Gaming Hacks

Run Homebrew Games on the Atari 2600

How do you play a homebrew 2600 game on the actual console hardware?

One of the coolest things about the current emulator and homebrew scene for the Atari 2600 is the amount of new development going on—recently coded, freely distributable games of various kinds. (See the Section 1.7.2).

What’s not so peachy is that it’s tricky to play these new games on the genuine hardware, especially with cartridges involved. There’s no straightforward way to put the homebrew title on your 2600, but there are a few ingenious pieces of hardware, often custom-made by others or do-it-yourself that can transfer code to your classic console.

Yes, you can run that Atari 2600 game as God originally intended it—on the 2600 itself.

Oldest of the Old

As discussed earlier, the Atari 2600 itself has a vibrant homebrew scene oriented around sites such as Atari Age (http://www.atariage.com/). It’s definitely not straightforward to play homebrew games on your 2600, but there are options.

Starpath Atari 2600 Supercharger

Released when the Atari 2600 was still being produced, this rare but ingenious utility allows the player to load third-party-developed games via cassette tape. The cart doesn’t save anything, so you need to load the game again every time you power up your 2600, but it’s still a great hack. There were specific games produced this way (for example, the Supercharger version of Frogger was much closer to arcade perfect than the regular cartridge version because the Supercharger also allowed more RAM than normal carts), but the only games available at the time came from Starpath and its affiliates.

However, with utilities such as BIN2WAV available on modern computers, it’s possible to turn an Atari ROM into a .WAV file and load it via Supercharger by plugging in the output of your PC to the input of the Supercharger. Your modern PC thus functions as an early ’80s tape player. Bob Colbert has a good explanatory page about using the Supercharger to load 2600 ROMs (http://members.cox.net/rcolbert/schookup.htm). However, the Supercharger will play only about half of the 2- and 4-KB games using this method; it takes some complex hardware modification (http://www.atari2600collector.com/scmod.htm) to make the others work.

The Atari 2600 Collector site also has a good overview of homebrew development using the Supercharger (http://www.atari2600collector.com/sdev.htm). You can find a Supercharger with games on eBay for $50 or less, so it’s a fun gadget to play with, even if many games won’t work properly with it.

Schell’s Electronics Cuttle Cart

Since the Supercharger was such a neat idea, Schell’s Electronics licensed the technology and created the Atari 2600 Cuttle Cart (http://www.schells.com/cuttlecart.shtml). These wonderful beasts work much like the Supercharger, using WAVs of games loaded via audio cable from an external sound source (see Figure 1-6). Even better, they lack the compatibility problems of the Supercharger!

The Schell’s Electronics site maintains a massive list of compatible games (http://www.schells.com/gamelist.shtml)—almost everything is there. However, with only 206 Cuttle Carts ever produced, they’re incredibly rare. If you ever see one at any reasonable price, snap it up immediately and store it in some kind of bulletproof vault.

Figure 1-6. A peek inside the innards of the Cuttle Cart

The description of why this clever add-on has such an odd name is worth reprinting:

The Cuttle Cart is named after the marine creature the cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are a type of cephalopod, a relative of the octopus. They are amazing animals capable of incredible shifts in both pattern and color, all in the blink of an eye. If I called this cart the Atari 2600 Chameleon, I think people would understand—chameleon because the cart can take on the appearance of other carts.

Schell’s Electronics Cuttle Cart 2 for Atari 7800/2600.

Also referred to as Cuttle Cart 2: Electric Boogaloo, this cartridge is a sequel mostly in name. It runs only on the Atari 7800, playing both 7800 and 2600 games, and uses a completely different method of transfer (http://www.schells.com/cc2.shtml). It uses a multimedia card (MMC) with RAM flashable from a PC via an inexpensive USB device. Because the MMC carts range up to 128 MB in size, you should easily be able to fit any homebrew games you want onto it. There are also none of the unwieldy transfer methods of the previous two crazy devices.

The first run of these Cuttle Cart 2 add-ons went to production at this book’s press time. It’s possible that enough demand will force a second run, so register your interest right now; these may also have very limited numbers. Remember, though, that you’ll need an Atari 7800 to run it.

Atari 2600 custom homebrew carts

AtariAge (http://www.atariage.com/) has an especially impressive shop (http://www.atariage.com/store/) that sells special cartridge versions of many Atari 2600 homebrew games. AtariAge does a wonderful job of publishing many excellent 2600 homebrew games (see [Hack #6] ). They also provide several services to homebrew authors who want to see real versions of their games in the marketplace (http://www.atariage.com/store/services.php).

Most of these homebrew titles cost between $20 and $40, and they’re lavishly repackaged, with manuals, labels, and boxes. Even better, much of the money goes directly to the homebrew authors to help them continue making their excellent titles, always distributed in ROM form for free. So buy, and you’ll help encourage further homebrew development. We like this option.

Homemade Atari 2600 multicartridge

This final option, building your own cartridge, is, frankly, a little bit too complicated. You’ll need to modify an Activision 4-KB Atari 2600 cartridge with a really complex set of dipswitches, use an EPROM burner, and other craziness. Bob Colbert’s site provides good directions (http://members.cox.net/rcolbert/multi.htm), but it’s really suitable only for experts: you’ll have to modify the circuit board in order to refit it inside the cartridge sleeve.

Multicarts

As well as these possibilities, you can sometimes find fixed-content multicarts advertised on the Internet with a lot of games on them. They don’t often feature homebrew titles, and therefore aren’t really that helpful, because you can’t flash any new games onto them. Googling for Atari 2600 multicart will help illuminate some of the possible choices, although there are no major current distributors as of press time.