GENERAL QUESTIONS
GENERAL STARPATH SUPERCHARGER QUESTIONS
2.1 What is the Starpath Supercharger?
2.2 Whatever happened to Starpath?
2.3 How can I find a Supercharger today?
STARPATH SUPERCHARGER CD (STELLA GETS A NEW BRAIN) QUESTIONS
3.1 What is the background on the hobby Starpath CD project?
3.2 Why was it done?
3.3.1 What was on it? (general)
3.3.2 Starpath Catalog/CD Table of contents (specific)
3.4 How was it done?
3.5 How do I find one? How much?
SUPERCHARGER/2600 PROGRAMMING QUESTIONS
4.1 What do I need to begin?
4.2 Is there a mailing list of programmers?
4.3 Are there any URLs with useful information?
QUESTIONS REGARDING THE FALLOUT OF THE CD's RELEASE
5.1 Does this mean the Starpath games are public domain?
5.2 Did any magazines write about it?
5.3 Did you ever find a PAL Survival Island?
5.4.1 What are the long-range goals of the mailing list?
5.4.2 The 1st Annual Stella Game Programming Contest!
5.4.3 What's happening on the list right now? What's been completed?
5.5 I heard that a commercial CD was planned? Will it ever come out?
QUESTIONS ABOUT THE 2600 DOCUMENTARY "STELLA AT 20"
6.1 Why did you decide to do this project?
6.2 What is the focus, or thesis, of this piece?
6.3 How did you locate all the programmers?
6.4 What is the status on it?
GENERAL QUESTIONS
Essentially Cyberpunks is a codename for four people, myself (Glenn Saunders), Russ Perry Jr., Dan Skelton, and Jim Nitchals who engage in telecommuting-style game-related projects part-time over the internet. The Starpath CD was our first completed project, and hopefully not the last.
The basic division of labor is:
Glenn Saunders (cybpunks@hotmail.com)
Russ Perry Jr. (slapdash@enteract.com)
Dan Skelton (dskelton@accesscom.net)
Bradford Mott (bwmott@eos.ncsu.edu)
Jim Nitchals (Jim Passed away in 1998)
Below you can read the Starpath story, the hobby CD's evolution, it's aftermath, and what lies ahead...
2.1 What is the Starpath Supercharger?
The Supercharger was made by Arcadia (who was later forced to change their name to Starpath). It is an extremely long cartridge, longer than a Xonox double-ender. The Supercharger has a blue label on it. The end of the cartridge (the end which doesn't plug into the 2600) is a large handle. Coming out of one side of the cartridge is a cord, ending in a plug which can plug into any cassette player's earphone jack.
Basically, then, the Supercharger is a giant cartridge which connects to any cassette player.
The games for the Supercharger are not cartridges. They're normal audio cassettes. Needless to say, that allows for a lot more program space. The Supercharger cartridge interface itself has 6K RAM. Games have to run from RAM rather than ROM because the memory has to get written-to every time you load in new games. The result is twelve games which are superior to a lot of other 2600 games. Dragonstomper and Escape From the Mindmaster are two of the best. These two and Survival Island in particular take advantage of the ability to save portions of the Starpath memory and load in new data for new levels. These are known as 'multiloaders'.
Since the games can be copied, we put them all on a single CD.
For the game list, read section 3.3.2.
The end of Starpath: apparently some "firm commitments" for sales didn't come through, and they ran out of money. At roughly the same time Epyx lost a lot of staff who formed another company. Since they shared some common investors, the two companies merged in November of 1983. Later Epyx went bankrupt too, but before doing so Atari had gained exclusive usage rights to all Epyx games for Atari systems (hence XEGS Ballblazer, etc..) but the official corpse of Epyx was bought by Bridgestone Multimedia. Bridgestone owns the copyrights of Epyx and retroactively Starpath. Atari still retains exclusive usage rights (in theory) and therefore had to be consulted to avoid litigation.
What happened to Sweat? The market was crashing, Starpath didn't have any $$, Eventually inspired Epyx's Summer Games but only a few basic Starpath routines were kept.
The mail order games: At the end, Starpath needed to get rid of stock (to pay bills no doubt), so they sold everything to A&B Sales, who got the up-til-then unreleased Swords Of Saros and Survival Island. These never had boxes or "normal" instructions and were shipped in a baggie.
3.1 What is the background on the hobby Starpath CD project?
As time went on, I really became more interested in the odds of encouraging further programming of the 2600 so that this project shifted beyond mere preservation to a big experiment to see whether there is any enthusiasm left to push the boundaries of the 2600, since this system is absolutely ideal in the 90's to program and distribute 2600 games.
