This Company Made Superior Atari 2600 Games. Here’s Why 

Never had this add-on back in the day, but man that Frogger port was impressive.

Phaser Patrol which was included with the Super Charger was fantastic. It’s a bit like Star Raiders, but looks and plays much better and didn’t need another controller to work. It used one of the difficulty switches and the colour/BW switches to toggle shields and map/forward view Dragon Stomper was a multi stage RPG, and was one of the earliest game of it’s type for a game console

You know what really would have helped this thing succeed? If retailers actually sold it. I saw plenty of ads in gaming magazines for the Starpath Supercharger but out of the ten major retailers (Sears, King's, Ames, Zayer's, Woolworth's, Kmart, Kay Bee Toys, Radio Shack, JC Penny, Macy's, Service Merchandise) and slightly fewer independent retailers in my town, nobody sold it.

Quite fascinating! Data East did a similar thing in arcades with the DECA system, releasing arcade games on cassette for a fraction of a board's price. Burger Time being the most famous DECA game.

I had a Starpath back in the day. Dragonstomper was my favorite game on the peripheral.

The game has to be loaded into the Supercharger's RAM, so some advantage is lost there. Additionally the 2600 has no write line to the cartridge port so writing to the extra RAM takes more cycles (an access to a $F0xx address determines the byte to be stored then the next access determines the location to store to) Where it can have great advantage is with unrolled program code, dynamically generated code and self-modifying code. That would be mostly done offscreen/VBlank then the graphics kernal could have more brute-force and cycle efficient programming for better graphics at the cost of taking up more RAM.

Imagine what the SuperCharger could have done for Pac Man. That might have kept them in the running.

OK, just to clear things up about the RAM... the 6K of RAM also had to hold the actual game which was loaded from tape. Of course the programmers could leave a bit more room for storage, but still compromises had to be made. And 6K was the maximum size of a game that could be loaded into the Supercharger in one go, so already 8K cartridges with 2 banks could be bigger than that. But the more of the 6K you needed for extra storage for the game, the smaller the game itself had to be. Of course you can make a better Frogger in 6K than in 4K, and they did that by color-striping nearly everything. But for the actual game variables you really only need the 128 bytes already in the console. This of course might be different for other games. Also keep in mind that the RAM in the Supercharger is a bit slower to access than that in the console because it's not part of the zeropage.

The one thing I love about youtube is learning about old tech such as this, that I never knew existed. Great video and thanks for sharing this knowledge, pojr.

If I'm not mistaken, the 6 kilobytes of RAM was not for scratchpad. It also held the program code and data loaded from the tape. So, the programmers were free to use the memory not used by the program itself. Still, even 512 bytes of scratchpad RAM was 4x what any cartridge had available.

This was a great peripheral. Load times were really short -- around 10 seconds to load the game from cassette. Much faster than my TI-99/4A's cassette system. The Supercharger supported multi-load games, so you could have titles much larger than 6KB. Dragonstomper was a groundbreaking RPG. Only part of it was loaded into RAM. After completing part of the game, you'd be prompted to load the next section. It would have been cool if a console had been designed around cassette tapes instead of cartridges in the 80's.

0:09 Yes, it looks better, but where it *really* shines is the sound and music. No other version on ANY 8 bit platform got the sound and music right except the Supercharger 2600 port. All the right music all at the right time. Even other ports like the C64 which was blessed with the SID chip got the music horribly wrong. Nothing you do affects the music, except on the supercharger 2600 port. There have been recent conversions for 8 bit platforms done well, very well, but up until like 2014, this was still the best way to play Frogger on any 8 bit platform

One of my friends and I had this! We used to tell our other friends about it but nobody else could convince their parents to shell out the $70 to buy it. Definitely Dragonstomper and Phaser Patrol were the best. And you could order by mail 3(?) others. One of them was Survival Island, which I also enjoyed. I also think one of the biggest problems was, since the games were on cassette tapes, you could easily copy them and give them to friends (allegedly). So if for example, one of your friends bought all the games, and gave you a copy, they would lose out on a lot of money... allegedly.

