odd/even fields of the raster are lost here. (2) May want to check your high levels. The "S"-Sounds are grating this time around. Just my pointless 2 cents in what are otherwise great videos I've seen here.
If I'm not mistaken, the 6 kilobytes of RAM was not for scratchpad. It also held the program code and data loaded from the tape. So, the programmers were free to use the memory not used by the program itself. Still, even 512 bytes of scratchpad RAM was 4x what any cartridge had available.
That's the crucial point. It needed the RAM to hold the program. The main purpose of the RAM was to allow cassette loading to work at all. But regardless, RAM is far more flexible than ROM so it did allow for some things that wouldn't be possible with a cartridge.
Came here to point this out. Not only did the RAM have to also hold the game, but it was bankswitched in the cart address space... which means you would have to go through extra cycles to write to it. The one interesting thing I can think of that this affords which something like an M-Network cart (some of which had 2K of RAM and up to 16K of ROM) would not is the possibility to more directly implement self-modifying code optimizations.
Dragonstomper set me up for my later love of JRPGs, specifically Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest everywhere other than the US) and FInal Fantasy. At one point, I had the path of the traps in the tunnel leading to the dragon memorized. I don't remember it anymore, but I do still occasionally play and enjoy the game!
@@stwenty5758 first time we reached the cave of the dragon, took us a while to realize you had to use the rope to go into the black pit to deal with the dragon (slay with the 3 hired soldiers) or sneak around to unlock and claim the amulet. think we circled around 3x wondering when we were going to get to the next stage until we realized it was looping.
Same. Also thought Fireball was a pretty good Breakout knockoff. Didn't have Frogger, but I think I had all their other games besides the last couple of very limited releases. I think I may still have Killer Satellites cassette somewhere.
You know what really would have helped this thing succeed? If retailers actually sold it. I saw plenty of ads in gaming magazines for the Starpath Supercharger but out of the ten major retailers (Sears, King's, Ames, Zayer's, Woolworth's, Kmart, Kay Bee Toys, Radio Shack, JC Penny, Macy's, Service Merchandise) and slightly fewer independent retailers in my town, nobody sold it.
I'll have to agree about this. I never saw it in the major retail stores. I only came across it by accident at some small independent store in downtown Vancouver on Hastings Street.
The one thing I love about youtube is learning about old tech such as this, that I never knew existed. Great video and thanks for sharing this knowledge, pojr.
I have the complete Arcadia/Starpath collection. I had to buy them all by mail order. None of the stores in town carried them. The pack-in game was Phaser Patrol. That was a great showcase for what the SuperCharger could do.
I was lucky enough to make a deal with someone out of Canada, whom sent me all 12 games recorded onto a cassette. I then burned them all (including the mult-loads of certain games) onto a CD. Now, it's just a matter of selecting the correct track on the CD player and pressing play :)
@@edgardeitz2784 - The expense of each cartridge was adding RAM to it. 2K, 4K or 8K that added greatly to the cost, even in the 1980's. Had they put 4K in the console, adding a few more K for the larger games would not have been a big deal. Plus, the early games would be a great deal better if the programmers took advantage of the space.
The difference between PacMan and Ms PacMan on the same system is all about design choice. You say "Ms PacMan on the Atari 2600 is clearly superior, why is that?". The difference is the design decision to keep PacMan as a 2-player game, which was thought to be important at the time, and a lot of critical memory was needed for that function. Ms PacMan was 1-player only and so looks way better because they used the memory for graphics instead of keeping in a 2 player option.
@@wolfshanze5980 Correct, it had to use RAM to remember the dots not eaten by the other player and score. But it was also on a 4K ROM to save money like Donkey Kong. Weird that the top-selling and 3rd top-selling (and 8th for E.T.) game on the Atari could be considered failures because they were disappointing.
The game has to be loaded into the Supercharger's RAM, so some advantage is lost there. Additionally the 2600 has no write line to the cartridge port so writing to the extra RAM takes more cycles (an access to a $F0xx address determines the byte to be stored then the next access determines the location to store to) Where it can have great advantage is with unrolled program code, dynamically generated code and self-modifying code. That would be mostly done offscreen/VBlank then the graphics kernal could have more brute-force and cycle efficient programming for better graphics at the cost of taking up more RAM.
Sega Genesis get's credited as being the first console aimed at making games for older kids and young adults. However if you look at the Super Charger lineup it's clear it's aimed at adults and older kids. I don't see parents buying a game called "Communist Mutants from Space" for their 6 year old kids same goes for "Suicide Mission". Those are awesome names but clearly not aimed at children. *I can see it already Mommy what does Suicide mean?*
There are definitely examples of software companies pushing our games for older audiences before the Genesis. The difference is that the hardware was being pushed to older people Like there are teen aimed games on every platform from the beginning but those platforms were getting the majority of initial sales from kids Sega specifically aimed to sell consoles to older kids rather then leaving it to software devs to target them.
I can explain how the supercharger was invented: Their engineers were more clever than their marketers or accountants. Not that it failed, but that nobody else made any games for it.
I had this and I can tell you that the biggest advantage was that games could multi-load levels one after the other, each level taking maximum advantage of the RAM space available. For example, one of the best games on the system (and considered by many to be the very first true RPG), Dragonstomper, had several levels that were all great.
0:09 Yes, it looks better, but where it *really* shines is the sound and music. No other version on ANY 8 bit platform got the sound and music right except the Supercharger 2600 port. All the right music all at the right time. Even other ports like the C64 which was blessed with the SID chip got the music horribly wrong. Nothing you do affects the music, except on the supercharger 2600 port. There have been recent conversions for 8 bit platforms done well, very well, but up until like 2014, this was still the best way to play Frogger on any 8 bit platform
What a cool addon! Seeing Tunnel Runner reminded me of how scared I was to play that as a child. Another 3D gem was Ballblazer. We had the 7800 version, but I eventually stumbled upon the 2600 version and it wasn't too bad either. What I really came here to say was this all reminds me of a game I think I spent more time playing than any other and it was called Xevious. It was available for so many platforms but it was challenging and also I felt rather complex. I played the 7800 version. I never got as good as my older brother, we'd all sit around and watch him play each level until he got to the final boss. I'd love to see any of these games games covered. Thanks for the great videos!
Tunnel Runner has to be one of the scariest games i remember from the Atart 2600. first get nervous as the music each zot plays gets louder as it gets closer, but worse if it was the grey or blue one because theirs were creepy on top of it. saw videos to see all the boards, but considering how fast the character zooms through the map at the upper levels, i don't know how anyone managed it
The 6k in the supercharger isn't as much as you think it is. The reason for that is all the program, graphic and sound data all need to be in that 6k. All this data takes up a ton of space. This came to hurt the supercharger. As time went on, 8k ROMs became the new standard. An 8k ROM has a full 2k more data in it than the SC has room for in its RAM. The entire 6k cannot hold the Asteroids ROM. Worse still, Atari and other companies began putting additional RAM chips in the cartridge. Mattel's port of Burgertime for the 2600 has 2 full kilobytes (2048 bytes) of RAM right on the cartridge.. Mattel, CBS and Atari all had RAM expansion cartridges. Defender II was an 8k rom with another kilobit of RAM bringing the total to 2kilobits or 256bytes.
Supercharger has RAM, yes, but it's used to store the game once loaded from tape, much like a C64. The actual reason some games have better graphics is the Supercharger dev environment allowed faster testing hence they could be more experimental.
To get REALLY pedantic, any extra RAM on the cartridge is above page zero (slow) and therefore less useful for graphics. And that's even before the penalty of bank switching on a system that has no RD/WR/CLK lines on the cartridge bus, unlike say the NES and its bevy of helper chips. Regardless, cool video!
I was a little kid when the Atari 2600 was out, my grandparents bought it for us kids to play when we visited. The dads got competitive with the scores too :) I'm 44 and I can tell you're definitely younger than me, so I think it's bloody awesome you're covering this stuff. I never knew about this thing. Thank you for making the video.
Hi pojr. Thanks for all the videos you have been making. I'm old school retro and i really enjoy them. i also really appreciate the "tl;dr" section where you summarise the entire video at the end. Loving your work and keep it up. Cheers! 🙂
The biggest catch here is that the 6K weren’t just available at will: the game itself would load into them. That means you, as a developer, would either have a regular 4K game and use the extra 2K as RAM, or use the full 6K (which is less than a bank-switched 8K cart would offer) and deal with the regular 128 bytes. Or, of course, something in between (e.g., a 2K game with 4K for data) or more creative (self-modifying code would allow some nice tricks: one could generate the notoriously tight code that runs when the display is generating a visible scanline and squeeze extra cycles with that (for example, instead of reading a graphic from memory and writing it to the TIA, the code could do an absolute write). But again, that would eat away from the game data portion, so it’s nowhere near a 49x increase in practice.