With this system, it is truly possible to develop easy-to-distribute shareware games on the internet just as easily as for other home computers: through traditional binary files.
The 2600 has now become an "open" system, as programmable as any [less than 8K] home-computer. Even more "open" than the Astrocade with it's crippled 1800 byte basic implementation w/tape. Multiloads open the possibility for more complex games than are possible in just 6K RAM. Random-Access (CD or via computer) make mega-load (dozens or hundreds of loads) finally practical and less painful to play. Imagine complex RPGs, Lode Runner clones, multi-wave scrollers, and so on. The CD and the resulting mailing list (read on) are all there to encourage programming. Give it a shot.
The title for this project???
Named after the internal Atari codename of the 2600 VCS chipset.
This CD acts as a standalone audio-CD, but also has an ISO-9660 data portion readable by a CD-ROM. Included on this data portion are a lot of image files as well as some development software which allows you to talk to the Supercharger to write your own games. A Vectrex portion includes high-quality cleaned-up overlay scans (much better than what you can find on the net) and legal ROM dumps, and more.
And don't forget the booklet. It is 4.25x5.5" in size, with an intro from Steve Hales, instructions, reviews, color cover and backcover, and more. The first 100 or so booklets were hand-initialed by Steve Hales. The pressing was limited to 400 units, about 350 of which were sold to consumers, the rest reserved as personal backups by the "Cyberpunks".
This CD is not for use with emulators. This is not an emulation! This CD is primarily an audio-CD to replace original Arcadia/ Starpath audio tapes and MUST be used with a genuine Starpath Supercharger cartridge and Atari 2600-compatible console (2600, 2600 jr., most 7800s, and so on). There is a data portion which requires a computer w/CD-ROM to use, but the computer will always only be a cross-compiler and file-server for the actual Atari 2600 hardware. Neat, huh?
| TITLE | PROGRAMMERS | BOXID# | CAT# |
| Supercharger + Phaser Patrol | Craig Nelson + Dennis Caswell | 1 | AR-4000 |
| Communist Mutants From Space | Stephen Landrum | 2 | AR-4101 |
| Fireball | Scott Nelson | 3 | AR-4300 |
| Suicide Mission | Steve Hales, Steve Landrum | 4 | AR-4102 |
| Escape from the Mindmaster | Dennis Caswell | 5 | AR-4200 |
| Dragonstomper (orig Labyrinth) | Steve Landrum | 6 | AR-4200 |
| Killer Satellites | Kevin Norman | 7 | AR-4103 |
| Rabbit Transit | Brian McGhie | 8 | AR-4104 |
| The Official Frogger By Sega | Steve Landrum | 9 | AR-4105 |
| Party Mix | Dennis Caswell | 10 | AR-4430 |
| Sword Of Saros (orig Excalibur) | Jon Leupp? | 11 | AR-4201 |
| Survival Island (orig Jungle) | Scott Nelson | 12 | AR-4401 |
| Sweat! (Beta) | Scott Nelson | N/A | N/A |
Bonuses included:
All known "preview" demo versions:
Commie Mutants
Fireball
Suicide Mission
Mindmaster
Dragonstomper
Killer Satellites
Rabbit Transit
Frogger
Party Mix *
Legally included Polo proto *
Dragonstomper beta "Excalibur" *
Suicide Mission beta "Meteroids" * +
Ed Federmeyer's SoundX utility *
* = NTSC only
+ = closest thing to vector asteroids you'll get on the 2600.
TV STANDARDS DEFINED:
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Believe me, it's a long story and I don't even remember the whole thing.
It was sold for only $15 plus shipping.
It is sometimes up for auction on RGVC.
There were only 350 made. Each has a hand-written serial number in either silver or gold ink.
A new version with slightly different content was released at CG Expo 99 and is now available. There should be enough to meet any future demand.
Bob Colbert (hatchets buried permanently, knock on wood) is currently supporting his own standalone freeware program called "makewav". If you are an Amiga owner like myself, makewav is the only choice for you. If you are a PC owner, you may also want to use makewave over bin2tape. For instance, due to CD pressing concerns, most the .BINs on the data portion of the Supercharger CD are padded to 32K. I don't believe the current version of bin2tape will read these effectively. Makewav will! Makewav has other compatibility enhancements and optional flags as well. Check it out.
