Want to poke around in my basement of crap? You can! All you have to do is become a member. Or, barring that, break into my home. I hope you’ll choose the first option.
Want to poke around in my basement of crap? You can! All you have to do is become a member. Or, barring that, break into my home. I hope you’ll choose the first option.
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I’ve never had a pustule on my perineum, putrid or otherwise, but Jeez! Maybe give us a warning before you put visions like that in our brains.
I don’t understand how they got 49 times more “RAM power” in the ad copy unless it was additive versus replacement of the native spec.
Anyway, a fun read and watch and I look forward to more installments. I can’t wait to see what part of human anatomy you are going to invoke and grossify next.
Damn, even my friends who are even deeper into this stuff than I am (and I’m deep into this stuff) hadn’t heard about this thing.
I was not familiar with this, so thanks for sharing! I love this old crap, too.
The moment I read the headline, I knew exactly what kind of supercharger we were going to see. Was not disappointed.
To save memory in Pit Fall, all the levels were randomly generated. But since they started with the same random seed each time, the levels were the same every time you played. I also love all the weird ways they saved memory back when every byte counted, and I watch a lot of youtube videos about this.
I had a 2600 as kid, but the Commodore VIC20 and Apple 2+ launched my career as a programmer. Nowadays we’re lazy with memory. Unless I’m writing something that processes video or something, I don’t have to worry about memory usage at all.
Looking at task manager, Slack is using 400MB of RAM. I guarantee an Atari programmer could have made the same application use 4K of RAM.
In the 2600 world, 4K wasn’t the RAM size… it was the ROM size.
Anyone ever tell Torch about the Xonox Double Ender?
I have one!
Everyone in the audience who has survived ‘Requiem for a Dream’ just shuddered.
Best. Date. Movie. Ever.
Gosh, imagine a world where RAM is too expensive to be able to have plenty of it for playing games. How much would that suck, eh?
Good rules for collecting. Once you’re open to buying things online well, depending on what you’re collecting the thrill of the hunt is pretty much dead.
Hmmm.. I would like to recommend Jason to a youtube channel named James Channel, yes, its just “James Channel”.
Thank me later
My family had a TRS-80 around that time that also used a cassette tape as memory. It couldn’t do half what the Atari alone could do.
Later in that decade, I had a Korg DW8000 keyboard. It still used a cassette as memory, but was even worse. It was so finicky I think I only got it to save and load my presets once in the 20 years I owned it.
For those in proximity to Mountain View, CA (in Silicon Valley), I recommend the Computer History Museum. Lot’s of interesting old and curious computational devices. Disclaimer: In their collection, although I don’t know if they are displayed, are some 128MB and 230MB magneto-optical cartridge storage media that I donated from when we manufactured them in San Jose, circa 1990 to 1995.
Well that’s neat. I’ve never heard of this thing. I’ve still got my Atari 7800 which is backwards compatible with the 2600. Apparently the Supercharger only works with early models of the 7800. I am curious to know if it would work with mine, but not curious enough to go try to buy one.
I’ve still got all my consoles from the ’80s to the modern era and a small collection of arcade boards, so this stuff is right up my alley. Wish I still had my old computers, but emulation will have to suffice for now.
The 2600 was my first game system. I liked it and played a ton, but my friend had the Intellivision and I was still pretty jealous. I can’t believe I’ve never known this thing existed. If you’d asked me, I’d have said it wasn’t possible to boost a 2600. Very cool!
My first game system was the first Atari system I can’t recall the number but it had 4 games downloaded on it I think it was pong, tank, air battle, and asteroids
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IagZIM9MtLo
Hey Hey 16K
Never knew this existed, although I’m a little younger – the must have system from my childhood was the NES. We bought 2600’s at yard sales by the mid-80s.
Dad bought an Atari 520ST in 1987? That thing was the damn future.
Never knew this existed either, although I’m a lot older – the must have system from my childhood was Etch-A-Sketch.
I loved my Etch-A-Sketch. Born ’76
I just checked Wikipedia. I may have had one of the earliest versions, since I was 7 when it first came out. Yes, born in ’53.
So simple to use. You simply had to turn it upside down and shake it to re-boot it.
Light bright was better
I love how the enabling technology for this was contract law, not electronics.
At first glance, the window muntin in the first ad made the phrase “arcade quality” look like it was written in strikethrough. Advanced graphics, sure, but not exactly top notch graphic design.
Now I’ve got to hit up eBay for a Communist Mutants from Space cassette.
That is a great title. Sounds like something Roger Corman would have produced.
JERRY: Hey, look at the high score–“G.L.C.” George Louis Costanza. That’s not you, is it?
GEORGE: Yes! 860,000. I can’t believe it’s still standing. No one has beaten me in like 10 years.
JERRY: I remember that night.
GEORGE: The perfect combination of Mountain Dew and mozzarella…just the right amount of grease on the joy stick…
MARIO: Here’s your pizza pea brains.
JERRY: I think I remember why we stopped coming here.
——————————–
Also: “Holes! I need holes!”
It’s maybe worth recognizing the forward thinking of Nintendo here. The SNES was made with an additional 16 pins on the cartridge slot for bus I/O. It allowed later games to include co-processing on the cartridge which provided a substantial graphics boost, albeit at the cost of having to include the processor on every cart.
I had no idea this existed. Great idea for a series!! I love old tech; the oldest thing I have is my NES. I wish I still had the Apple IIGS; my parents gave it to some elderly relatives who claimed they wanted a computer, but had let it sit so long that the RAM disk (no hard drive!) had reset to a rediculously small value, rendering the computer incapable of running useful software.
Okay just to confirm, you will be wearing pants in this content?
“I’m not sure there’s ever been a plug in whatever for a home game console that transformed its capabilities as much as the Supercharger did for the 2600.”
Uhh, are you forgetting the Sega Genesis 32x? Yes? It’s ok, everyone else did too.
The genesis was so expandable. You could plug in a master system converter and play old gen games, you could plug in the 32x for coprocessor required games, you could plug in a cd drive. We had all of them—they’re with my brother now and all still work.
Thanks for this! Yes, it’s amazing what having limits on the hardware could do for imagination and ingenuity. Have to work with constraints like this makes the early days of computing even more amazing.
“the most brutally putrid and debased pustule on the perineum of American culture” – How dare they taint such a respectable sanctuary!
ISWYDT
Based on search results, this phrase was used in a comment on The Autopian website to describe something in a strongly derogatory manner, followed by the comment: “How dare they taint such a respectable sanctuary!”.
The phrase appears to be a visceral, subjective insult used in an online discussion rather than a widely recognized quotation from a specific famous person or published work.
Context: The comment appears in a discussion about old technology, expanding gaming consoles, and the respectability of certain enthusiast spaces.
Perineum Definition: The perineum is the region of the body between the pubic symphysis and the coccyx.
Taint. Ha.
Sounds like 3 80s band names
Cool! Sort of like what the language card did for the Apple ][+, adding 16k of RAM to swap out for the ROM with AppleSoft basic. Even more like the Apple //e with its double hi-res mode.
Amazing how much the early home computers and game consoles did with so very little hardware.
Or the Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard that let you run CPM on the Apple ][+
We had one of those, and an 80 character card.
Or the whole 3DO on an expansion card that Creative made. Wild PC accessory.
I remember going to buy a half megabyte, (that’s five hundred and twelve whole kilobytes!) memory expansion for my Amiga 500. As I recall, it was only about £50, which was shocking reasonable for the time to double your memory capacity.
I remember seeing ads for harddrives around the same period, which were close to £1000 for eight (8!) megabytes. Who could ever get close to using up that much storage?