Atari 2600 Cassette Games With The Starpath Supercharger

hey there everybody my name is Aaron welcome back to the channel well if you saw my last video about 10 technical things you didn't know about the Atari VCS also known as the Atari 2600 or if you ever even owned an Atari VCS growing up or maybe later in life uh you'll know that it has several ports on the back it has a couple of joystick ports has a power port and it also has a cable coming out of it for video one port that it doesn't have is a cassette input Port unlike many of the PCS of the late 70s and early 80s that did have a cassette port on them the Atari VCS did not even the original IBM PC was sold as a model with no floppy drives and only a cassette port for loading data onto the system in 1982 one company set out to change that the name of that company was Arcadia and the name of their product was the star path supercharger and here it is right here it's a cartridge that goes into the Atari 2600 or VCS and there is only one thing coming out of it and that is a Jack to plug into a cassette player so today as promised we're going to take a look at the star path supercharger right here at the Retro hack Shack foreign [Music] so let's talk about the star path formerly Arcadia supercharger as I mentioned in my 10 technical things video the star path supercharger added cassette loading functionality to the Atari 2600 or VCS system it also added six kilobytes of ram which greatly extended the paltry 128 bytes that was included in the Atari VCS to begin with the company was actually Incorporated in June of 1981 by Craig Nelson and Bob Brown two former Atari employees so one thing you'll notice if you ever start looking into the starpath supercharger is on all of the later assets that they developed they all say very clearly formerly Arcadia formerly Arcadia stamped on everything well it seems that they started out as a company called Arcadia and changed the name to star path both of which I really like by the way this is because the company Emerson sin had just come out with a video game console called the Arcadia 2001 so being the younger smaller company I suppose they decided to change their name and so it became star path there were only 12 games made available for the star path supercharger and a few demos and prototype games were available as well we'll take a look at these in just a minute one of the things that sets these games apart is the style of the artwork that was included with the games it is very much an updated look and feel compared to the early days of Atari or even the Activision cartridges that were coming out at the time the artwork was also noticeably a bit darker with skulls and people with glowing eyes looking out of a frightening mask this style of artwork really would have appealed to me as a kid however I can imagine parents who were involved in the 80s satanic Panic might have been pretty concerned if they looked at some some of the artwork that was going on here the titles of the games were a bit darker as well with titles such as killer satellites or suicide mission that may not go over well with parents today compared to cartridges cassettes were cheaper and faster to produce and they could hold much more data than the limitation of 2K and 4K cartridges which were around at the time looking inside the supercharger the architecture is deceptively simple there are three 2K RAM chips a 2K ROM chip and then a controller chip which handles the analog to digital conversion from the analog audio into the binary data which will then get loaded into the ram so even though the star path supercharger did add 6K of ram to the system it really couldn't be utilized to make dramatic improvements to the system overall because it was essentially being used as a storage space Also the star path supercharger couldn't overcome the limitations that the system had in terms of its processor or the way that it drew data on the screen if you want to know more about that you should check out the 10 technical things video I mentioned earlier and I'll put a link to that in the description there were also a number of knockoffs produced there was digital's digigame K7 embricom Electronica's telegame vgs Game Changer and splices comp K7 there was also the comma vid Magic card programming cartridge which came with 2K of ROM and 1K of RAM and you could modify that to save and load programs from cassette last but not least there was the Spectra video compumate which came with 16k of ROM and 2K of RAM and that would change your 2600 into a cheap computer essentially that would also let you save and load programs from cassette starpath had a number of things going against it from the start number one they launched in 1982 which if you know your game history you know that there was a big video game crash here in the states in 1983 so the timing wasn't great also the system was based on cassette loading which at this point a lot of people were turning towards floppy disk drives unlike in Europe where the cassette was still very popular not to mention that Atari was getting ready to release the 5200 nobody knew how that would perform but it was certain to be incompatible with the starpath supercharger all of this led to resellers not wanting to stock their cassettes in their stores and So eventually the company had to fold in November of 1983 starpath was bought out by the epics game company who had recently lost a bunch of developers who left to start their own company instead one of the prototypes that never made it to Market was a game called sweat and rumor has it that this actually went on to inspire the epics Games summer games which was very popular for many systems at the time there was a Community Driven project to organize these files and get the audio out on CD that project was called Stella gets a new brain and you could actually buy copies of that CD for a while while they were in production at this point though you can find the files for the star path supercharger online you can download the mp3s and I'll show you how to load those files in just a minute now let's take a look at what these games actually look like but before we do I want to thank the sponsor of this episode PCB way CB way offers inexpensive PCB manufacturing and a whole lot more need assembly Services no problem they can do front side backside through-hole components you name it they also offer 3D printing CNC milling and more so check out PCB way for your next project and