Both bin2tape and makewav can be used to send preexisting 2 and 4K ROM dumps of commercial cartridges to the supercharger, although I do not endorse this if it is used for piracy.
Bob Colbert's Cheetah program can be used in conjunction with this to modify games for infinite lives, etc similar to Game Genie. Since some commercial games bang on the Supercharger bank select register, causing crashes, Bob Colbert designed a hardware modification which write-protects the Supercharger RAM and allows most incompatible games to run.
Relevant 2600 programming information and support files to be found at this URL:
You can subscribe and unsubscribe through a web interface as well.
This is an Atari 2600 programming cooperative and discussion group. Beta-test source code and binaries are often published here.
Past archives are also available in a searchable interface.
So, if you wanna code, get a Supercharger, get the software, and get onto the stella list. Even if you plan on coding via an emulator a Supercharged 2600 is important to verify the integrity of your games. Many games will run fine on emulators but screw up on authentic 2600s. Even if you intend to distribute via cart it's much more convenient to debug with a Supercharger. No more test-EPROM burns...
5.1 Does this mean the Starpath games are public domain?
Also the developer software should not be used as a pirating device. This would defeat the purpose of including "DEVELOPER" software.
(stepping off the soap-box)
I got an e-mail from a guy named Chris Hind who claimed to own an honest-to-goodness PAL version of Survival Island. We were skeptical because we had gotten our hands on one before that was labelled as a PAL version but upon decoding turned out to be byte-identical to the NTSC version (as odd as that sounds).
We then assumed that there never was a true PAL version of Survival Island. It turns out that we were wrong. This game must be pretty rare in Europe because despite all the exposure on r.g.v.c. it's taken this long for anyone to come forward with a genuine PAL Survival Island, and it's unfortunate that this game did not make it onto the official CD. But it is fortunate that the Arcadia/Starpath catalog has been properly archived in its entirety down to every single byte of released code, remaining betas and source, and the vast majority of the released printed material (a little more of this has surfaced as well).
If you are one of the handful of Supercharger CD owners who use PAL televisions, please email me (cybpunks@hotmail.com) and I'll see about sending you the 3 loads in .BIN form which you can then run makewav or bin2tape on to generate a viable WAV file. I'm not putting these up on an ftp or web server because these games remain copyrighted outside of the domain of the Supercharger CD. That also means you should reserve it for personal use only.
If you contacted me in the past and I didn't get it to you, contact me again. I have the .BINs.
Ever since the Starpath Supercharger CD was released in late 1996 I had wanted to sponsor a contest to encourage programming but I had no way to provide a suitable prize.
All this changed when I shot at Nolan Bushnell's home for my documentary in the summer of 1997. I printed out a special "Happy 20th Birthday to Stella" signature certificate on parchment-style paper which has the following autographs:
Only 4 of these certificates exist.
Piero Cavina won for his excellent game, Oystron.
No contest was announced for subsequent years, unfortunately, since no games were completed via the list. The only new games that surfaced were the mysterious THE CORE, as well as Eric Bacher's ALFRED'S CHALLENGE, Merlin's Walls, and Pesco, created independent of the list. See below for more recent developments.
There have been many technical demos created on the list such as text scrollers, and a cool flickering moving dual six-char which was intended to be used for a 2D fighter type game. The latter turned into an Amiga Boing ball demo, quite impressive. Most recently (2/2000) a Gravitar-like game was completed that is probably already worthy of an award, but some say the difficulty needs to be ramped down a bit.
You can purchase cartridge versions of most of these programs at Hozer Video.
Some links to the binaries are available through Nick Bensema's 2600 site.
6.1 Why did you decide to do this project?
The thesis is similar to an IEEE article from 1983 which states that the 2600 survived well beyond anyone's expectations due to its amazing flexibility, which was exploited by some very creative programmers. In addition, the piece will focus on the changes in the industry from the perspective of those who helped to create it.
Along the way we will learn the genesis of the machine and the games that made it famous and kept it alive for 14 years.
As for style, I'd like it to be visually exciting, not just simple talking heads. Lots of animations, sound effects and music, screenshots of the games, pan and scan on old photos (Ken Burns effect), and so on.
The focus has shifted somewhat, away from individual interviews and more towards a pure roundtable, casual chat approach. This has resulted in much more candid, looser conversations which, though harder to edit, are more of what I'm looking for, since more of the personality of each person comes through this way.
See the NEWS section for all future Cyberpunks updates. As a result, this FAQ will no longer be added to, only maintained with updated links and information. Future products will have their own support pages.
-fin