57 replies to this topic

[Philflound]

Scanner would work too!

[nathanallan]

Any kind of Atari dev, even if it's a homebrew is pretty cool. Maybe not expensive, but cool nonetheless.

[supercat]

nathanallan, on Wed Feb 11, 2009 9:02 PM, said:

Any kind of Atari dev, even if it's a homebrew is pretty cool. Maybe not expensive, but cool nonetheless.

Cool indeed, from a historical perspective. I would very much second the notion that the batteries should not be left in the cart. It may be worthwhile to try to preserve the labels of the batteries (either by removing the labels, or gutting the batteries and storing them separately from the cart) to allow comparisons if other similar carts turn up. At minimum, preserve or copy down any markings that look like a date codes, serial numbers, etc. The actual guts of the batteries are 100% worthless, though.

[Ian Primus]

This is a very interesting cartridge, but definitely homemade. I somehow doubt that the original mask ROM is in there. I'm willing to wager that he's got two 6116 SRAM chips in there (2k each), wired up to be one 4k bank. The shield's presense doesn't say much, those are on all the production cartridges, and very easy to remove and reinstall. I generally put them back when I make up EPROM carts, as it helps reduce the RF noise in the picture.

Get those batteries out of there, and clean up the corrosion.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is speculating when this was made, and how it was used. Building a device to read Atari catridges into a computer is pretty trivial, and would have been pretty easy for a hardware hacker in the 80's on most home micros (think Apple II). Similarly, writing to an SRAM cart like this wouldn't have been that difficult either.

So, you've basically got two scenarios that I can think of:

Whoever made this was a programmer, trying to code for the Atari. This would have predated emulators, so the only way to really test anything would be to put it on a cart and plug it into the Atari. EPROMS get old fast if you're trying to develop some code.

or...

Whoever made this was a hardware hacker that had friends he could borrow Atari games from. Plug it into the computer, download the data, store it on disk. Then, when you want to play, plug in the RAM cart and write the data. Much cheaper than buying stacks of games - you'd only have to buy the bankswitched ones, or the ones with extra RAM inside.

But, interesting find nonetheless. Where did you find it? Does it have a label of any kind?

-Ian

[atariwizard]

any news yet

[Syntaxerror999]

Perhaps the technique could be adapted for games that could save progress, high scores, etc

[GroovyBee]

Syntaxerror999, on Thu May 24, 2012 5:10 AM, said:

Perhaps the technique could be adapted for games that could save progress, high scores, etc

Nice idea but you'd be better off with a new PCB design that has a CPLD that controls address decoding (and bank switching) to the game ROM and also provides an SPI/I2C interface to an EEPROM in my opinion. No battery dying/leaking hassles then.

[Crazy Climber]

I remember this one, I take it nobody figured out what it was?