@@sandal_thong8631 I think so - be it more ROM for holding the code for a more sophisticated algorithm, or more RAM to make and store look-ahead configurations. A Supercharger chess would have the flexibility of both things, so yes, I suppose it would crush Video Chess! :)
Am actually amezed how on earth the 2600 could be expandible in the first place because i suppose the 2600 was never designed with expandibility in mind,was it? So therefore i will not understand how the supercharger could expand the system’s capabilities, Eventrough the 2600 did had external sound pins wich is ironic because did the designers would,ve really expected future games to contain builtin soundchipet? Retty odd choise.
In 06 I was in Jr high trippin balls just thinking about the Gamecube and what is the ceiling on power and graphics in consoles and when are we going to hit that point where it just can't get any more powerful 😂 too bad gamecube was the last time Nintendo wasn't last when it came to graphics
@@johneygd Cartridge slots are essentially expansion slots. You can load cartridges up with whatever hardware you want - extra memory, nonvolatile storage, extra processors, extra I/O connectors, the sky's the limit.
@@pojr Actually, a lot of the systems capacity was underutilized on most games. Game designers were under such strict schedules to pump out games. A lot of titles went out half baked. Especially Atari's own titles.
I knew about this back when it came out, but I didn't get one until after the video game crash. I picked it up for about $10 at Toys-R-us, and I think the games were like $5 each. I don't have every one, but I think I have seven of them. I didn't keep the boxes though, just the games and the manuals. It was great for its time, but it really didn't do anything that couldn't be done in a self-contained cartridge. Years later, people figured out how to convert other existing games to audio format so that they could be loaded into the Supercharger. Of course it only worked for games that were 6K or less, and even then some games needed to be modified since they were never intended to run from RAM. Or there was a hack you could do, to add a write-protect switch to the Supercharger itself, so that once the game was loaded, it couldn't write to itself. I also recall seeing a brief mention in a game magazine of some other company intending to make their own version of a tape-loading system for the 2600. If I'm not mistaken, it was said that they were going to release games with red/blue 3D graphics. I don't think it ever came out though.
From what it looks like, in the games where you didn't really notice the RAM expansion, that RAM was generally being used on making stuff animate. Animation of almost anything in a regular Atari 2600 game is generally very limited, and often nonexistent, especially on earlier titles. If something does animate, it's usually only two frames or so; anything bigger or using more frames is both much more advanced and much more tricky to do, again due to the anemic RAM of the 2600. Animation means that the sprites (although the Atari 2600 didn't draw them in the way we typically think of them - they were drawn scanline by scanline, but I digress) must be stored in RAM somewhere, a timing loop constructed and running (that must also be held in RAM and takes up precious processing cycles), and so on. So basically, you're seeing the RAM "at work" in those less impressive games, but we're just so used to seeing stuff animate from playing games on later consoles that we don't even really notice all the animation going on - but someone playing this at the time would have noticed that rippling water in Rabbit Transit, that boss monster in Communist Mutants From Space, the... almost everything in Suicide Mission, and so on. Frogger and Escape From The Mind Master were just much easier to notice this stuff with because you had a direct comparison via the regular 2600 Frogger and Tunnel Runner.
I owned one of these as a kid. I'm SUPER SHOCKED you didn't mention DragonStomper, the killer app for the Starpath SuperCharger. It was the first RPG! Seriously groundbreaking stuff.
It was an expensive addon which effectively only added 2KB extra storage. Yes that 6Kb could be used as RAM, but simple games like Frogger did not need any more RAM over the stock 128 bytes. All the RAM was used for was to store the Cassette data instead of it being stored on a ROM; ROM costs were expensive so Atari wanted to use the smallest ROM size possible thus reducing game content / graphics / music.
Definite parallels with the Famicom disk system here - both console add-ons that loaded games from cheaper magnetic media, and allowed for bigger, better games than the base cartridge spec, but improving cartridge tech (bank switching/memory mappers, RAM in cart, and more) soon matched then passed the add-ons' improvements for both.
I remember when Intellivision,Atari 2600 & Atari 5200 & the Coleco Adam Computer were new in Stores however I had never heard of Star Path & their games. I learned a lot of Video Game History!
@@lunarmodule6419 My First Console was Sears Telegames which was really Atari 2600,Coleco Adam Computer which a lot of games were on Cassette’s & Nintendo NES. Which were yours?
One of my friends and I had this! We used to tell our other friends about it but nobody else could convince their parents to shell out the $70 to buy it. Definitely Dragonstomper and Phaser Patrol were the best. And you could order by mail 3(?) others. One of them was Survival Island, which I also enjoyed. I also think one of the biggest problems was, since the games were on cassette tapes, you could easily copy them and give them to friends (allegedly). So if for example, one of your friends bought all the games, and gave you a copy, they would lose out on a lot of money... allegedly.
I had the version of the 2600 that was sold by Sears for about a year before it was marketed with Atari labeling. I opened the console to accommodate a replacement plug on one of my joystick controllers. The console's digital circuitry was in a little metal box (probably for RF shielding) about four inches wide (100mm) in the center of the cabinet. About 3/4 of that flat front section was completely empty.
That's because it was originally intended to contain stereo speakers that were dropped before the final revision (you can find some 20th anniversary interviews here on RUclips explaining this.)
6:21 Tunnel Runner has extra RAM in the cartridge. It is not doing this with the 128 bytes. IIRC, it's 2kb of extra RAM, bringing the total to 3kb (384 bytes)
@@pojr Yeah, I don't have either game, but felt you were kind of dumping on Tunnel Runner, which is similar to Escape from the Mindmaster, and just saw an ad for it saying it had RAM enhancement too.
Ah yes, I was a big fan of the Supercharger as a kid. Another factor that held it back is that it was super obscure. If you didn't read any games media back then (and there really wasn't much dedicated media for console games at this time in the '80s), chances are you never heard of it. It was not available at most stores in my area, and many of my schoolyard friends thought I was lying about it until I showed it to them. Besides upping the memory, a few of the games had multiple levels on the cassette. Mindmaster, Dragonstomper and a couple of others would prompt you to turn the tape on so it could load new content once you reached a certain point.
This was a great peripheral. Load times were really short -- around 10 seconds to load the game from cassette. Much faster than my TI-99/4A's cassette system. The Supercharger supported multi-load games, so you could have titles much larger than 6KB. Dragonstomper was a groundbreaking RPG. Only part of it was loaded into RAM. After completing part of the game, you'd be prompted to load the next section. It would have been cool if a console had been designed around cassette tapes instead of cartridges in the 80's.
Thanks for sharing; that was my question: how long did these games take to load? My VIC-20 was really slow loading from cassette especially machine language/assembly programs I typed in from magazines. I picked up Scramble (or the other one) on cassette which took time too. It was pretty tedious and after playing once or twice in a session, would find something else to do. I would have liked to get an 8K ROM expansion for that computer but it was expensive and didn't come down in price. Somewhere/sometime I found the 3K ROM on the cheap, but I was pretty much done with it by then.
I think you can tell that Rabbit Transit looks and plays way beyond a “normal” 2600. And as others have said, Phasor Patrol is a great game that shows off the Supercharger.
the supercharger was truly an amazing piece of technology, i remember seeing the team who made the homebrew atari 2600 game Assembloids actually used a supercharger during development to test the game on real hardware.
When a game is loaded from a cassette it has to fit somewhere. I'm sure that some of that ram was used for the game loaded, while on cartridge it had rom. So, after the game is laded with the cassette would have probably only 1 o 2kb free to use as working ram.
6kb may sound like a lot, and it definitely is compared to 128 bytes, but keep in mind that unlike cartridge games, some of this ram had to be used to store the game program and data itself. A 4kb game meant only 2kb left over for working space.
8:42 it looks like it's in interlaced mode. Stella does not support interlace. At the end of a game of Star Raiders, you can't read the rating. Z26 solves this problem. IDK if Z26 supports Supercharger, though.
I used Z26 to develop Stella Doomsday Interceptor (SDI), which was my 1K mini-game entry back in IIRC 2004. Pretty sweet Missile-Command-style game. Pared down a bit to fit in 1K, but it had overlapping explosions which were drawn and erased much like the arcade game.
Great video! The only thing I wish you would have done is shown the operation of the unit. It would be cool to see you load a tape into it, eject, rewind, etc. Did tapes autoboot or did you turn on the 2600 and hit a button on the unit? How long were load times? I've never heard of this add on, but it looks pretty awesome. It makes me wonder if there's a homebrew community for it. I would have loved playing the upgraded version of Frogger as a kid.
I'm on to you. I've finally figured out the "pojr theme" is actually Zena-Lan's theme from Cosmic Carnage. Not a bad pick, especially considering how obscure that game is. I feel like it doesn't fit in its original game, but the fact I'm used to hearing it in your videos probably doesn't help. It sounds more like a credits / staff roll music than a battle one.
@@pojrYou replied to a comment of mine a while back, pointing me to that soundtrack. It’s excellent - much better than the box art and name would suggest. Great music!
In Brazil we had a Supercharger with Activision's games. And with Atari original's games. I had one and it was fantastic! The cassete tapes had diferent prices, because we had "golden" games and "silver" games. Good times....