I thank them for their support of the Retro hack Shack before I start testing these games let me just show you what my setup is going to be I have a light sixer and for you know those half a dozen or so people that commented about the difference in the heavy sixer and the light sixer from my previous video and said that the heavy sixer has more shielding inside and that's why it's heavier uh go check my social media and you will see a picture that I took of my heavy sixer compared to This Light sixer you'll see that they are identical on the inside in terms of the shielding the only difference is the thickness of the plastic in terms of what makes it heavier so that is a misnomer that the heavy sixer was Heavy because it had additional shielding anyway I'm going to be using this light sixer today I've got it out here to do some mods a little bit later with and then we have right here the supercharger the star path supercharger formerly Arcadia so yes it was written on just about everything it's written back here formerly Arcadia this is plugged into a replica of an older cassette deck this is not very old I think this is maybe you know six between six and ten years old but it looks like the old Panasonic tape players and it actually has batteries in it that are working that I put in it has an older style and that's why I picked this up from E-Waste when I did was I just love the fact that it was replicating that older style of tape recorder and I've got a tape loaded first game I want to try out is escape from the mine master I actually have three tapes so we'll be playing that one first then I also have phaser Patrol and I have killer satellites so those are the ones I'm going to be playing today there are other videos on YouTube that you can find where people are playing Frogger because it's a better version of Frogger than you could play and the one that came with the VCS so I'll let you go look up that I didn't want to do something different I just happen to have these cassettes and I'm also going to show you how to load from your phone as well because this thing works really well at loading MP3 files from your phone but first let's try loading from a cassette so you can see what this actually would have been like so take the star path supercharger plug it in just like a regular old cartridge and you could hear that click maybe this does have a tendency I don't know if it's off center a little bit but it has a tendency to click on one edge here so it's no big deal it's not hurting anything it just kind of clicks into place kind of sharply all right so with that in let's turn it on and see what we get I should mention also that I'm using a newer style TV that has just about every input available on it HDMI VGA composite and of course RF which the Atari puts out so I've got I'm using this because it's got kind of a matte screen uh CRTs have a lot of glare they're hard to record the camera doesn't like it you get the more effects I don't know if I'm saying that right so for those people that why didn't you use a CRT well I needed to record this and this is the easiest way to do it is by using a digital screen here you can see here we've got rewind tape and press play so tape is already rewound and so I should just be able to press play and we'll see if this loads it may take a minute to get back past the leader I didn't wind that up manually with my uh with my finger as I might have done back in the day [Music] and this is loading it's a little bit reminiscent of the Naboo if you saw my video on the Naboo um it loads with this similar tone generation that goes up and up and up until the game is loaded and there we go it says press stop tape I'm actually going to keep the tape going because I don't know what happens if you don't stop the tape I guess it just sits there and waits and somehow this is the cool thing somehow it is able to recognize maybe because of the there's a signal when I hit the stop there's maybe a a sharp click or something that this thing is able to register and know that I press stop it's kind of interesting and ingenious if you ask me so anyway as soon as I hit stop you get this escape from the mine Master copyright 1982 star path it's a little bit hard to see I'm sure it is for you too because they used a pink on pink uh Pink text on a pink background anyway escape from the mind master now for me the first time I played this it really blew me away this is a maze game where you're actually going through a 3D maze okay future Aaron here and uh well that's embarrassing I got everything set up and didn't see in my little camera display that the camera wasn't picking up this great visuals here on this TV so uh I'm gonna go ahead and splice in some actual gameplay try to line it up as much as I can but just keep in mind that what I'm saying in the video may not line up exactly with this extra footage I'm putting in in post and there's a little critter that's following you around and if I stop talking for a minute foreign [Music] there's this little beeping that's going on in the background and that will go faster and higher pitch the closer you are to the bad guy which will oh see I'm really close now so I've got to get going but you see is that if I move across the screen I'm further away from him and that beeping will slow down anyway the uh the trick here is to find these uh different shaped jigsaw pieces or or shapes here you have to grab them and then find the receptacle this the matching shape receptacle in a wall somewhere and you can put those in and then once you have there he goes you see that okay now he can't go through doors you have a little map down here that shows you where you are in The Maze so I'm going to go back over here and see if I can find that square receptacle somewhere over there oh now here's the other thing they have these mini games this is so cool it's a mini game that's built in and you basically have to dodge these uh falling blocks or whatever you have a little spaceship here and the better you do at this game you can see it's getting faster the blocks are getting bigger you will get extra points from the mind master if you can do very well at this game and oh I got hit a little bit took a little bit of damage and just for the sake of the video I'm not going to go any further I'll just go ahead and die here so you can see what happens now I just died here's my score down here and my kind of like my time remaining if you do really well you'll get extra