Game CARTRIDGES make a comeback ... for smartmobes A Japanese company named Beatrobo has revealed plans to revive games cartridges, for use in smartphones. Beatrobo already makes a device that plugs in to a phone's audio port and sends a sound to the phone to authenticate you as someone able to access content stored in the cloud. The company's now planning to use the audio …
Interface 2 had a literal ROM socket. It worked just like a console. You plugged in a ROM when the computer was off, turned it back on, and it instantly booted into a game. About 10-12 games were made on the format, but it saved the 5+ minute loading time.
It worked by exposing the memory bus directly to the expansion port, and the IF2 exposed some memory pins of that direct to a ROM chip in a cartridge. Literally when you executed the bootup / ROM routines, it was just using the chip on the cartridge instead of the normal Spectrum ROM. I believe size was limited to 16Kb because of the way the expansion port as designed.
I had one. It was great. Also had two Sinclair joysticks ports you could use with games (and all ROM games supported those joysticks too - I believe the Jetpac ROM was rewritten to support it rather than Kempston / Cursor interface), Instant booting, guaranteed loading, Nintendo-like cartridges, dual joystick ports, and you could still plug in things like the ZX printer etc. into the back of the IF2.
Sadly, never very many games but I did have (may still have somewhere) Jetpac, Planetoids and Hungry Horace on that format. The ROMs were a chip on a PCB covered in a black plastic case with a red rubber "skirt" to stop dirt getting on the exposed PCB edge.
Fond memories.
Anne-Lise, you are right, but for an early adopter (or receiver), some of the cartridge games were great.
Radar Rat Race may have been a copy of Rally X for the Atari empire of the time, adequate graphics, but perfect gameplay. Likewise, Miner 2049er, IIRC the first version of Pitfall was cart-only.
Action Replay, Final Cartridge were great, but couldn't work on everything, and the art of the fast-loaders was often great. One game had a version of Space Invaders as the loading screen, brilliant use of interrupts.
I never used the cheat codes, but had much fun making graphics and sounds with Turbo Assembler and Action Replay or Final Cart.
Sad that the latter-day AR cartridges were for cheat codes only.
"We all had an Action Replay cartridge for cheating on tape games that we used Action Replay to clone onto a floppy"
Really?
I just used to ground the warm reset on the parallel interface port and dump the memory to a PET disk dual drive via an Interpod.
You could then load the game back into memory at any time and restart with it with a SYS ....
(IIRC)
I used to have a vic20. I think I had an absolutely brilliant game called "Myriad" on it. Which was sort of a vertical scrolling Defender-type game with a myriad of things to shoot at. It slowed down a bit when there were too many things, and it always crashed after I'd got a particularly high score. Those were the days... I remember downloading Myriad on a Vic20 emultator about ten years ago.
"Hey, I've got cassette games that still work! :-)"
Same here. At least they did work last time I checked. They've managed to outlast every cassette player in the house and the hardware the games are supposed to run on. I still can't bring myself to throw them away though.
3D Monster Maze - FTW!
sales here in Japan, if they can offer some good games, doubt it can succeed.
I have never seen anyone carrying a sillyphone in a game-controller cradle, so that rules any platformer, space shooter, fighting game etc. out of contention as playable.
I doubt they will be getting licences to Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy.
Wasn't planning to go to the Game Show this year, but the BBQ I was thinking of on Sunday will likely be washed out, so maybe will check TGS and their booth.
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