I have this but can't use it anymore because I don't have an actual Atari VCS and my Intellivision System Changer no longer woks because when I got the RGB Mode on my Intellivision 2 it dissabled the the System Changer because it relies on the RF module that was replaced by the RGB MOD. I have Escape from the Mind Master, Killer Satellites and Communist Mutants from Space. The Super Charger basically did what Activision and Imagic did, made games that did not have flicker plus had the advantage of lower priced games that could easily be copied by simply making a copy of the tapes that had no copy protection because they just contained audio on a standard audio tape.
I LOVE this video! I always wanted to see what that Atari cassette deck had in store outside of that amazing Frogger conversion And hearing the music at the start of your videos makes me wonder if you could make a video on Velez and Dubail! The guys who made V-Rally on Game Boy and many other amazing technical showcase ports, like Asterix XXL on GBA, Driver 3 on GBA and many others
I wonder how long the games took to load via cassette? In the 80s, my family had an Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 - then I got an NES. We never did the load from cassette thing. I couldn't imagine thinking "Hmm, I might want to play Frogger in 20 minutes, better set everything up and start playing the game tape."
I think that some of the games were rushed to flush out the ecosystem as some titles were sort of blah, but some were amazing and complex in gameplay, such as Dragon Stomper, Phaser Patrol and Survival Island. In that complexity of gameplay I think we've seen the benefits of the extra memory really shine, there was nothing in Atari's library that came up to that level, and 2 of those 3 I mentioned were unique the type of game they were and I can't imagine how that could have fit in the standard cartridge. I think if the crash didn't happen it could have brought the Atari games in a new direction and kept Atari relevant longer against the onslaught of newer systems.
The vectrex had a prototype that came with a supercharger of sorts which actually was a full-fledged computer with co-processing power. It used an unusual type of bubble memory from Russia which I puzzled over until I saw it at the living computer Museum not the front in Seattle Full keyboard, tape drive support
It might have been the reason they only made 10 games for was due to the fact that the super charger unit cost 2/3 the amount of the 2600 itself. Im sure it was a horrible realization after a really good idea. Still, itz so awesome to dig up all these "quirks and features" of one of the greatest consoles in video game history.
In 1982, the Atari 2600 itself was selling for $130, so this add-on was over half the price of the base system. With a limited selection of games (most of which were clones of games already on the system), all using the cumbersome and slow cassette format, it seems like this would have been a tough sell.
All of the Supercharger games took advantage of the extra memory. Hint: the game had to be stored somewhere while it was being played... It's also possible for the games to benefit from the extra RAM without receiving the kind of graphical glowup Frogger did. For example, the communist mutant game's "replace the invaders" mechanic could have easily blown the 128 B RAM budget with the additional state that needs to be tracked. It took *significant* hackery to make 2600 games look good; it was pretty much all beam-racing all the time, which meant instructions had to be executed with precise timing. I can see how Starpath would want to showcase a few graphically impressive games and then have a few others that had interesting mechanics but maybe didn't try so hard on the graphics if doing so took enough effort to detract from the game's other interesting qualities.
Hello. Thank God I found your channel!!!!!! Very good video, man. Nostalgia to see the Atari 2600. If you knew about this type of Cartridges. It would be excellent if you make a video about Taiwan Copper cartridges and their horrible covers, or also about the CRASH OF VIDEOGAMES. Excuse my english. Greetings from Perú.
I've had a Super Charger in my collection for ages and never thought to look up what it did. Now I wish I could recall where I got it and whether they had any cassettes for sale as well.
Oh, the Starpath stuff was just awesome. This Frogger version is one of my most favorite ever! It is impressive what they were able to do with the additional RAM and taking advantage of the multi-load feature to make even larger games.
neat way of thinking about it. kind of like how Final Fantasy VII had the three discs to play the full game. Dragon Stomper had the load the countryside area, then the merchant village and finally the dragon's cave. and if you failed in the cave you had to rewind and start all over in the countryside.
@@kennethtaylor3467 Yes! The same thing with Escape from the Mindmaster and Surivival Island. I have an article I wrote on the SuperCharger that appears on Old School Gamer magazine. :)
Great video! As a kid during this time, I remember seeing this and didn't know what it was. Add ons like this were a new concept back then and I didn't see any changes to the games at the time, but I don't think I saw the Frogger one as that would have impressed me for sure, Also like you said this came late in the life of the Atari, most gamers moved on to better consoles or like me to computers.
There's parts where graphics go invisible. I suspect they're not fully invisible in person, but blinking on and off due to the 2600's limited sprite and background graphics, am I right about that? Speculating that that's the case, I'll take a guess that this video would have been better if it were captured at 60fps.
What's really interesting to me is if you could play games off a cassette tape, that means you could make and copy your own games using technology an individual in the 1980s would have at home. I don't know how 1980s unlicensed 2600 developers tested their games (I know there were a lot of them) but I assume they had to own custom hardware for making test carts. But in principle if it's 1983 and you have a Commodore 64 or maybe an Apple //, you could make a 2600 game on there and record it to a tape with the equipment you already have. A 15 year old could have done it, and given copies of their games to all their friends- if they knew a little bit of assembly, and if anyone outside Starpath had known how to format the tapes. (And for that matter if anyone had owned a Supercharger for you to give those cassette games *to*.) A homebrew game would probably be smaller with fewer assets to begin with, so in that context you wouldn't care as much about the game and the RAM fighting over memory. I looked it up and it turns out that in the early 2000s the homebrew Atari gaming community got really into Starpath format games for this exact reason (easy deployability) and the third-party homebrew devices popular at the time were designed to be Starpath compatible. That probably could have happened in the 80s, if the information and software tools were only available then.
One of the tremendous advantages of the supercharger from Starpath's point-of-view was rapid development. Their involvement in a 2600 games was late and short, but they still pumped out 10 games. Developers from other companies had to burn a cartridge prototype to test their work. At starpass they could use the much easier, simpler, and quicker method of writing to tape then using the supercharger to read it into a real 2600 and test it. What's more surprising than starpass failure in the market to me, is that third parties didn't buy up superchargers for development purposes. Even if you were going to sell your games as a cartridge, using a supercharger to develop the game offered tremendous advantages.
The reason it works so well is that RAM was quicker to access than ROM. The biggest upshot of this is that instructions didn't take as long to execute. You can see the difference in the two maze games. Tunnel Runner just runs on a stock ROM cartridge. As each pixel had to effectively be drawn manually as the electron beam went across the screen, the longer it took to fetch the instruction and execute it, the longer it would take to draw the pixel and the further than the electron beam will have moved in that time. This led to the wider pixels in Tunnel Runner. On the Starpath game, because it didn't take as long to draw the pixel, the electron beam hadn't travelled so far and so the resolution was higher. But, yes, a lot of the power of the Supercharger seems to have been ignored for the most part. Even Frogger doesn't make use of the potential for higher resolution. It seems to me that they only really used the RAM for music and colour information in that game.
I am genuinely shocked that you didn't look at Dragonstomper, which is by far the most historically interesting and impressive game. It's a straight up JRPG in 1984. You had to have been privy to the game, it's right in one of your photos, so it baffles me that you would make a supercharger video where you don't look at it, but do look at a number of titles you see as uninteresting.
You dontexplain how long the casette takes to load the 6kb? Did the rom in the supercharger have a turbo load? What a pity the supercharger didnt have an expansion slot too for a super cpu rapidus stylee!
I think that was their last game, and Parker Bros.'s version from 1982 had sold 4 million, making it the 5th best-selling Atari cart. It looks like they needed to license arcade games from the get-go. A racing game like Pole Position or Enduro might have shown what it could do (though I call them passing-traffic games rather than a race game like Indy 500 or AutoRacing for Intellivision).
The “6K of Ram” was mostly for Rom emulation. I have 2 of the Starpath units. By the 90s you could run a program on PC that would convert most cartridges into a Starpath audio file. This was great for running home brew software on a real 2600. There was nothing about the Starpath version of frogger that couldn’t be done on a regular cartridge. The most interesting thing to do with the Starpath would be multi-load games, where you load levels progressively as you play the game.
There may be a way to convert rom images of normal 2600 cartridges to load into a Super Charger. There's the Cuttle Cart which definitely can do that. Then there was the Krokodile Cart which connected to a computer with a serial cable. But the best one is the Harmony Cartridge that plays games from SD cards and supports up to 32 gig cards. It even runs the original Super Charger games (converted from audio to binary files).
Apparently there were mom and pop cassette loader carts around at the time, meant for ripping and saving multiple cartridges to cassette and allowing them to be reloaded. I wasn't aware of these 3rd party pirate cart rippers at the time, but heard of them through retro gaming forums
So like, how did the casette tapes load? Did you just plug the supercharger into the atari and insert the rewound casette and it automatically played, how long were the load times and was there a loading screen similar to commodore 64? Did the tapes automatically stop playing once the game data was loaded, could you have multiple games on a single cassette that load at a specific time if you wrote them down? Like fast forward to 4 minutes 38 seconds to play the next game?