points so you can last a little bit longer and then I can go through this maze again and find all of the shapes and get them in the proper place and once you do that then you can go up the stairs you have to find where the stairs are you can go up the stairs go to the next level and so on and so on and eventually you will have to play the second tape or I think maybe all the all of the the uh segments of this are on the same tape so then I would play the next segment of the tape it would load that into memory and I would continue going from there so it did have the star path supercharger did have the concept of multi-loading the same way you would do with a floppy disk take it out put disc two in uh start that and it would load the rest of the game Etc this had a similar uh Paradigm here where you can load multiple segments of the tape to if you have a really long game or you need more memory clear throughout the memory load the next segment of the game and go from there so really cool game the fact that this does 3D I mean one of my favorite games as a kid was dungeons of daggerath on the trs80 color computer my first computer and it had kind of this style this look and feel but you know that had way more memory I mean it 4K 16k you know 32 64k you could upgrade it you know this thing has 128 bytes on board and uh 6K on the cartridge and it's able to do this with a lot less resources in the Atari 2600 than were on the color computer so really really impressive game but let's move on to loading games from a phone or some sort of digital device okay so now let's move on to a game called phaser Patrol and I just want to give you a quick look inside the manual I think I showed some covers earlier the manual for this is actually you know really well done for a game Manual of this type this is somewhat like Star Raiders um for the there was different versions for even the 26 600 but most notably for the Atari 800 when it came out so it's very similar to that you have sectors here and what's cool is they make use of the left difficulty switch you put the left difficulty switch in the B position and that brings up the map where you can select which sector you want to move around to there are star bases and enemy sectors and unknown sectors if you get hurt on fighting the enemies and you want to go back and repair yourself you can just quickly warp to a friendly star base you sit there for a few minutes it recharges your Shields Torpedoes and fixes your ship and everything then you can go back to a sector where the enemy is and start fighting them there so yeah really well detailed it has information for all the controls nice color Graphics it tells you about your little control panel down on the bottom of the screen which you'll see in a minute tells you where your enemies are and what's what's what's what the status of your ship is so really cool game let's go ahead and load this one from my phone so I've got the screen up here which is ready for me to play it assumes I have a tape player connected but at this time I have the starpath supercharger connected to my phone down here always nice to have a three and a half inch millimeter Jack here a headphone jack on your phone I don't know why they're getting rid of those companies are dumb for doing that in my opinion but here we go all the games here are on my phone I can go in and select the one that I want again these are downloadable online you can find them by doing some searches and the one that we want is killer satellites oh sorry uh phaser patrol all the way down here at the bottom phaser Patrol ntsc because there are both ntse versions and pal versions of these games so make sure you've got the right one for your region but all I have to do is play that audio tape and you will see that we are loading from the phone really easily you do have to get your volume set just right I like to start at about 80 volume for my phone and then either go up or down if I have any problems it says stop tape but it it stopped the the playing of the the media file stopped and it immediately jumped into the game so that's all there is to it really simple and easy game loading from your phone really reliable from what I found compared to other systems other games uh you know all the home computers seem to have a little bit of issues with it you have to get things just right but so far all of these games have loaded for me either on the first try or you know with a little bit of fiddling with the volume second or third try and then they once I get that tuned in and dialed in correctly they just work and they load really quickly really easily and it's a great way to use the star path Supercharger so let's just try this game out ah there we go I can hear the sound now okay now I'm in the game Left difficulty switch let's go to an enemy sector and at any time you can switch switch the difficulty mode back and you'll be in this screen it's got a little range finder there that tells me how close I am oh there's an enemy let's see if I can get him come on baby [Music] my computer is damaged so I don't know if that makes it harder to ah come on dude this is hard oh there I got one got another one so if you get them in the targeting reticle there uh scan damage if you get them in the targeting reticle it will lock onto them and get them that way but I'm damaged right now so I'm gonna go to a Star based sector I love the use of that difficulty switch as something that you can do it says stand by down here it might be difficult to see that little sound filled up my fuel and all my gauges are green so now I can go back let's go back to that same sector [Music] [Applause] there we go we're back I need to find an enemy let's see if I can line them up and get locked on again oh man they're really killing me there we go see that I got locked on oh almost oh Torpedoes destroyed I gotta get out of here I've got to get out of here quick oh oh oh ship destroyed I'm dead so yeah really really fun game you can tell the graphics are a little bit better everything's a little bit more responsive I mean even this little uh I guess that's supposed to be like a computer analyzing or something down there at the bottom I don't know I'll have to check the manual but yeah this is a good example of the graphics capability of this thing again it's not um you know 10 times better than the Atari games because it still has to keep up with scan lines it has to count where things are I mean it's it's still got to