RE: [stella] Superchip?

[Glenn Saunders <cybpunks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 08:46 AM 10/15/99 +0200, you wrote:
> Who knows why they didn't put the Superchip in other games..


The Pitfall II chip is the DPC chip.  I haven't asked Crane specifically, 
but I would bet you that he worked on at least one other game designed to 
use it which was either never finished or never released.  It was not 
designed specifically to be used in only one game, as you can see in the 
patent docs.  At least for testing purposes he must have written some 
programs to use some of the other functions of the chip.  That might be 
cool to run on an emulator...  Or to run programs for the DPC which will 
only run on the emulator (since we can't manufacture it).

For those of you who watched Stella at 20: Volume 2, The reason the DPC 
chip ended with Pitfall II had to do with the crash and also that the chip 
couldn't compete with the economy of scale of larger 8/16K banked 
ROMs.  According to Crane, a lot of what the DPC chip gave to the 2600 
could be done by virtue of more ROM for specialized code: tables to save 
CPU, etc...

As for the Superchip, which adds the RAM to the cart, that was used for 
several latter games like Save Mary, Millipede, Jr. Pac Man, etc...


Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment
Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698
Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc


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