I knew about this back when it came out, but I didn't get one until after the video game crash. I picked it up for about $10 at Toys-R-us, and I think the games were like $5 each. I don't have every one, but I think I have seven of them. I didn't keep the boxes though, just the games and the manuals. It was great for its time, but it really didn't do anything that couldn't be done in a self-contained cartridge. Years later, people figured out how to convert other existing games to audio format so that they could be loaded into the Supercharger. Of course it only worked for games that were 6K or less, and even then some games needed to be modified since they were never intended to run from RAM. Or there was a hack you could do, to add a write-protect switch to the Supercharger itself, so that once the game was loaded, it couldn't write to itself. I also recall seeing a brief mention in a game magazine of some other company intending to make their own version of a tape-loading system for the 2600. If I'm not mistaken, it was said that they were going to release games with red/blue 3D graphics. I don't think it ever came out though.

6kb may sound like a lot, and it definitely is compared to 128 bytes, but keep in mind that unlike cartridge games, some of this ram had to be used to store the game program and data itself. A 4kb game meant only 2kb left over for working space.

I had this and I can tell you that the biggest advantage was that games could multi-load levels one after the other, each level taking maximum advantage of the RAM space available. For example, one of the best games on the system (and considered by many to be the very first true RPG), Dragonstomper, had several levels that were all great.

It was an expensive addon which effectively only added 2KB extra storage. Yes that 6Kb could be used as RAM, but simple games like Frogger did not need any more RAM over the stock 128 bytes. All the RAM was used for was to store the Cassette data instead of it being stored on a ROM; ROM costs were expensive so Atari wanted to use the smallest ROM size possible thus reducing game content / graphics / music.

From what it looks like, in the games where you didn't really notice the RAM expansion, that RAM was generally being used on making stuff animate. Animation of almost anything in a regular Atari 2600 game is generally very limited, and often nonexistent, especially on earlier titles. If something does animate, it's usually only two frames or so; anything bigger or using more frames is both much more advanced and much more tricky to do, again due to the anemic RAM of the 2600. Animation means that the sprites (although the Atari 2600 didn't draw them in the way we typically think of them - they were drawn scanline by scanline, but I digress) must be stored in RAM somewhere, a timing loop constructed and running (that must also be held in RAM and takes up precious processing cycles), and so on. So basically, you're seeing the RAM "at work" in those less impressive games, but we're just so used to seeing stuff animate from playing games on later consoles that we don't even really notice all the animation going on - but someone playing this at the time would have noticed that rippling water in Rabbit Transit, that boss monster in Communist Mutants From Space, the... almost everything in Suicide Mission, and so on. Frogger and Escape From The Mind Master were just much easier to notice this stuff with because you had a direct comparison via the regular 2600 Frogger and Tunnel Runner.

When a game is loaded from a cassette it has to fit somewhere. I'm sure that some of that ram was used for the game loaded, while on cartridge it had rom. So, after the game is laded with the cassette would have probably only 1 o 2kb free to use as working ram.

Didnt appear on German Market.... I remember Imagic hitting the 2600 with jaw dropping graphics Games Back then

My dad picked up one with 3 games at a yard sale. I loved it!

Definite parallels with the Famicom disk system here - both console add-ons that loaded games from cheaper magnetic media, and allowed for bigger, better games than the base cartridge spec, but improving cartridge tech (bank switching/memory mappers, RAM in cart, and more) soon matched then passed the add-ons' improvements for both.

I have this but can't use it anymore because I don't have an actual Atari VCS and my Intellivision System Changer no longer woks because when I got the RGB Mode on my Intellivision 2 it dissabled the the System Changer because it relies on the RF module that was replaced by the RGB MOD. I have Escape from the Mind Master, Killer Satellites and Communist Mutants from Space. The Super Charger basically did what Activision and Imagic did, made games that did not have flicker plus had the advantage of lower priced games that could easily be copied by simply making a copy of the tapes that had no copy protection because they just contained audio on a standard audio tape.

It amazes me how far gaming systems have come when you read the specs of the old systems.

Hi pojr. Thanks for all the videos you have been making. I'm old school retro and i really enjoy them. i also really appreciate the "tl;dr" section where you summarise the entire video at the end. Loving your work and keep it up. Cheers! 🙂

Ah yes, I was a big fan of the Supercharger as a kid. Another factor that held it back is that it was super obscure. If you didn't read any games media back then (and there really wasn't much dedicated media for console games at this time in the '80s), chances are you never heard of it. It was not available at most stores in my area, and many of my schoolyard friends thought I was lying about it until I showed it to them. Besides upping the memory, a few of the games had multiple levels on the cassette. Mindmaster, Dragonstomper and a couple of others would prompt you to turn the tape on so it could load new content once you reached a certain point.