take uh into account all of those difficult things that you do with the Atari 2600 but it's just got more memory and and it can it can do things um I can do more things essentially better sound better graphics I would say that the star pad the games for the start pass supercharger are more in the realm of the intellivision compared to the Atari 2600 so that's the kind of Step Up that you're going to see maybe getting towards the realm of the coleco vision in comparison but you're not going to see you know the Nintendo right you're not going to see Nintendo Entertainment System type of Graphics but you are going to be able to see some much improved Graphics over the base Atari 2600 when when this came out in 1982 later on of course people were able to do all sorts of cool things with games for the Atari 2600 but in 1982 when this came out this would have been seen anybody that would have seen this games would have been like wow I've never seen that before on an Atari which is what we called it it was the only thing so we just called it the Atari okay let's take a look at one more game let's take a look at killer satellites oh I don't have the manual for this one I think I've seen it played a couple times let's just go ahead and play it and see if we can figure it out okay side scrolling shooter oh it's kind of like Defender nice okay so this should be should be relatively straightforward there we go nice hope there's another one what are you talking about I didn't hit that [Music] there we go first level down they're doing something interesting with the two up here it's got this weird curlicue at the bottom instead of just using a flat two like everybody else does watch when this this two's okay but watch the twos up here if I get a two oh that's a three let's see I love the look at the detail on this little alien dude here okay there there's a two see the two oh have a hard time getting twos on this game until it starts counting up [Music] nope there's a two and that weird that little curly cute thing so so far not a very challenging game I wonder if I can select multiple oh yeah you can choose maybe these are different difficulty or different levels so you can start on level 15 let's see what that's like [Music] oh wow they come oh my goodness I can't even get that guy he's indestructible ah okay it does get harder the first two levels were super easy but setting this to level 15 has definitely made a big difference it doesn't have an auto fire unfortunately so you have to mash the button oh and I went too fast just like I do with the fender okay well I cleared the level at least but yeah level 15 is a lot harder than level two so uh yeah you could have like hours of fun playing this game it levels up seemingly pretty linear linearly and nicely so yeah I would definitely play this as a kid although I think uh star what's it star star path star um I'll put the name the correct name of it down below basically is the the second version of Defender Defender two was much better than even this was so a much better game but uh yeah this is still very fun for 1982. I would definitely play this for a while one last thing I'll say about the sarpat supercharger there were several mods for this over the years this will work with any 2600 but if you wanted to use it with the 7800 which was 2600 compatible it was not compatible with the supercharger so there are some mods that you can do to the supercharger to get that to work with the 7800 there's also some mods that you can do so that you can load any game not just the supercharger formerly Arcadia games you can actually load any or not any I should say most of the 2K and 4K games you can convert the binaries to a cassette format and load those in over using the supercharger I found that on an old website that I had to look up on the Wayback machine on internet archive but there was a mod at least that allowed you to load other games from tape not something I'm going to do today but it's just interesting what people made use of this cartridge for Beyond just playing the star path supercharger games so the star path supercharger a really incredible add-on to the 2600 that I never used as a kid but I certainly am glad I know about it now and I'm glad I have one to play with on real Hardware it does make a difference Sometimes using the actual Hardware although you can load on an emulator like Stella it will let you load cassettes in the form of a binary file and it will load those just fine it does support those so if you don't have a 2600 and you want to check out the star path supercharger cassettes or programs you can do that through an emulator as well now I want to welcome all of the new subscribers I've got a bunch of new subscribers after that last video which did very well so welcome to all of you and I do want to share some big news as this is my 100th episode all the timing is just coincidental I will be launching a second channel so the second channel will have more of what you see on this channel but maybe not as scripted and maybe not as polished so there might be some things on there some little things I pick up here and there that I just want to do a quick video about or maybe a really long form video in the way of a repair that many people would just want to skip over well you can find that content on my second Channel and you'll find that Linked In the description below and it's going to be called retro hackshack after hours so if you're a subscriber to my channel and you want even more content head over to Retro hackshack after hours and subscribe there as well and you'll see things like E-Waste Wednesday and a lot of other features that I know a lot of my regular viewers really like so I'll see you over there be sure to head over and subscribe and I thank you for that speaking of thank you thanks to all my patrons who support the channel if you want to become a patron you'll see information coming up in the credits along with the names of those patrons that I already have so thanks again to them thanks for watching and we'll see you next time patrons receive ad free and early access to content after the episode commentary and of course your name in the credits if you liked that episode here's a few more you might enjoy and I thank you for your support End of Line

Channel: Retro Hack Shack

Views: 12,581

Keywords: retrohackshack, computers, technology

Id: Uhn35u0pOE0

Length: 28min 26sec (1706 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023