Curious if that scheme is all that different from loading on the tape drive on the XL or XE computers? (Atari occasionally had much better games on those platforms, but they had 64 to 128K to work with.)
Interesting. I’ve never heard of this. Thank you for the great video. I have a question though: why couldn’t you believe that “Communist” was used in a game’s title?
starpath was really clever. I'm surprised nobody else tried this. I wish the 7800 and 5200 would've been combined. Idk why atari didn't just put a TIA in the 5200 to begin with
Space Invaders was so successful for them that they captured 70%+ of the market and Mattel's Intellivision was D.O.A. So they could get away with dumping on their programmers and putting out lots of lame games in 1982 (15) and 1983 (33!) without retiring their 1970s games from the catalog and store shelves; they didn't feel the pressure to push a newer, better system. They botched the rollout of the 5200, which had the same tech level as the computers, and decided to double-down on the 2600 by releasing a bad version of Pac-Man on it, which nevertheless sold 8 million carts and 2-5 million more consoles (which they figured out how to manufacture cheaper in Asia). They should have retired the 2600 after Christmas 1981 and only released Pac-Man on their better computers and/or 5200 which would have sold millions of those systems instead of just 1 million.
@@sandal_thong8631 which is sad because atari could've went the starpath route maybe just BOUGHT that company outright instead of wasting peoples time with the 5200 and 7800. They shouldn't have had two seperate teams working on different products
@@corgiverse9550 I haven't looked at the 7800 much, but I think it did OK, though the NES dominated North America. Meanwhile the 5200 after only selling 1 million, was D.O.A.
Even though bigger rom cartridges were coming out for the 2600 they were still only running on 128 Bytes of RAM or not much higher but with the Supercharger having 6 Kilobytes of RAM and using Cassette ROMs meant you could do games that were hundreds of Kilobytes in ROM size as a Cassette back then could hold up to a Megabyte of data or two this was an attempt to make the Atari 2600 more competitive with the upcoming third generation systems.
Many game cartridges included an extra 128 bytes of RAM on the cartridge (in addition to the 128 bytes in the console), which helped a lot. 16K ROM and 128+128 bytes RAM is for many purposes apt to be better than 6144+128 bytes of RAM without any ROM.
Mega Boy was the biggest retail game on the Atari 2600 with 64 Kilobytes of ROM but was only released in Brazil. So 64 Kilobyte cartridge games for the 2600 were possible then.
That asteroid clone appears to be doubling the resolution with a kind of Interlace mode so it's displaying half the image every other frame. This effect doesn't work unless playing on a crt
Toys R Us cleared the Supercharger for 5 bucks and games for $1 each. still have the whole set in my attic. Also, first games that could be pirated (on a console). Had tons of kids who got the same $5 deal, but wanted me to dub them some games. I even put all the games on 1 cassette so they wouldn't get worn out.
I had this as a kid and YES the games were superior and goddamn amazing! It blew my young mind to see the amazing graphics on the Atari VCS! They are still fun to play to this day!
a several seconds at most from what i remember. started as a black screen and then would turn blue from the left and right while going up the musical scale until complete. Dragon Stomper had three stages. the countryside, the merchant village and the cave of the dragon. if you crossed the bridge/entered the gates to the cave, the game would prompt you on screen to hit play to load the next data
@@riversarcadereview385 it depended more on the game. i only had Phaser Patrol, Fireball, and Dragon Stomper. with Phaser Patrol and Fireball, once the game was loaded, that was it, could play/replay as often as you wanted as long as the Atari wasn't turned off. in Dragon Stomper though, once you did what you had to get across the bridge in the countryside, it would prompt you to continue playing the cassette. same with going into the cave of the dragon. if you died in the countryside, could soft reset to continue the game. die in the cave and you'd have to rewind the cassette to reload and start in the countryside again. but each continue of the cassette was quick to load.
If you want to actually see the Supercharger flex, then you really need to play through Dragonstomper. Admittedly, the game isn't necessarily the easiest to just pick-up-and-play these days (what with arguably being the first ever fully-fledged RPG available on consoles). Otherwise, you aren't necessarily wrong, many Supercharger games were only "moderately improved".
Honestly I think this kind of peripheral is so positive that Atari itself should have developed something like this officially for the VCS 2600. By far it would have been much better than releasing things like the Atari 5200. This version of Frogger shows well what the accessory is capable of if used well, the problem is that this was not done in later games. Which was a real shame.
@@ZylonBane Yes, I know that. But there's nothing to stop a device for cartridges coming out on Atari's own initiative... Or maybe even a 2600 with more RAM included.
Never had this add-on back in the day, but man that Frogger port was impressive.
Yup, I was blown away
@@pojr Sega had rights to both 2600 ports?
@@legendsflashbacknope. Parker bros had one and Sierra had the other. SEGA had not the rights as they had licensed it forwarded to those two companies.
@@litjellyfish Frogger is a 1981 arcade action game developed by Konami and manufactured, published, distributed and licensed by Sega on the modded Namco Galaxian motherboard." Guess Konami let Sierra do tape and disks and parker bros do Atari carts etc (had to ask permission from Sega).
@@legendsflashback I think it’s actually that the forwarded licensing was handled by SEGA and not Konami. Remember at this time SEGA was much bigger and more established than Konami. For the arcade I think in the US SEGA was still seen as Sega / gremlin.
Regardless for both US and EU console / computer market I am pretty sure it was through the SEGA label it was licensed to Parker and Sierra for as you say cartridge vs magnetic media. So not the typical console / computer as today. So yeah that is the reason there is two versions for Atari 2600
And as you say the Galaxian board. I love/ hate those early odd colors of those boards. Same with pengo and Zaxxon. Don’t remember if those where Namco hardware or SEGAS own?
OK, just to clear things up about the RAM... the 6K of RAM also had to hold the actual game which was loaded from tape. Of course the programmers could leave a bit more room for storage, but still compromises had to be made. And 6K was the maximum size of a game that could be loaded into the Supercharger in one go, so already 8K cartridges with 2 banks could be bigger than that. But the more of the 6K you needed for extra storage for the game, the smaller the game itself had to be. Of course you can make a better Frogger in 6K than in 4K, and they did that by color-striping nearly everything. But for the actual game variables you really only need the 128 bytes already in the console. This of course might be different for other games. Also keep in mind that the RAM in the Supercharger is a bit slower to access than that in the console because it's not part of the zeropage.
It should also be noted that at the time of the Atari 2600 and its original release in 1977, it cost several thousands of dollars to include RAM in the kilobyte range, which would have put it out of reach from most consumers. For reference, the Bally Astrocade, which was probably the most graphically advanced second-generation home console, had a baseline of 4kb of RAM and would have cost almost $1,450 if released in 2022.
Quite fascinating! Data East did a similar thing in arcades with the DECA system, releasing arcade games on cassette for a fraction of a board's price.
Burger Time being the most famous DECA game.
Phaser Patrol which was included with the Super Charger was fantastic. It’s a bit like Star Raiders, but looks and plays much better and didn’t need another controller to work. It used one of the difficulty switches and the colour/BW switches to toggle shields and map/forward view
Dragon Stomper was a multi stage RPG, and was one of the earliest game of it’s type for a game console
Phaser Patrol reminded me more of Activision's Starmaster game with the travel to fight and repair. only had this, Fireball (their version of Breakout), and Dragon Stomper which i also enjoyed a lot until my buddy introduced me to Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy on the NES
Two things:
(1) Videos need to be 60fps. 30fps loses a lot of Atari's graphics (like Frogger, and the row he's on vanishes), Suicide Mission looks half empty in weird ways. The use of alternating graphics on odd/even fields of the raster are lost here.
(2) May want to check your high levels. The "S"-Sounds are grating this time around.
Just my pointless 2 cents in what are otherwise great videos I've seen here.
If I'm not mistaken, the 6 kilobytes of RAM was not for scratchpad. It also held the program code and data loaded from the tape. So, the programmers were free to use the memory not used by the program itself. Still, even 512 bytes of scratchpad RAM was 4x what any cartridge had available.
That's the crucial point. It needed the RAM to hold the program. The main purpose of the RAM was to allow cassette loading to work at all. But regardless, RAM is far more flexible than ROM so it did allow for some things that wouldn't be possible with a cartridge.
Came here to point this out. Not only did the RAM have to also hold the game, but it was bankswitched in the cart address space... which means you would have to go through extra cycles to write to it. The one interesting thing I can think of that this affords which something like an M-Network cart (some of which had 2K of RAM and up to 16K of ROM) would not is the possibility to more directly implement self-modifying code optimizations.
I had a Starpath back in the day. Dragonstomper was my favorite game on the peripheral.
Yep. I had one too. I loved that game.
Dragonstomper set me up for my later love of JRPGs, specifically Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest everywhere other than the US) and FInal Fantasy. At one point, I had the path of the traps in the tunnel leading to the dragon memorized. I don't remember it anymore, but I do still occasionally play and enjoy the game!