6:21 Tunnel Runner has extra RAM in the cartridge. It is not doing this with the 128 bytes. IIRC, it's 2kb of extra RAM, bringing the total to 3kb (384 bytes)

I was a little kid when the Atari 2600 was out, my grandparents bought it for us kids to play when we visited. The dads got competitive with the scores too :) I'm 44 and I can tell you're definitely younger than me, so I think it's bloody awesome you're covering this stuff. I never knew about this thing. Thank you for making the video.

What a cool addon! Seeing Tunnel Runner reminded me of how scared I was to play that as a child. Another 3D gem was Ballblazer. We had the 7800 version, but I eventually stumbled upon the 2600 version and it wasn't too bad either. What I really came here to say was this all reminds me of a game I think I spent more time playing than any other and it was called Xevious. It was available for so many platforms but it was challenging and also I felt rather complex. I played the 7800 version. I never got as good as my older brother, we'd all sit around and watch him play each level until he got to the final boss. I'd love to see any of these games games covered. Thanks for the great videos!

Cool. Had no idea this existed. The VCS had some impressive and ambitious peripherals for such a primitive console.

Ahhh the old Starpath Supercharger....keep up the good work Pojr!

Surprised you didin't include Phaser Patrol or Dragonstomper. If you play them then you'll see why this was so good.

I'm on to you. I've finally figured out the "pojr theme" is actually Zena-Lan's theme from Cosmic Carnage. Not a bad pick, especially considering how obscure that game is. I feel like it doesn't fit in its original game, but the fact I'm used to hearing it in your videos probably doesn't help. It sounds more like a credits / staff roll music than a battle one.

Holy smokes!! I am an Atari user and I hadn’t realized this was an option, so thanks!

I think you can tell that Rabbit Transit looks and plays way beyond a “normal” 2600. And as others have said, Phasor Patrol is a great game that shows off the Supercharger.

I had the version of the 2600 that was sold by Sears for about a year before it was marketed with Atari labeling. I opened the console to accommodate a replacement plug on one of my joystick controllers. The console's digital circuitry was in a little metal box (probably for RF shielding) about four inches wide (100mm) in the center of the cabinet. About 3/4 of that flat front section was completely empty.

the supercharger was truly an amazing piece of technology, i remember seeing the team who made the homebrew atari 2600 game Assembloids actually used a supercharger during development to test the game on real hardware.

I like how starpaths games manage to make their games look good despite ataris 2 colours per scanline limitation using multiplexing, sometimes you dont notice it since of how dense the pixel art is to mask the limitatioj

I LOVE this video! I always wanted to see what that Atari cassette deck had in store outside of that amazing Frogger conversion And hearing the music at the start of your videos makes me wonder if you could make a video on Velez and Dubail! The guys who made V-Rally on Game Boy and many other amazing technical showcase ports, like Asterix XXL on GBA, Driver 3 on GBA and many others

I owned one of these as a kid. I'm SUPER SHOCKED you didn't mention DragonStomper, the killer app for the Starpath SuperCharger. It was the first RPG! Seriously groundbreaking stuff.

The 6k in the supercharger isn't as much as you think it is. The reason for that is all the program, graphic and sound data all need to be in that 6k. All this data takes up a ton of space. This came to hurt the supercharger. As time went on, 8k ROMs became the new standard. An 8k ROM has a full 2k more data in it than the SC has room for in its RAM. The entire 6k cannot hold the Asteroids ROM. Worse still, Atari and other companies began putting additional RAM chips in the cartridge. Mattel's port of Burgertime for the 2600 has 2 full kilobytes (2048 bytes) of RAM right on the cartridge.. Mattel, CBS and Atari all had RAM expansion cartridges. Defender II was an 8k rom with another kilobit of RAM bringing the total to 2kilobits or 256bytes.

I remember when Intellivision,Atari 2600 & Atari 5200 & the Coleco Adam Computer were new in Stores however I had never heard of Star Path & their games. I learned a lot of Video Game History!

I have the complete Arcadia/Starpath collection. I had to buy them all by mail order. None of the stores in town carried them. The pack-in game was Phaser Patrol. That was a great showcase for what the SuperCharger could do.

Dragonstomper for this is a MUST play

Two things: (1) Videos need to be 60fps. 30fps loses a lot of Atari's graphics (like Frogger, and the row he's on vanishes), Suicide Mission looks half empty in weird ways. The use of alternating graphics on odd/even fields of the raster are lost here. (2) May want to check your high levels. The "S"-Sounds are grating this time around. Just my pointless 2 cents in what are otherwise great videos I've seen here.

