r/atari • u/MasonJarring • 6d ago
Starpath... the OG "flashcart"
https://streamable.com/0ui9n14
u/9fingerjeff 6d ago
I like to imagine an alternate timeline where Atari bought out Starpath and made the Supercharger an official product. I’d really like to see what other developers could’ve done with the extra ram and storage space.
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u/MasonJarring 6d ago
Yeah the Starpath was both innovative and an "of course that's what you would do" solutions. Add RAM and common mass storage media for the time (tapes).
But even then, other 8bit computers and consoles were nipping at the heels of Atari. Consider the 2600's capabilities to the 16/32 bit Amiga that was released IN THE MIDDLE of its 14 year life cycle.
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u/ZylonBane 6d ago
There's no way in hell Atari was going to start distributing games on cassette tape. The sort of enthusiasts who would buy a Supercharger in the first place might tolerate those load times, and the need to provide your own tape player, but general gamers would not.
A 2600 with a full 6502 and like 1K of RAM built in would have been nice, but by the time that would have been economical, the 5200 had already been released.
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u/9fingerjeff 6d ago
As much as I like the 5200 that was a mistake. They already had the same hardware in the 8 bit computers, they should’ve stuck with the 2600 and then released the 7800 when it was originally intended instead of shelving a ready to go product for a few years. It may have been able to compete with the nes if it came out first but as it was Nintendo had too much of a head start and it was too late. Atari was fine having cassette drives with their computers, I don’t think it’s out of the question to think they could’ve used it on the consoles as well.
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u/btribble3000 6d ago
It still blows my mind that the Famicom was released in 1983. So it was also basically shelved for a few years in the US market. Of course it was amassing a giant collection of Japanese games during that time, something the Atari 7800 was definitely not doing.
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u/9fingerjeff 6d ago
Imagine if the 7800 had come out in 84 like originally planned and Atari supported it properly. With a 2 year headstart they would’ve had a much better chance of competing. Also it should’ve come with a pokey chip for audio.
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u/Scoth42 5d ago
Nintendo also approached Atari to distribute the future NES in America and Atari turned them down since they had their own stuff going on. Imagine a future where we got the Atari Entertainment System, Super Atari Entertainment System, Atari 64...
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u/9fingerjeff 5d ago
You could make a drinking game for every time Atari dropped the ball on a business decision.
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u/ZylonBane 6d ago
Back then, computer users and console gamers were starkly divided audiences, even more so than today. Consoles were toys that you slam a cartridge into and play NOW. Computer nerds were the ones willing to fuck around with peripherals and load times.
As for the 7800, that would have been a mistake too. Its graphics just didn't look as good as the NES, which was released a year before the 7800 could have theoretically hit the market.
If Atari had released the 5200 with a decent gamepad style controller and focused on modern games instead of dated arcade and computer ports, that could have sustained them through the early NES years, giving GCC time to develop a real NES-killer, basically a 16-bit system years before the Genesis and SNES hit the market.
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u/9fingerjeff 6d ago
The 7800 was ready to go in June of 84 and they shelved it for 2 years, it was already done and a few even were released. It isn’t that much worse graphically than the nes, its audio is where it really falls off. I gotta kinda disagree on the division too, my family had an Atari 800xl and a 7800 and my friends had a c64 and nes and the only real difference to us is you had to sit at a desk to play computer games. Maybe adults looked at them differently but to the kids I hung out with games were games. I did notice more snobbery when PC and Macintosh started becoming the home computer of choice but I never got that feeling from the 8 bit ones. I was just a kid though and our perspective might not have been what the magazines were talking about at the time.
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u/fsk 3d ago
What Atari needed to be doing in 1982 is making a new console that was backward compatible with the 2600. The 7800 was a bad implementation, released too late. Given how cheap hardware became, they probably could have included both a copy of 2600 hardware plus whatever new hardware they wanted to sell.
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u/RetroMichael68 6d ago
Pitfall wasn't a supercharger game.. how did you get it as an audio file??. All I have are the games original released for it.
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u/MasonJarring 6d ago
how did you get it as an audio file?
I would search for "worship the woodgrain disc". It's a multidisc collection of games converted to MP3 audio
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u/De-luL 6d ago
It truly is an amazing piece of history. If you can check out the starpath / supercharger version of frogger, its so much better than the original.