@@stwenty5758 first time we reached the cave of the dragon, took us a while to realize you had to use the rope to go into the black pit to deal with the dragon (slay with the 3 hired soldiers) or sneak around to unlock and claim the amulet. think we circled around 3x wondering when we were going to get to the next stage until we realized it was looping.
Same. Also thought Fireball was a pretty good Breakout knockoff. Didn't have Frogger, but I think I had all their other games besides the last couple of very limited releases. I think I may still have Killer Satellites cassette somewhere.
nothing says monster battle like "bong bong bong"..."bing bing bing" we were spoiled back then!
You know what really would have helped this thing succeed?
If retailers actually sold it.
I saw plenty of ads in gaming magazines for the Starpath Supercharger but out of the ten major retailers (Sears, King's, Ames, Zayer's, Woolworth's, Kmart, Kay Bee Toys, Radio Shack, JC Penny, Macy's, Service Merchandise) and slightly fewer independent retailers in my town, nobody sold it.
I bought my Supercharger package at Video Express in Columbus, Ohio in 1986.
I'll have to agree about this. I never saw it in the major retail stores. I only came across it by accident at some small independent store in downtown Vancouver on Hastings Street.
My local appliance store had them when Sears and Ames didn't where I was. If I had any friends I'm sure they would have been impressed.
I would imagine Atari would have told them not to stock it, or they'd stop the supplying them with the 2600 and games - kill it straight away.
I think we got ours as a closeout from Children's Palace, which was too busy going out of business to care about Atari's opinion.
The one thing I love about youtube is learning about old tech such as this, that I never knew existed. Great video and thanks for sharing this knowledge, pojr.
I have the complete Arcadia/Starpath collection. I had to buy them all by mail order. None of the stores in town carried them. The pack-in game was Phaser Patrol. That was a great showcase for what the SuperCharger could do.
I was lucky enough to make a deal with someone out of Canada, whom sent me all 12 games recorded onto a cassette. I then burned them all (including the mult-loads of certain games) onto a CD. Now, it's just a matter of selecting the correct track on the CD player and pressing play :)
Imagine what the SuperCharger could have done for Pac Man. That might have kept them in the running.
Not that it *needed* the extra power, though; look as "Ms. Pacman" for the base system...
@@edgardeitz2784 - The expense of each cartridge was adding RAM to it. 2K, 4K or 8K that added greatly to the cost, even in the 1980's. Had they put 4K in the console, adding a few more K for the larger games would not have been a big deal.
Plus, the early games would be a great deal better if the programmers took advantage of the space.
The difference between PacMan and Ms PacMan on the same system is all about design choice.
You say "Ms PacMan on the Atari 2600 is clearly superior, why is that?".
The difference is the design decision to keep PacMan as a 2-player game, which was thought to be important at the time, and a lot of critical memory was needed for that function.
Ms PacMan was 1-player only and so looks way better because they used the memory for graphics instead of keeping in a 2 player option.
@@wolfshanze5980 Correct, it had to use RAM to remember the dots not eaten by the other player and score. But it was also on a 4K ROM to save money like Donkey Kong. Weird that the top-selling and 3rd top-selling (and 8th for E.T.) game on the Atari could be considered failures because they were disappointing.
@@wolfshanze5980 there's also the fact that the 2600 port of Pac-Man was a rush job...
The game has to be loaded into the Supercharger's RAM, so some advantage is lost there. Additionally the 2600 has no write line to the cartridge port so writing to the extra RAM takes more cycles (an access to a $F0xx address determines the byte to be stored then the next access determines the location to store to)
Where it can have great advantage is with unrolled program code, dynamically generated code and self-modifying code. That would be mostly done offscreen/VBlank then the graphics kernal could have more brute-force and cycle efficient programming for better graphics at the cost of taking up more RAM.
Sega Genesis get's credited as being the first console aimed at making games for older kids and young adults. However if you look at the Super Charger lineup it's clear it's aimed at adults and older kids. I don't see parents buying a game called "Communist Mutants from Space" for their 6 year old kids same goes for "Suicide Mission". Those are awesome names but clearly not aimed at children. *I can see it already Mommy what does Suicide mean?*
Never thought about that, but this makes sense now that you bring it up.
Great point!
Can’t (but should) forget Custer’s Revenge
There are definitely examples of software companies pushing our games for older audiences before the Genesis. The difference is that the hardware was being pushed to older people
Like there are teen aimed games on every platform from the beginning but those platforms were getting the majority of initial sales from kids
Sega specifically aimed to sell consoles to older kids rather then leaving it to software devs to target them.
@@charlesgreenberg6956exactly. It's pretty simple
I can explain how the supercharger was invented: Their engineers were more clever than their marketers or accountants. Not that it failed, but that nobody else made any games for it.
I had this and I can tell you that the biggest advantage was that games could multi-load levels one after the other, each level taking maximum advantage of the RAM space available. For example, one of the best games on the system (and considered by many to be the very first true RPG), Dragonstomper, had several levels that were all great.
0:09 Yes, it looks better, but where it *really* shines is the sound and music. No other version on ANY 8 bit platform got the sound and music right except the Supercharger 2600 port. All the right music all at the right time.
Even other ports like the C64 which was blessed with the SID chip got the music horribly wrong. Nothing you do affects the music, except on the supercharger 2600 port.
There have been recent conversions for 8 bit platforms done well, very well, but up until like 2014, this was still the best way to play Frogger on any 8 bit platform
Yeah the official frogger is the closest to the arcade experience we'll ever get, outside of any possible homebrew. The sound is definitely noticable.
What a cool addon! Seeing Tunnel Runner reminded me of how scared I was to play that as a child. Another 3D gem was Ballblazer. We had the 7800 version, but I eventually stumbled upon the 2600 version and it wasn't too bad either. What I really came here to say was this all reminds me of a game I think I spent more time playing than any other and it was called Xevious. It was available for so many platforms but it was challenging and also I felt rather complex. I played the 7800 version. I never got as good as my older brother, we'd all sit around and watch him play each level until he got to the final boss. I'd love to see any of these games games covered. Thanks for the great videos!
Tunnel Runner has to be one of the scariest games i remember from the Atart 2600. first get nervous as the music each zot plays gets louder as it gets closer, but worse if it was the grey or blue one because theirs were creepy on top of it. saw videos to see all the boards, but considering how fast the character zooms through the map at the upper levels, i don't know how anyone managed it
Cool. Had no idea this existed. The VCS had some impressive and ambitious peripherals for such a primitive console.
Holy smokes!! I am an Atari user and I hadn’t realized this was an option, so thanks!
The 6k in the supercharger isn't as much as you think it is. The reason for that is all the program, graphic and sound data all need to be in that 6k. All this data takes up a ton of space.
This came to hurt the supercharger. As time went on, 8k ROMs became the new standard. An 8k ROM has a full 2k more data in it than the SC has room for in its RAM. The entire 6k cannot hold the Asteroids ROM. Worse still, Atari and other companies began putting additional RAM chips in the cartridge. Mattel's port of Burgertime for the 2600 has 2 full kilobytes (2048 bytes) of RAM right on the cartridge.. Mattel, CBS and Atari all had RAM expansion cartridges. Defender II was an 8k rom with another kilobit of RAM bringing the total to 2kilobits or 256bytes.
Thx for this info
Supercharger has RAM, yes, but it's used to store the game once loaded from tape, much like a C64. The actual reason some games have better graphics is the Supercharger dev environment allowed faster testing hence they could be more experimental.
To get REALLY pedantic, any extra RAM on the cartridge is above page zero (slow) and therefore less useful for graphics. And that's even before the penalty of bank switching on a system that has no RD/WR/CLK lines on the cartridge bus, unlike say the NES and its bevy of helper chips. Regardless, cool video!
My dad picked up one with 3 games at a yard sale. I loved it!
I was a little kid when the Atari 2600 was out, my grandparents bought it for us kids to play when we visited. The dads got competitive with the scores too :) I'm 44 and I can tell you're definitely younger than me, so I think it's bloody awesome you're covering this stuff. I never knew about this thing. Thank you for making the video.
I’m 24 and I grew up playing it too 😂 I used to love adventure and missile command. Always my faves.
Hi pojr. Thanks for all the videos you have been making. I'm old school retro and i really enjoy them. i also really appreciate the "tl;dr" section where you summarise the entire video at the end. Loving your work and keep it up. Cheers! 🙂
The biggest catch here is that the 6K weren’t just available at will: the game itself would load into them. That means you, as a developer, would either have a regular 4K game and use the extra 2K as RAM, or use the full 6K (which is less than a bank-switched 8K cart would offer) and deal with the regular 128 bytes.
Or, of course, something in between (e.g., a 2K game with 4K for data) or more creative (self-modifying code would allow some nice tricks: one could generate the notoriously tight code that runs when the display is generating a visible scanline and squeeze extra cycles with that (for example, instead of reading a graphic from memory and writing it to the TIA, the code could do an absolute write). But again, that would eat away from the game data portion, so it’s nowhere near a 49x increase in practice.
