This Company Made Superior Atari 2600 Games. Here’s Why
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- Опубликовано: 5 июн 2024
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Release of the Starpath Supercharger:
books.google.com/books?id=1yQ...
More information about the Starpath Supercharger:
www.retrogamescollector.com/s...
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:31 Frogger
2:31 Hardware Limitations
3:18 Starpath Supercharger
4:41 The Official Frogger
5:42 Other Games
8:59 Issues
10:03 Success or Failure?
10:42 Conclusion
11:44 Outtro
Special thanks to the following users from pexels.com for the stock footage:
84LENS, 霍天赐, A frame in motion, Ahmet Akpolat, Andrew Hanson, Anna Hinckel, Anvar Tushakov, Artem Podrez, Caleb Oquendo, Cottonbro, Cristian Dina, Curtis Adams, DAV Grup 1, David McBee, Distill, Drones Scot, Edward Jenner, EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA, Ekrulila, Evgenia Kirpichnikova, Free Videos, George Morina, Glen McBride, Jack Sparrow, Joseph Redfield, Kampus Production, Karolina Grabowska, Kelly, Kindel Media, Ksenia Chernaya, MART PRODUCTION, Mikhail Nilov, Miguel Á. Padriñán, Mike B, Monstera, Nazim Zafri, Nicole Michalou, Pavel Danilyuk, Pete Wales, pickarick, Pixabay, Polina Tankilevitch, Pressmaster, Ricky Esquivel, RODNAE Productions, Ron Lach, Sora Shimazaki, Steve B, Thirdman,Tiger Lily, Tima Miroshnichenko, Tom Fisk, Tony Schnagl, Vlada Karpovich, Yan Krukov, Yaroslav Shuraev
Special thanks to streambeats.com for the music used in this video.
#atari #frogger #atari2600 #pojr 
Игры
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?
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
My dad picked up one with 3 games at a yard sale. I loved it!
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! 🙂
Didnt appear on German Market....
I remember Imagic hitting the 2600 with jaw dropping graphics Games Back then
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!
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
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.
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.
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 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.
Cool. Had no idea this existed. The VCS had some impressive and ambitious peripherals for such a primitive console.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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
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.
I like how starpaths games manage to make their games look good despite ataris 2 colours per scanline limitation using multiplexing, sometimes you dont notice it since of how dense the pixel art is to mask the limitatioj
Yeah and there's a chance I might have missed some of the upgrades in a few of the games.
The Atari 2600 has four color registers (background, playfield/ball, player/missile 0, player/missile 1), and can change them mid scan line. My game Toyshop Trouble shows on many scan lines a total of six colors (three independent toys, the player character, the background, and the ends of a conveyor), and my game Strat-O-Gems shows eight (six gems, a decorative playfield, and the background).
@@flatfingertuning727yes I think he meant two color per line for the background. Even that can of course be changed to more but in general most games settle for those two colors per line for the background. Trigger here shows that you can do plenty with it and still be able to have all sprites left to do other duh stuff for a dynamic games
@@litjellyfish The TIA has one color register for the background and one for the playfield and ball, though it has an option to use the player 0 color for the left half of the playfield and the player 1 color for all but the first half-pixel of the right half of the playfield, using the playfield/ball color only for the ball. Games which show more than a single background color and a single playfield color for "background" parts of a scan line almost invariably use sprites for some of the "background".
@@flatfingertuning727 ah interesting. I was under the impression you could change the BG color during the scanline?
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.
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
Dragonstomper for this is a MUST play
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 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 :)
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?
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.)
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.
Holy smokes!! I am an Atari user and I hadn’t realized this was an option, so thanks!
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.
Thanks Lemonlight for the Video! And Pojr too!
Thank you for being here!
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! :)
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
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 didn't know you were the CEO of Starpath! 😋
🤣
😂
It was a good one. This vloger will go far :-)
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
Honestly really enjoy your content man. Keep it up! And thanks!
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.
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.
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.
Got the Supercharger and 6 or 7 of the games on closeout at Toys R Us for really chreap back then. Great fun!
Never heard of this. Definitely a nice upgrade for back then!
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. :)
Ok , I am new here and I feel right at home . Subscribed !!!!
Always wondered how much the devs knew about frogs if they though putting them in water would kill them! 🐸☠🤣
One version has Frogger ending on dry land and not that little water puddle.
I had a Supercharger before the fire. I'd like to get this thing again.
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!
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.
The Starpath Supercharger was like the N64 Expansion Pack but on steroids. Incredible innovation for its time. Great video Pojr!
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....
If you see what was done with the Commodore 64 you can see what the 6502 compatible processor is capable of. A good programmer could seriously create remarkable stuff for it. The 2600 uses a version of the 6502.
Yup. Main issue was the forced Ram limits on the 2600 version of the 6502.
The Supercharger addressed this, and later large memory carts and more sophisticated bank switching improved things.
Current Homebrew carts from Champ Games and others at Atari Age use Arm chips in the carts for fancy accelerated ram switching of 32K or more
Same with Atari's own line of 8-bit computers as well. I mean Rescue on Fractalus was a work of art for the time it came out
The trouble is that the 2600 doesn't really have a video buffer. Well it does, but it's only one scanline tall. So you have to spend most of the CPU time doing the work of a video chip. The power of the C64 lies in the VIC-II and SID chips which take a lot of the load off the CPU.
