Re: 2600 Development System???

[xx382@freenet.carleton.ca (Marc Sira)]

In our last episode, krishna@primenet.com (Glenn Saunders) said:

>The more popular FROB was (unfortunately) for the Apple II.  This was the
>one that they actually sold to the general public.  The Apple II was also
>used to assemble Starpath Supercharger programs, because it had an
>optional tape interface available for it which was useful for encoding
>tapes.

Nope, it had a built-in tape interface, and monitor ROM routines to
read and write (later included as the SAVE/LOAD commands in AppleSoft
BASIC). Unfortunately, my IIgs has neither the ROM routines nor the
tape jack (you can hardly blame Apple for this, though you can blame
them for so much else).

Does anyone know whether the Supercharger software is written to tape
in some custom manner, or just using the same technique as the monitor
"W" and "R" commands? If the latter, one could get binary images of
the Supercharger software pretty easily using a ][ and a tape deck.
If the former, it's only slightly more difficult (a question of
getting the software Starpath used, hopefully to be included on the
Supercharger CD).

My bet is that they just used the monitor routines; why write new
tape routines? The builtins write out (and recognise) a "training
pattern" like the one I've seen mentioned in Supercharger discussions,
and otherwise just dump a specified section of memory to tape: exactly
what a Supercharger needs (presumably a 6K dump).

--
Marc Sira			|
ub675@freenet.victoria.bc.ca	|  "Your god drinks...p-p-peach nectar!"
{aa,xx}382@freenet.carleton.ca	'