Makes me think of how Video Chess had to turn off the screen to "think." Would an extra 2K might make the logic A.I. work better?
@@sandal_thong8631 I think so - be it more ROM for holding the code for a more sophisticated algorithm, or more RAM to make and store look-ahead configurations.
A Supercharger chess would have the flexibility of both things, so yes, I suppose it would crush Video Chess! :)
It amazes me how far gaming systems have come when you read the specs of the old systems.
Yeah absolutely, and it's amazing how much the hardware limits were pushed. The 2600 lasted until 1990.
Am actually amezed how on earth the 2600 could be expandible in the first place because i suppose the 2600 was never designed with expandibility in mind,was it?
So therefore i will not understand how the supercharger could expand the system’s capabilities,
Eventrough the 2600 did had external sound pins wich is ironic because did the designers would,ve really expected future games to contain builtin soundchipet?
Retty odd choise.
In 06 I was in Jr high trippin balls just thinking about the Gamecube and what is the ceiling on power and graphics in consoles and when are we going to hit that point where it just can't get any more powerful 😂 too bad gamecube was the last time Nintendo wasn't last when it came to graphics
@@johneygd Cartridge slots are essentially expansion slots. You can load cartridges up with whatever hardware you want - extra memory, nonvolatile storage, extra processors, extra I/O connectors, the sky's the limit.
@@pojr Actually, a lot of the systems capacity was underutilized on most games. Game designers were under such strict schedules to pump out games. A lot of titles went out half baked. Especially Atari's own titles.
I knew about this back when it came out, but I didn't get one until after the video game crash. I picked it up for about $10 at Toys-R-us, and I think the games were like $5 each. I don't have every one, but I think I have seven of them. I didn't keep the boxes though, just the games and the manuals.
It was great for its time, but it really didn't do anything that couldn't be done in a self-contained cartridge.
Years later, people figured out how to convert other existing games to audio format so that they could be loaded into the Supercharger. Of course it only worked for games that were 6K or less, and even then some games needed to be modified since they were never intended to run from RAM. Or there was a hack you could do, to add a write-protect switch to the Supercharger itself, so that once the game was loaded, it couldn't write to itself.
I also recall seeing a brief mention in a game magazine of some other company intending to make their own version of a tape-loading system for the 2600. If I'm not mistaken, it was said that they were going to release games with red/blue 3D graphics. I don't think it ever came out though.
From what it looks like, in the games where you didn't really notice the RAM expansion, that RAM was generally being used on making stuff animate.
Animation of almost anything in a regular Atari 2600 game is generally very limited, and often nonexistent, especially on earlier titles. If something does animate, it's usually only two frames or so; anything bigger or using more frames is both much more advanced and much more tricky to do, again due to the anemic RAM of the 2600.
Animation means that the sprites (although the Atari 2600 didn't draw them in the way we typically think of them - they were drawn scanline by scanline, but I digress) must be stored in RAM somewhere, a timing loop constructed and running (that must also be held in RAM and takes up precious processing cycles), and so on. So basically, you're seeing the RAM "at work" in those less impressive games, but we're just so used to seeing stuff animate from playing games on later consoles that we don't even really notice all the animation going on - but someone playing this at the time would have noticed that rippling water in Rabbit Transit, that boss monster in Communist Mutants From Space, the... almost everything in Suicide Mission, and so on.
Frogger and Escape From The Mind Master were just much easier to notice this stuff with because you had a direct comparison via the regular 2600 Frogger and Tunnel Runner.
I owned one of these as a kid. I'm SUPER SHOCKED you didn't mention DragonStomper, the killer app for the Starpath SuperCharger. It was the first RPG! Seriously groundbreaking stuff.
It was an expensive addon which effectively only added 2KB extra storage. Yes that 6Kb could be used as RAM, but simple games like Frogger did not need any more RAM over the stock 128 bytes. All the RAM was used for was to store the Cassette data instead of it being stored on a ROM; ROM costs were expensive so Atari wanted to use the smallest ROM size possible thus reducing game content / graphics / music.
Definite parallels with the Famicom disk system here - both console add-ons that loaded games from cheaper magnetic media, and allowed for bigger, better games than the base cartridge spec, but improving cartridge tech (bank switching/memory mappers, RAM in cart, and more) soon matched then passed the add-ons' improvements for both.
I remember when Intellivision,Atari 2600 & Atari 5200 & the Coleco Adam Computer were new in Stores however I had never heard of Star Path & their games.
I learned a lot of Video Game History!
You have to tell us more! What was your first console? Your friends console? The feeling of playing your first games not in the arcade but home!
@@lunarmodule6419 My First Console was Sears Telegames which was really Atari 2600,Coleco Adam Computer which a lot of games were on Cassette’s & Nintendo NES.
Which were yours?
One of my friends and I had this! We used to tell our other friends about it but nobody else could convince their parents to shell out the $70 to buy it. Definitely Dragonstomper and Phaser Patrol were the best. And you could order by mail 3(?) others. One of them was Survival Island, which I also enjoyed.
I also think one of the biggest problems was, since the games were on cassette tapes, you could easily copy them and give them to friends (allegedly). So if for example, one of your friends bought all the games, and gave you a copy, they would lose out on a lot of money... allegedly.
Oh shoot good point!
I had the version of the 2600 that was sold by Sears for about a year before it was marketed with Atari labeling. I opened the console to accommodate a replacement plug on one of my joystick controllers. The console's digital circuitry was in a little metal box (probably for RF shielding) about four inches wide (100mm) in the center of the cabinet. About 3/4 of that flat front section was completely empty.
That's because it was originally intended to contain stereo speakers that were dropped before the final revision (you can find some 20th anniversary interviews here on RUclips explaining this.)
6:21 Tunnel Runner has extra RAM in the cartridge. It is not doing this with the 128 bytes. IIRC, it's 2kb of extra RAM, bringing the total to 3kb (384 bytes)
This is true
@@pojr Yeah, I don't have either game, but felt you were kind of dumping on Tunnel Runner, which is similar to Escape from the Mindmaster, and just saw an ad for it saying it had RAM enhancement too.
3 KB is not 384 bytes, it's 3,072 bytes.
@@filipe.estima It's not 3kB (Byte), it's 3kb (bit) which is 384 bytes. Smartiepants.
Ah yes, I was a big fan of the Supercharger as a kid. Another factor that held it back is that it was super obscure. If you didn't read any games media back then (and there really wasn't much dedicated media for console games at this time in the '80s), chances are you never heard of it. It was not available at most stores in my area, and many of my schoolyard friends thought I was lying about it until I showed it to them.
Besides upping the memory, a few of the games had multiple levels on the cassette. Mindmaster, Dragonstomper and a couple of others would prompt you to turn the tape on so it could load new content once you reached a certain point.
This was a great peripheral. Load times were really short -- around 10 seconds to load the game from cassette. Much faster than my TI-99/4A's cassette system.
The Supercharger supported multi-load games, so you could have titles much larger than 6KB. Dragonstomper was a groundbreaking RPG. Only part of it was loaded into RAM. After completing part of the game, you'd be prompted to load the next section.
It would have been cool if a console had been designed around cassette tapes instead of cartridges in the 80's.
Isnt it so strange that he didn't talk about Dragonstomper? Best game on the supercharger
Thanks for sharing; that was my question: how long did these games take to load?
My VIC-20 was really slow loading from cassette especially machine language/assembly programs I typed in from magazines. I picked up Scramble (or the other one) on cassette which took time too. It was pretty tedious and after playing once or twice in a session, would find something else to do.
I would have liked to get an 8K ROM expansion for that computer but it was expensive and didn't come down in price. Somewhere/sometime I found the 3K ROM on the cheap, but I was pretty much done with it by then.
Didnt appear on German Market....
I remember Imagic hitting the 2600 with jaw dropping graphics Games Back then
I think you can tell that Rabbit Transit looks and plays way beyond a “normal” 2600. And as others have said, Phasor Patrol is a great game that shows off the Supercharger.
the supercharger was truly an amazing piece of technology, i remember seeing the team who made the homebrew atari 2600 game Assembloids actually used a supercharger during development to test the game on real hardware.
Now we have flash carts to serve that roll.
always considered it unique in hooking up a cassette player and loading the game that way. had potential if Atari had more staying power at the time
Ahhh the old Starpath Supercharger....keep up the good work Pojr!
Thank you so much! Will do
Totally with you. I loooove retro gaming vids!
Got the Supercharger and 6 or 7 of the games on closeout at Toys R Us for really chreap back then. Great fun!
When a game is loaded from a cassette it has to fit somewhere. I'm sure that some of that ram was used for the game loaded, while on cartridge it had rom. So, after the game is laded with the cassette would have probably only 1 o 2kb free to use as working ram.
6kb may sound like a lot, and it definitely is compared to 128 bytes, but keep in mind that unlike cartridge games, some of this ram had to be used to store the game program and data itself. A 4kb game meant only 2kb left over for working space.
