> That's a cool idea. There would be a big power dip when you inserted the new
> cart. Maybe enough to glitch the system. I dunno. But yeah I think this
> is possible. Why don't you try it? I would suggest requiring several
> consecutive successful reads, though...just to make sure that the cart has
> stabilized. Assuming A12 is low, the bus won't see the cartridge. You just
> need to worry about the temporary power glitch.
Well, I'm at work now, so that's why I didn't try it :) I'll try to
remember to do it later, though I'd have to swap Supercharger-to-cart
rather than cart-to-cart. If it does work,
there's your way around your copy-protection scheme right there - via
Supercharger, get some code into RAM, then insert the protected cart...
the code in RAM has full access to the protected cart's data, so it could
display it to screen, or maybe send it out a joystick port for capture by
a PC (or Mac or C-64).
I'm trying to think of a *useful* reason to cart-swap, though, but I
can't. Only if you *really* need to do multiloads without a Supercharger
for some reason - if you needed to swap multiple 16k sections.
BTW, Chris, have you given any thought to making boards based on the
TIgervision backswitch scheme? Someone (I think it was over on gametech,
possibly Kevin Horton himself) said it was as simple to implement as the
standard Atari 16k bankswitch, but it's more flexible, scalable up to 32k,
and most of the emulators already support it (they wouldn't with your
megacart.)
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