Great video! The only thing I wish you would have done is shown the operation of the unit. It would be cool to see you load a tape into it, eject, rewind, etc. Did tapes autoboot or did you turn on the 2600 and hit a button on the unit? How long were load times? I've never heard of this add on, but it looks pretty awesome. It makes me wonder if there's a homebrew community for it. I would have loved playing the upgraded version of Frogger as a kid.

The biggest catch here is that the 6K weren’t just available at will: the game itself would load into them. That means you, as a developer, would either have a regular 4K game and use the extra 2K as RAM, or use the full 6K (which is less than a bank-switched 8K cart would offer) and deal with the regular 128 bytes. Or, of course, something in between (e.g., a 2K game with 4K for data) or more creative (self-modifying code would allow some nice tricks: one could generate the notoriously tight code that runs when the display is generating a visible scanline and squeeze extra cycles with that (for example, instead of reading a graphic from memory and writing it to the TIA, the code could do an absolute write). But again, that would eat away from the game data portion, so it’s nowhere near a 49x increase in practice.

Thanks Lemonlight for the Video! And Pojr too!

Got the Supercharger and 6 or 7 of the games on closeout at Toys R Us for really chreap back then. Great fun!

I think that some of the games were rushed to flush out the ecosystem as some titles were sort of blah, but some were amazing and complex in gameplay, such as Dragon Stomper, Phaser Patrol and Survival Island. In that complexity of gameplay I think we've seen the benefits of the extra memory really shine, there was nothing in Atari's library that came up to that level, and 2 of those 3 I mentioned were unique the type of game they were and I can't imagine how that could have fit in the standard cartridge. I think if the crash didn't happen it could have brought the Atari games in a new direction and kept Atari relevant longer against the onslaught of newer systems.

Sega Genesis get's credited as being the first console aimed at making games for older kids and young adults. However if you look at the Super Charger lineup it's clear it's aimed at adults and older kids. I don't see parents buying a game called "Communist Mutants from Space" for their 6 year old kids same goes for "Suicide Mission". Those are awesome names but clearly not aimed at children. *I can see it already Mommy what does Suicide mean?*

In Brazil some companies got the inspiration to make add-on to load pirate Atari 2600 games from K7. Just don´t had any extra hardware.

The reason it works so well is that RAM was quicker to access than ROM. The biggest upshot of this is that instructions didn't take as long to execute. You can see the difference in the two maze games. Tunnel Runner just runs on a stock ROM cartridge. As each pixel had to effectively be drawn manually as the electron beam went across the screen, the longer it took to fetch the instruction and execute it, the longer it would take to draw the pixel and the further than the electron beam will have moved in that time. This led to the wider pixels in Tunnel Runner. On the Starpath game, because it didn't take as long to draw the pixel, the electron beam hadn't travelled so far and so the resolution was higher. But, yes, a lot of the power of the Supercharger seems to have been ignored for the most part. Even Frogger doesn't make use of the potential for higher resolution. It seems to me that they only really used the RAM for music and colour information in that game.

Hello. Thank God I found your channel!!!!!! Very good video, man. Nostalgia to see the Atari 2600. If you knew about this type of Cartridges. It would be excellent if you make a video about Taiwan Copper cartridges and their horrible covers, or also about the CRASH OF VIDEOGAMES. Excuse my english. Greetings from Perú.

In Brazil we had a Supercharger with Activision's games. And with Atari original's games. I had one and it was fantastic! The cassete tapes had diferent prices, because we had "golden" games and "silver" games. Good times....

I had a Supercharger before the fire. I'd like to get this thing again.

Never heard of this. Definitely a nice upgrade for back then!

Honestly really enjoy your content man. Keep it up! And thanks!

The “6K of Ram” was mostly for Rom emulation. I have 2 of the Starpath units. By the 90s you could run a program on PC that would convert most cartridges into a Starpath audio file. This was great for running home brew software on a real 2600. There was nothing about the Starpath version of frogger that couldn’t be done on a regular cartridge. The most interesting thing to do with the Starpath would be multi-load games, where you load levels progressively as you play the game.

Gotta have that backup mic running just in case

Always wondered how much the devs knew about frogs if they though putting them in water would kill them! 🐸☠🤣

the extra ram was mainly for storing the game from the cassette - in ram. But could be used for self modifying code and storage game variables.

