Discontinued 1984 (1984) | ||
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Introduced August 1982; 34 years ago (1982-08) Type Expansion peripheral cartridge | ||
The Starpath Supercharger (originally called the Arcadia Supercharger) is an expansion peripheral cartridge created by Starpath, for playing cassette-based proprietary games on the Atari 2600 video game console.
Contents
The device consists of a long cartridge with a handle on the end, and an audio cassette cable. It adds 6 KB to the Atari 2600's 128 bytes of RAM (increasing it to 6,272 bytes of RAM or 49-fold), allowing for the creation of specially compatible games which are larger and have higher resolution graphics than normal cartridges. A cable coming out of the side of the cartridge plugs into the earphone jack of any standard cassette player, for loading all Supercharger games from standard audio cassettes.
Games
All Supercharger games were developed by Starpath.
Compatibility
The Supercharger is compatible with Atari 2600, Atari 2600 Jr., and the Sears Video Arcade consoles.
Due to the shape of the Supercharger, it would not normally fit into the ColecoVision's Expansion Module #1, which is an adapter that allows the ColecoVision to play Atari 2600 games. However, if the cover of the expansion module is removed or an extender is used, the Supercharger will work. Extenders were sent to customers who called Starpath about such issues.
The Supercharger did not work on many Atari 7800 systems (which is typically backward compatible with the Atari 2600), although it does with some early models of the system. After Atari installed a circuit to fix a compatibility issue with the 2600 version of Dark Chambers, it subsequently caused incompatibility with the Supercharger and some other games that use the FE bank switching method.
Modern release
The complete library of games, including the prototype Sweat, was also released on audio CD as Stella Gets A New Brain by CyberPuNKS (Jim Nitchals, Dan Skelton, Glenn Saunders and Russ Perry Jr.). There are two releases, both sanctioned by Atari and Bridgestone Multimedia, who had obtained the rights to the Starpath library some time ago. The first release is a limited number not-for-profit product, which also includes the previously unreleased Atari prototype, Polo by Carol Shaw. The second release includes the Supercharger prototypes Meteroid (an early version of Suicide Mission) and Excalibur (an early version of Dragonstomper), in addition to a number of homebrew games by permission of their respective authors, and the song Atari 2600 by Splitsville, fully licensed from the band.