Defender II had 7680 bytes of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM (in addition to the 128 bytes of RAM in the console.
8:42 it looks like it's in interlaced mode. Stella does not support interlace. At the end of a game of Star Raiders, you can't read the rating. Z26 solves this problem. IDK if Z26 supports Supercharger, though.
I used Z26 to develop Stella Doomsday Interceptor (SDI), which was my 1K mini-game entry back in IIRC 2004. Pretty sweet Missile-Command-style game. Pared down a bit to fit in 1K, but it had overlapping explosions which were drawn and erased much like the arcade game.
Great video! The only thing I wish you would have done is shown the operation of the unit. It would be cool to see you load a tape into it, eject, rewind, etc. Did tapes autoboot or did you turn on the 2600 and hit a button on the unit? How long were load times?
I've never heard of this add on, but it looks pretty awesome. It makes me wonder if there's a homebrew community for it. I would have loved playing the upgraded version of Frogger as a kid.
I'm on to you. I've finally figured out the "pojr theme" is actually Zena-Lan's theme from Cosmic Carnage. Not a bad pick, especially considering how obscure that game is. I feel like it doesn't fit in its original game, but the fact I'm used to hearing it in your videos probably doesn't help. It sounds more like a credits / staff roll music than a battle one.
Lol that is one of my most common questions. I do like the soundtrack in general from cosmic carnage.
@@pojrYou replied to a comment of mine a while back, pointing me to that soundtrack. It’s excellent - much better than the box art and name would suggest. Great music!
In Brazil we had a Supercharger with Activision's games. And with Atari original's games. I had one and it was fantastic! The cassete tapes had diferent prices, because we had "golden" games and "silver" games. Good times....
I have this but can't use it anymore because I don't have an actual Atari VCS and my Intellivision System Changer no longer woks because when I got the RGB Mode on my Intellivision 2 it dissabled the the System Changer because it relies on the RF module that was replaced by the RGB MOD.
I have Escape from the Mind Master, Killer Satellites and Communist Mutants from Space. The Super Charger basically did what Activision and Imagic did, made games that did not have flicker plus had the advantage of lower priced games that could easily be copied by simply making a copy of the tapes that had no copy protection because they just contained audio on a standard audio tape.
I LOVE this video! I always wanted to see what that Atari cassette deck had in store outside of that amazing Frogger conversion
And hearing the music at the start of your videos makes me wonder if you could make a video on Velez and Dubail! The guys who made V-Rally on Game Boy and many other amazing technical showcase ports, like Asterix XXL on GBA, Driver 3 on GBA and many others
Surprised you didin't include Phaser Patrol or Dragonstomper. If you play them then you'll see why this was so good.
I agree; they might be as much a case for the addon as "Official" Frogger.
I wonder how long the games took to load via cassette? In the 80s, my family had an Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 - then I got an NES. We never did the load from cassette thing. I couldn't imagine thinking "Hmm, I might want to play Frogger in 20 minutes, better set everything up and start playing the game tape."
I feel Dragon Stomper is a great example of the Supercharger
The video game crash is probably why this wasn’t more supported. The Frogger and mind master games look pretty good though.
You're absolutely right
I think that some of the games were rushed to flush out the ecosystem as some titles were sort of blah, but some were amazing and complex in gameplay, such as Dragon Stomper, Phaser Patrol and Survival Island. In that complexity of gameplay I think we've seen the benefits of the extra memory really shine, there was nothing in Atari's library that came up to that level, and 2 of those 3 I mentioned were unique the type of game they were and I can't imagine how that could have fit in the standard cartridge. I think if the crash didn't happen it could have brought the Atari games in a new direction and kept Atari relevant longer against the onslaught of newer systems.
I had a Supercharger before the fire. I'd like to get this thing again.
The vectrex had a prototype that came with a supercharger of sorts which actually was a full-fledged computer with co-processing power. It used an unusual type of bubble memory from Russia which I puzzled over until I saw it at the living computer Museum not the front in Seattle
Full keyboard, tape drive support
In Brazil some companies got the inspiration to make add-on to load pirate Atari 2600 games from K7. Just don´t had any extra hardware.
China and Brazil, pirate capitals of the world
The Starpath Supercharger was like the N64 Expansion Pack but on steroids. Incredible innovation for its time. Great video Pojr!
It might have been the reason they only made 10 games for was due to the fact that the super charger unit cost 2/3 the amount of the 2600 itself. Im sure it was a horrible realization after a really good idea. Still, itz so awesome to dig up all these "quirks and features" of one of the greatest consoles in video game history.
Dragonstomper for this is a MUST play
In 1982, the Atari 2600 itself was selling for $130, so this add-on was over half the price of the base system. With a limited selection of games (most of which were clones of games already on the system), all using the cumbersome and slow cassette format, it seems like this would have been a tough sell.
The cassette format wasn't slow. I bought a SuperCharger in 1994, and I was impressed at the speed, and that it loaded reliably.
All of the Supercharger games took advantage of the extra memory. Hint: the game had to be stored somewhere while it was being played...
It's also possible for the games to benefit from the extra RAM without receiving the kind of graphical glowup Frogger did. For example, the communist mutant game's "replace the invaders" mechanic could have easily blown the 128 B RAM budget with the additional state that needs to be tracked.
It took *significant* hackery to make 2600 games look good; it was pretty much all beam-racing all the time, which meant instructions had to be executed with precise timing. I can see how Starpath would want to showcase a few graphically impressive games and then have a few others that had interesting mechanics but maybe didn't try so hard on the graphics if doing so took enough effort to detract from the game's other interesting qualities.
Gotta have that backup mic running just in case
Hello. Thank God I found your channel!!!!!! Very good video, man. Nostalgia to see the Atari 2600. If you knew about this type of Cartridges. It would be excellent if you make a video about Taiwan Copper cartridges and their horrible covers, or also about the CRASH OF VIDEOGAMES. Excuse my english. Greetings from Perú.
Good ideas compadre!
I've had a Super Charger in my collection for ages and never thought to look up what it did. Now I wish I could recall where I got it and whether they had any cassettes for sale as well.
Oh, the Starpath stuff was just awesome. This Frogger version is one of my most favorite ever! It is impressive what they were able to do with the additional RAM and taking advantage of the multi-load feature to make even larger games.
neat way of thinking about it. kind of like how Final Fantasy VII had the three discs to play the full game. Dragon Stomper had the load the countryside area, then the merchant village and finally the dragon's cave. and if you failed in the cave you had to rewind and start all over in the countryside.
@@kennethtaylor3467 Yes! The same thing with Escape from the Mindmaster and Surivival Island. I have an article I wrote on the SuperCharger that appears on Old School Gamer magazine. :)
Great video! As a kid during this time, I remember seeing this and didn't know what it was. Add ons like this were a new concept back then and I didn't see any changes to the games at the time, but I don't think I saw the Frogger one as that would have impressed me for sure, Also like you said this came late in the life of the Atari, most gamers moved on to better consoles or like me to computers.
6KB in those days meant 6KiB = 6 * 1024 = 6144 bytes divided by 128 bytes equals exactly 48 times as much RAM, not 49.
There's parts where graphics go invisible. I suspect they're not fully invisible in person, but blinking on and off due to the 2600's limited sprite and background graphics, am I right about that? Speculating that that's the case, I'll take a guess that this video would have been better if it were captured at 60fps.
Yeah, or if it showed each pair of frames interlaced. Dropping every other frame on the 2600 is just plain bad.
Honestly really enjoy your content man. Keep it up! And thanks!
Never heard of this. Definitely a nice upgrade for back then!
the extra ram was mainly for storing the game from the cassette - in ram. But could be used for self modifying code and storage game variables.
What's really interesting to me is if you could play games off a cassette tape, that means you could make and copy your own games using technology an individual in the 1980s would have at home. I don't know how 1980s unlicensed 2600 developers tested their games (I know there were a lot of them) but I assume they had to own custom hardware for making test carts. But in principle if it's 1983 and you have a Commodore 64 or maybe an Apple //, you could make a 2600 game on there and record it to a tape with the equipment you already have. A 15 year old could have done it, and given copies of their games to all their friends- if they knew a little bit of assembly, and if anyone outside Starpath had known how to format the tapes. (And for that matter if anyone had owned a Supercharger for you to give those cassette games *to*.) A homebrew game would probably be smaller with fewer assets to begin with, so in that context you wouldn't care as much about the game and the RAM fighting over memory.
I looked it up and it turns out that in the early 2000s the homebrew Atari gaming community got really into Starpath format games for this exact reason (easy deployability) and the third-party homebrew devices popular at the time were designed to be Starpath compatible. That probably could have happened in the 80s, if the information and software tools were only available then.
One of the tremendous advantages of the supercharger from Starpath's point-of-view was rapid development. Their involvement in a 2600 games was late and short, but they still pumped out 10 games. Developers from other companies had to burn a cartridge prototype to test their work. At starpass they could use the much easier, simpler, and quicker method of writing to tape then using the supercharger to read it into a real 2600 and test it. What's more surprising than starpass failure in the market to me, is that third parties didn't buy up superchargers for development purposes. Even if you were going to sell your games as a cartridge, using a supercharger to develop the game offered tremendous advantages.