One of the tremendous advantages of the supercharger from Starpath's point-of-view was rapid development. Their involvement in a 2600 games was late and short, but they still pumped out 10 games. Developers from other companies had to burn a cartridge prototype to test their work. At starpass they could use the much easier, simpler, and quicker method of writing to tape then using the supercharger to read it into a real 2600 and test it. What's more surprising than starpass failure in the market to me, is that third parties didn't buy up superchargers for development purposes. Even if you were going to sell your games as a cartridge, using a supercharger to develop the game offered tremendous advantages.

Great video! As a kid during this time, I remember seeing this and didn't know what it was. Add ons like this were a new concept back then and I didn't see any changes to the games at the time, but I don't think I saw the Frogger one as that would have impressed me for sure, Also like you said this came late in the life of the Atari, most gamers moved on to better consoles or like me to computers.

Supercharger has RAM, yes, but it's used to store the game once loaded from tape, much like a C64. The actual reason some games have better graphics is the Supercharger dev environment allowed faster testing hence they could be more experimental.

Even though bigger rom cartridges were coming out for the 2600 they were still only running on 128 Bytes of RAM or not much higher but with the Supercharger having 6 Kilobytes of RAM and using Cassette ROMs meant you could do games that were hundreds of Kilobytes in ROM size as a Cassette back then could hold up to a Megabyte of data or two this was an attempt to make the Atari 2600 more competitive with the upcoming third generation systems.

There may be a way to convert rom images of normal 2600 cartridges to load into a Super Charger. There's the Cuttle Cart which definitely can do that. Then there was the Krokodile Cart which connected to a computer with a serial cable. But the best one is the Harmony Cartridge that plays games from SD cards and supports up to 32 gig cards. It even runs the original Super Charger games (converted from audio to binary files).

All of the Supercharger games took advantage of the extra memory. Hint: the game had to be stored somewhere while it was being played... It's also possible for the games to benefit from the extra RAM without receiving the kind of graphical glowup Frogger did. For example, the communist mutant game's "replace the invaders" mechanic could have easily blown the 128 B RAM budget with the additional state that needs to be tracked. It took *significant* hackery to make 2600 games look good; it was pretty much all beam-racing all the time, which meant instructions had to be executed with precise timing. I can see how Starpath would want to showcase a few graphically impressive games and then have a few others that had interesting mechanics but maybe didn't try so hard on the graphics if doing so took enough effort to detract from the game's other interesting qualities.

Ok , I am new here and I feel right at home . Subscribed !!!!

So like, how did the casette tapes load? Did you just plug the supercharger into the atari and insert the rewound casette and it automatically played, how long were the load times and was there a loading screen similar to commodore 64? Did the tapes automatically stop playing once the game data was loaded, could you have multiple games on a single cassette that load at a specific time if you wrote them down? Like fast forward to 4 minutes 38 seconds to play the next game?

It might have been the reason they only made 10 games for was due to the fact that the super charger unit cost 2/3 the amount of the 2600 itself. Im sure it was a horrible realization after a really good idea. Still, itz so awesome to dig up all these "quirks and features" of one of the greatest consoles in video game history.

I also got Survivor Island in the mail..no artwork, no box, just a white cassette that said Survivor Island...LOL Loved it!

The Starpath Supercharger was like the N64 Expansion Pack but on steroids. Incredible innovation for its time. Great video Pojr!

6KB in those days meant 6KiB = 6 * 1024 = 6144 bytes divided by 128 bytes equals exactly 48 times as much RAM, not 49.

I feel Dragon Stomper is a great example of the Supercharger

Oh, the Starpath stuff was just awesome. This Frogger version is one of my most favorite ever! It is impressive what they were able to do with the additional RAM and taking advantage of the multi-load feature to make even larger games.

I didn't know you were the CEO of Starpath! 😋 🤣

You missed big detail about the extra memory. The Super Charger had to have the ram because it loads the program from the cassette to the memory. With a cart, it has the program in the rom. The only difference between ram and rom is one can be used to store information and one can only be read from. Now take a 4K cart put it on a cassette, you will have to load that 4k to ram somewhere so the computer has access to it. the computer cannot run just from a cassette, it has to load it into memory. Compare it to a 4k cart and you have an extra 2k of memory, but compare it to a later 8k cart and you have 2 k less memory. It really doesn't matter if it's ram or rom, it's all memory to the computer. 128 bytes are a lot to hold variables that the game changes - which is only stuff like score, sprite locations, health screen locations, there is not a lot that needs to be stored that changes.

Tunnel Runner wasn't a regular 2600 game, it was a "RAM Plus" game that had 256 bytes of extra RAM in the cartridge.

