At 11:13 PM 2/6/2004, you wrote:
2) Remove the super charger/catridge from the 2600.
4) Have the RAM code dump the cartridge content. I was thinking of doing
this by sound (in a format similar to what the super charger uses), or
if that doesn't work trying to dump the data over the joystick port over
to a PC (or maybe an atari 8 bit).
Hmm...
If you are looking for a project, and you have a Supercharger, I suggest
you come up with a standard code library that could be used to provide a
serial "request" handshake with a PC or other host computer.
The idea behind that is if you already have a PC or other
makewav/playbin-compatible host computer hooked up to your SC/CC then if
you also interface one of the joystick ports to a serial port on the host,
then the 2600 could send control signals to the PC requesting a given load
right before jumping to the SC/CC ROM routines.
The software that sends this signal would have to be extremely small in
order to not eat too much of the RAM space. This is the sort of thing that
would have been better put in ROM because you'd need it to be RAM resident
all the time.
Naturally this would also require some software on the PC side to listen
for, interpret, and respond to these signals.
With this in place, games could request their own loads without any human
intervention.
I can also envision something a little more complex like a save-game
library which this little widget could load in and then jump to. The
save-game load would be told which memory range to save off and it would
scan through the cart and dump it to the PC. You'd also have a load-game
load (or maybe this could be small enough to do both).
It would be the final step necessary to qualify the Supercharger as
tantamount to a disk drive interface.
You could make enormous games that way. Anything that uses wave-based
level data would be possible, without the restrictions of linear loads or
the inconvenience of clicking on wav files or playing CD tracks.
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