The reason it works so well is that RAM was quicker to access than ROM. The biggest upshot of this is that instructions didn't take as long to execute. You can see the difference in the two maze games. Tunnel Runner just runs on a stock ROM cartridge. As each pixel had to effectively be drawn manually as the electron beam went across the screen, the longer it took to fetch the instruction and execute it, the longer it would take to draw the pixel and the further than the electron beam will have moved in that time. This led to the wider pixels in Tunnel Runner. On the Starpath game, because it didn't take as long to draw the pixel, the electron beam hadn't travelled so far and so the resolution was higher. But, yes, a lot of the power of the Supercharger seems to have been ignored for the most part. Even Frogger doesn't make use of the potential for higher resolution. It seems to me that they only really used the RAM for music and colour information in that game.
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I am genuinely shocked that you didn't look at Dragonstomper, which is by far the most historically interesting and impressive game. It's a straight up JRPG in 1984.
You had to have been privy to the game, it's right in one of your photos, so it baffles me that you would make a supercharger video where you don't look at it, but do look at a number of titles you see as uninteresting.
Are there any games from the recent homebrew scene for this hardware add-on?
I also got Survivor Island in the mail..no artwork, no box, just a white cassette that said Survivor Island...LOL Loved it!
You dontexplain how long the casette takes to load the 6kb? Did the rom in the supercharger have a turbo load? What a pity the supercharger didnt have an expansion slot too for a super cpu rapidus stylee!
If "Frogger" had turned out so well, then why didn't they produce more arcade ports?
I think that was their last game, and Parker Bros.'s version from 1982 had sold 4 million, making it the 5th best-selling Atari cart. It looks like they needed to license arcade games from the get-go. A racing game like Pole Position or Enduro might have shown what it could do (though I call them passing-traffic games rather than a race game like Indy 500 or AutoRacing for Intellivision).
The “6K of Ram” was mostly for Rom emulation. I have 2 of the Starpath units. By the 90s you could run a program on PC that would convert most cartridges into a Starpath audio file. This was great for running home brew software on a real 2600.
There was nothing about the Starpath version of frogger that couldn’t be done on a regular cartridge.
The most interesting thing to do with the Starpath would be multi-load games, where you load levels progressively as you play the game.
There may be a way to convert rom images of normal 2600 cartridges to load into a Super Charger. There's the Cuttle Cart which definitely can do that. Then there was the Krokodile Cart which connected to a computer with a serial cable. But the best one is the Harmony Cartridge that plays games from SD cards and supports up to 32 gig cards. It even runs the original Super Charger games (converted from audio to binary files).
Apparently there were mom and pop cassette loader carts around at the time, meant for ripping and saving multiple cartridges to cassette and allowing them to be reloaded. I wasn't aware of these 3rd party pirate cart rippers at the time, but heard of them through retro gaming forums
So like, how did the casette tapes load?
Did you just plug the supercharger into the atari and insert the rewound casette and it automatically played, how long were the load times and was there a loading screen similar to commodore 64?
Did the tapes automatically stop playing once the game data was loaded, could you have multiple games on a single cassette that load at a specific time if you wrote them down? Like fast forward to 4 minutes 38 seconds to play the next game?
Review the Starpath add-on and you don't mention Dragonstomper?
Curious if that scheme is all that different from loading on the tape drive on the XL or XE computers? (Atari occasionally had much better games on those platforms, but they had 64 to 128K to work with.)
Interesting. I’ve never heard of this. Thank you for the great video.
I have a question though: why couldn’t you believe that “Communist” was used in a game’s title?
starpath was really clever. I'm surprised nobody else tried this. I wish the 7800 and 5200 would've been combined. Idk why atari didn't just put a TIA in the 5200 to begin with
Space Invaders was so successful for them that they captured 70%+ of the market and Mattel's Intellivision was D.O.A. So they could get away with dumping on their programmers and putting out lots of lame games in 1982 (15) and 1983 (33!) without retiring their 1970s games from the catalog and store shelves; they didn't feel the pressure to push a newer, better system.
They botched the rollout of the 5200, which had the same tech level as the computers, and decided to double-down on the 2600 by releasing a bad version of Pac-Man on it, which nevertheless sold 8 million carts and 2-5 million more consoles (which they figured out how to manufacture cheaper in Asia). They should have retired the 2600 after Christmas 1981 and only released Pac-Man on their better computers and/or 5200 which would have sold millions of those systems instead of just 1 million.
@@sandal_thong8631 which is sad because atari could've went the starpath route maybe just BOUGHT that company outright instead of wasting peoples time with the 5200 and 7800. They shouldn't have had two seperate teams working on different products
@@corgiverse9550 I haven't looked at the 7800 much, but I think it did OK, though the NES dominated North America. Meanwhile the 5200 after only selling 1 million, was D.O.A.
Even though bigger rom cartridges were coming out for the 2600 they were still only running on 128 Bytes of RAM or not much higher but with the Supercharger having 6 Kilobytes of RAM and using Cassette ROMs meant you could do games that were hundreds of Kilobytes in ROM size as a Cassette back then could hold up to a Megabyte of data or two this was an attempt to make the Atari 2600 more competitive with the upcoming third generation systems.
Many game cartridges included an extra 128 bytes of RAM on the cartridge (in addition to the 128 bytes in the console), which helped a lot. 16K ROM and 128+128 bytes RAM is for many purposes apt to be better than 6144+128 bytes of RAM without any ROM.
@@flatfingertuning727 I think Fatal Run was the only 32k rom retail cartridge game on the 2600
Mega Boy was the biggest retail game on the Atari 2600 with 64 Kilobytes of ROM but was only released in Brazil. So 64 Kilobyte cartridge games for the 2600 were possible then.
That asteroid clone appears to be doubling the resolution with a kind of Interlace mode so it's displaying half the image every other frame. This effect doesn't work unless playing on a crt
Toys R Us cleared the Supercharger for 5 bucks and games for $1 each. still have the whole set in my attic.
Also, first games that could be pirated (on a console). Had tons of kids who got the same $5 deal, but wanted me to dub them some games. I even put all the games on 1 cassette so they wouldn't get worn out.
Tunnel Runner wasn't a regular 2600 game, it was a "RAM Plus" game that had 256 bytes of extra RAM in the cartridge.
I had this as a kid and YES the games were superior and goddamn amazing! It blew my young mind to see the amazing graphics on the Atari VCS! They are still fun to play to this day!
i especially love frogger on this unit. it's amazing what they came up with.
My biggest question is how long it took to load each game and did it need to load between levels like MK for the original Playstation
a several seconds at most from what i remember. started as a black screen and then would turn blue from the left and right while going up the musical scale until complete. Dragon Stomper had three stages. the countryside, the merchant village and the cave of the dragon. if you crossed the bridge/entered the gates to the cave, the game would prompt you on screen to hit play to load the next data
@@kennethtaylor3467 - so you are saying after each time you get a frog into its home, it stops to load
@@riversarcadereview385 it depended more on the game. i only had Phaser Patrol, Fireball, and Dragon Stomper. with Phaser Patrol and Fireball, once the game was loaded, that was it, could play/replay as often as you wanted as long as the Atari wasn't turned off. in Dragon Stomper though, once you did what you had to get across the bridge in the countryside, it would prompt you to continue playing the cassette. same with going into the cave of the dragon. if you died in the countryside, could soft reset to continue the game. die in the cave and you'd have to rewind the cassette to reload and start in the countryside again. but each continue of the cassette was quick to load.
@@kennethtaylor3467 - ok. I have never heard of any of those games, just Frogger
hey, this Arcadia company was mentioned in the "making of Imagic" documentary
If you want to actually see the Supercharger flex, then you really need to play through Dragonstomper. Admittedly, the game isn't necessarily the easiest to just pick-up-and-play these days (what with arguably being the first ever fully-fledged RPG available on consoles). Otherwise, you aren't necessarily wrong, many Supercharger games were only "moderately improved".
Honestly I think this kind of peripheral is so positive that Atari itself should have developed something like this officially for the VCS 2600. By far it would have been much better than releasing things like the Atari 5200. This version of Frogger shows well what the accessory is capable of if used well, the problem is that this was not done in later games. Which was a real shame.
Later 2600 games accomplished basically the same thing as this by using larger ROM sizes and including RAM chips in the cartridge.
@@ZylonBane Yes, what you say is true, but even so this accessory would give the system even more capacity to exploit even larger ROMs.
@@PONTOCRITICO This system didn't have any way to plug in other cartridges. You could ONLY load games from tape.
@@ZylonBane Yes, I know that. But there's nothing to stop a device for cartridges coming out on Atari's own initiative... Or maybe even a 2600 with more RAM included.
I had a Supercharger mid80s, can't recall where I bought it, maybe on closeout after the Crash of 83-84