I had this as a kid and YES the games were superior and goddamn amazing! It blew my young mind to see the amazing graphics on the Atari VCS! They are still fun to play to this day!

If I had a PBros cart of Frogger as well as the Supercharger back in the day, I still would not want to wait for that SP tape to load up….

Atari had a custom chip they put in several game cartridges called the SARA. This chip provided an extra 128 bytes of RAM and (I think) bank switching. Defender II was among the 14 games that had this chip. So that's potentially the reason why Defender II was superior to 1, and competed with the supercharger version so well. It was also an 8K ROM, so it had more space for program code than Defender did. If I were Activision, and my choice was between developing games for the Starpath and the small amount of people that had it, or developing a custom chip to add some extra capability to the Atari 2600, I'd go with the extra chip.

Hi, the difference in games. An 6k mult-banked rom, is going be the same as 6k of ram most of the time, as the graphics were simple. The original Frogger appears to use very little room for the graphics, and require similar size rom or ram. They are basically but pattern drawing routines on the 2600, and I would not be surprised if a rom version could be done identically. In those days the cost of the rom chip was a major factor. What size was Frogger, 1 or 2k? Once bigger roms were used, starpath would offer little advantage, however if they had had foresight to offer the cart at low enough cost, and games at $5-$10, they could have made a killing. If they had made the ram socketed upgradable, and had a socket for future custom chip to add some extra graphics, as PLD's were becoming popular, and might serve such a purpose. Then things could have been a lot better. Unfortunately, atari didn't use a processor with a bigger bus, and a little more of most things with backwards compatibility in mind, then a successor to the Atari 2600 would have been easier by 1980. I've been contemplating how to make primitive home computer like graphics on an Atari 2600. But, a game like sonic is likely possible using the new graphics technique, but using the 2600's resolution. But, very intensive big memory requirements.

I never saw anything about this in the 80's and I bought gaming magazines at the grocery store whenever I saw them... wild. I don't know. I recall two things about the atari 2600 the most... the left hand palm pain from playing with the joy stick for too long and after the crash you could get bargain bin games at the convenience store for just a couple bucks... that's how I managed to amass a bunch of games because there's no way I could afford the original retail price. For me though, the commodore 64 was riiiiiight around the corner and holy cats that was the ultimate gaming unit for me at the time.

If you see what was done with the Commodore 64 you can see what the 6502 compatible processor is capable of. A good programmer could seriously create remarkable stuff for it. The 2600 uses a version of the 6502.

I found communist mutants from space when I was a trash man. Never knew what the heck it was for! Until now!!

There's parts where graphics go invisible. I suspect they're not fully invisible in person, but blinking on and off due to the 2600's limited sprite and background graphics, am I right about that? Speculating that that's the case, I'll take a guess that this video would have been better if it were captured at 60fps.

Nice idea, a pity it was a missed opportunity. I remember it caused quite a buzz when it came out here in the UK.

starpath was really clever. I'm surprised nobody else tried this. I wish the 7800 and 5200 would've been combined. Idk why atari didn't just put a TIA in the 5200 to begin with

hey, this Arcadia company was mentioned in the "making of Imagic" documentary

I can explain how the supercharger was invented: Their engineers were more clever than their marketers or accountants. Not that it failed, but that nobody else made any games for it.

Are there any games from the recent homebrew scene for this hardware add-on?

You dontexplain how long the casette takes to load the 6kb? Did the rom in the supercharger have a turbo load? What a pity the supercharger didnt have an expansion slot too for a super cpu rapidus stylee!

8:42 it looks like it's in interlaced mode. Stella does not support interlace. At the end of a game of Star Raiders, you can't read the rating. Z26 solves this problem. IDK if Z26 supports Supercharger, though.

I bought one of these when the 2600 market started tanking. I paid $15 for the supercharger and 8 of the games for $5 each. It was worth it.

What a cool add on. That version of frogger looks and sounds awesome. Great video. The communist game and the defender clone both look cool as well as the rabbit game.

I remember seeing this is the store and wanting it before the Video Game crash, then I never saw it again.

I remember seeing the title Communist Mutants from Outer Space back in the day, but I didn't know there was a RAM expander associated with it.

Damn, I was hoping that it was because the programmers were so good, but in fact it turns out that they just had more powerful hardware. 6kb vs 128 bytes is a HUGE difference, and this directly impacts graphics and logic, everything.

There were actually 12 games. 10 sold at retail, and two that were mail order only. Sword of Soros and Survival Island had to be ordered via mail