@@AnthonyFlack Exactly. Plus the SID itself was somewhat of a revolutionary sound chip at the time. It was designed by Robert Yannes who actually knew something about music (he was an amateur musician himself), and went on to found Ensoniq.
What an absurd take. Lol. The cpu is one small aspect of video game power. 😂😂😂
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).
Gotta have that backup mic running just in case
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.
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.
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.
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 “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.
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.
Nice idea, a pity it was a missed opportunity. I remember it caused quite a buzz when it came out here in the UK.
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.
I feel Dragon Stomper is a great example of the Supercharger
I also got Survivor Island in the mail..no artwork, no box, just a white cassette that said Survivor Island...LOL Loved it!
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?
hey, this Arcadia company was mentioned in the "making of Imagic" documentary
What a cool add on. That version of frogger looks and sounds awesome. Great video. The communist game and the defender clone both look cool as well as the rabbit game.
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.
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).
6KB in those days meant 6KiB = 6 * 1024 = 6144 bytes divided by 128 bytes equals exactly 48 times as much RAM, not 49.
I remember seeing this is the store and wanting it before the Video Game crash, then I never saw it again.
People nowadays have figured out wonders on atari 2600, 1 guy ported the nes bomberman to the machiene now called Boom!, it looks so close to nes just that its very verical resolution.
Ugh… bud.. that’s WITH a lot of additional hardware. Champ games has great arcade ports but it’s a different system entirely in the hardware they use.
I never saw anything about this in the 80's and I bought gaming magazines at the grocery store whenever I saw them... wild. I don't know. I recall two things about the atari 2600 the most... the left hand palm pain from playing with the joy stick for too long and after the crash you could get bargain bin games at the convenience store for just a couple bucks... that's how I managed to amass a bunch of games because there's no way I could afford the original retail price. For me though, the commodore 64 was riiiiiight around the corner and holy cats that was the ultimate gaming unit for me at the time.
I found communist mutants from space when I was a trash man. Never knew what the heck it was for! Until now!!
Atari had a custom chip they put in several game cartridges called the SARA. This chip provided an extra 128 bytes of RAM and (I think) bank switching. Defender II was among the 14 games that had this chip. So that's potentially the reason why Defender II was superior to 1, and competed with the supercharger version so well. It was also an 8K ROM, so it had more space for program code than Defender did.
If I were Activision, and my choice was between developing games for the Starpath and the small amount of people that had it, or developing a custom chip to add some extra capability to the Atari 2600, I'd go with the extra chip.
You missed big detail about the extra memory. The Super Charger had to have the ram because it loads the program from the cassette to the memory. With a cart, it has the program in the rom. The only difference between ram and rom is one can be used to store information and one can only be read from. Now take a 4K cart put it on a cassette, you will have to load that 4k to ram somewhere so the computer has access to it. the computer cannot run just from a cassette, it has to load it into memory. Compare it to a 4k cart and you have an extra 2k of memory, but compare it to a later 8k cart and you have 2 k less memory. It really doesn't matter if it's ram or rom, it's all memory to the computer. 128 bytes are a lot to hold variables that the game changes - which is only stuff like score, sprite locations, health screen locations, there is not a lot that needs to be stored that changes.
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".
If I had a PBros cart of Frogger as well as the Supercharger back in the day, I still would not want to wait for that SP tape to load up….
Awesome thanks
You're welcome!
Nice video, I was thinking about getting it but, for some of the prices on ebay just don;t make it worth it, since Frogger is really only the game that worth getting , at least to my taste. Though I do find Rabbit Transit to seem like a fun addictive game, but that something could be done on the 2600, and ohh I just love the offical Atari 2600 port of Asteroids, I like it better than the arcade. I could just never get used to button control vs joystick. Same with Space Invaders, the atari 2600 is my all time favoirte version of Space Invaders.
Rabbit Transit is clearly not a game you could have on a conventional cartridge. The rabbit looks like a rabbit, it's animated like a rabbit and with no loss of speed. I would have been blown away by it back in the day.
Hi, the difference in games. An 6k mult-banked rom, is going be the same as 6k of ram most of the time, as the graphics were simple. The original Frogger appears to use very little room for the graphics, and require similar size rom or ram. They are basically but pattern drawing routines on the 2600, and I would not be surprised if a rom version could be done identically. In those days the cost of the rom chip was a major factor. What size was Frogger, 1 or 2k?
Once bigger roms were used, starpath would offer little advantage, however if they had had foresight to offer the cart at low enough cost, and games at $5-$10, they could have made a killing. If they had made the ram socketed upgradable, and had a socket for future custom chip to add some extra graphics, as PLD's were becoming popular, and might serve such a purpose. Then things could have been a lot better. Unfortunately, atari didn't use a processor with a bigger bus, and a little more of most things with backwards compatibility in mind, then a successor to the Atari 2600 would have been easier by 1980.
I've been contemplating how to make primitive home computer like graphics on an Atari 2600. But, a game like sonic is likely possible using the new graphics technique, but using the 2600's resolution. But, very intensive big memory requirements.
Tunnel Runner wasn't a regular 2600 game, it was a "RAM Plus" game that had 256 bytes of extra RAM in the cartridge.
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 remember seeing the title Communist Mutants from Outer Space back in the day, but I didn't know there was a RAM expander associated with it.