Whichever console you owned as a child, it’s hard to recall just how difficult it was to choose which of the many games available for your platform would be the one to ask for at Christmas or for a birthday. How I would struggle with the decision on how to spend my precious saved pocket money and how I dreamed of having all of those games.
That childhood dream may not be something that can come true however much I try to buy up a complete Atari 2600 collection but it is possible with the power of the internet and some 21st century hardware to have access to all of those games for cartridge-based consoles and also save on the wear and tear on precious cartridges and cartridge connectors.
For some platforms intrepid hardware engineers have created multi-carts with ROMs containing many or all games available for the system but these can be expensive and hard to come by as they are often available for only a short time in limited quantities. However in the past few years SD Card storage hardware has been created for most of the vintage game platforms. These allow you to use ROM images on your actual hardware and with the great increases in available storage capacity over the years typically provide enough storage to include every released game for a platform on a single SD or micro-SD card.
Mostly these flash storage solutions are old cartridge shells with the insides replaced with the modern circuit board and a slot cut in the shell to allow the SD-card to be inserted and removed. A menu screen is displayed when the console is switched on or reset that allows you to select the game required from those on the SD-card and the game is loaded from the storage card into the internal cartridge memory. From that point on the cartridge behaves exactly as the original game cartridge would. The cartridge ROM images are copied to the storage card by taking it out of the cartridge shell and using normal file copying on your more modern computer with SD-card reader.
There is of course the legal aspect to take into account and strictly speaking you should not be downloading and storing ROM images for cartridges you do not own unless they have been made freely available by the copyright owner. Having said this, ROM images for cartridges you do own are widely available and there is a very healthy homebrew scene producing some excellent work for old platforms that require these storage solutions to run on original hardware.
The three I will list here are examples I own and, I think, are good products from reliable sources. Expect to pay upwards of $100 for any of these as they are usually hand-made, often to order.
Harmony Cartridge (Atari VCS / 2600)
This cartridge is available with a 2GB card containing homebrew software, includes a Mini USB port for firmware updates and can also be used to run 2600 games on the compatible Atari 7800. 1GB will hold every 2600 title ever produced and all original games should work, the only titles with problems being some homebrew games over 32K in size. It even supports the cassette-based Supercharger games.
Colecovision Ultimate SD Cart (CBS Colecovision)
The Ultimate SD Cart from Atarimax runs all standard 32K or less ROMs and Mega-Cart bank-switched ROMs up to 512KB. It comes with two game digital editions, Mario Brothers and Mr Chin, pre-installed.
Everdrive
Everdrive is a family of superb SD cartridges for a number of consoles and they are available from a number of stockists linked from the creator’s website. Prices and stock levels vary so shop around.
There are currently versions for Nintendo’s NES/Famicom (also supporting the disk system ROMS), SNES, 64 (runs all games on all regions), Sega’s Master System, GameGear, Mega Drive (including 32X) and the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16. For some platforms, game saves are automatically backed-up to the SD card and Game Genie/Game Shark cheat codes are supported.
One thing to note for the N64 version is that you should buy one with the correct CIC security chip for your region pre-installed unless you are willing to take one from an N64 cartridge and solder it into the cartridge yourself.
For Vintage Computers?
There are also a number of Compact Flash and SD-card storage hardware solutions available for vintage computers. These tend to behave differently and vary greatly in function just because of the nature of the computers vs consoles and the significant differences between computer platforms in the pre-PC world, but that’s another story…
Even the much-mocked Mattel Aquarius has one! Here’s mine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLYeKoWyIz4
Not mocked by me! I own 2 boxed Aquarii myself. That cart would be useful, Aquarius software is hard to come by.
I don’t think its creator (Jay Snellen) is making them at this moment — demand is rather limited — but you can chat with him at AtariAge. He’s “jaybird3rd”.
You may also like this: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/213965-aquarius-stuff-from-boriels-zx-basic-compiler-first-attempt/
Anything for the Intellivision currently available? There used to be the Intellicart and the Cuttle Cart 3 CC3, but these are no longer available.
I only know of this announcement by Left Turn Only: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/227859-project-l/page-11#entry3036661
Not sure if it’s available yet though sorry.
You may also want to take a look at this potential release.
http://www.intellivisionrevolution.com/hive
There’s a thread at AtariAge that’s been around a while and there’s no release announced yet but it’s always looked promising.
That looks interesting Trev! I’ll keep my beadies on that.