I didn't know if I should post this in the "nostalgia" section or not, but here we go:

I've been learning some Atari programming for fun. NES is great, but I wanted something more simple, yet still challenging.
I would like to eventually burn my games to an cartridge. From what I've read, the older games were either 2 or 4K as the 6507
couldn't support much ROM. Later they had bank-swappable carts but I haven't gotten that far in my projects yet.

I was hoping someone here might know what kind of (E)EPROM to use, and what kind of wiring would need to take place for the cart.

Thanks

_________________
http://www.thestarrlab.com

_________________
http://www.thestarrlab.com

Since nobody else has pitched in, and your last message is not precisely interpretable...

Atariage.com has schematics for the 2600 and the basic carts. Use whatever large-enough EEPROM you have, tying the extra address lines on the chip to something useful (5v or ground, your call), and make a custom PCB. Or de-solder the ROM from an existing cart and wire up whatever adaptor you need using perfboard. Or find a suitably-sized pin-compatible EEPROM chip. As I said, cart schematics are available from atariage.com.

This isn't like the NES which has a non-standard pin spacing on the edge connector, two complete memory busses, plus a lockout chip, a virtual requirement that any hacked board fit in the original case in order to clear the top of the cart port, and almost no boards having EEPROM-compatible pinouts on the ROMs. It's 24 pins at a standard spacing, power, two grounds, eight data bits, and a bunch of address lines. You just wire the high address line as your ROM /CE or /OE, tie the two grounds together, and that's just about all the trickery you have to deal with.

I hope that this helps,

-- Alastair Bridgewater

Thank you Alastair. (The cricket picture symbolized the lack of comments, as in "crickets")

That is a good site, I'll have to do some research I suppose.

_________________
http://www.thestarrlab.com

In case you are still looking for information, traditionally 27 series EPROMs are used to make new cartridges. There are a lot of different options though, if you are just looking to test on real hardware. Some are:

- Starpath/Arcadia Supercharger: RAM cartridge from back in the day with a cassette interface which can be hooked up to a PC's headphone jack. A program called makewav is used to turn 2K or 4K ROMs into an audio file that you play which the cartridge translates and downloads to the RAM.

- Cuttle Cart: This is a now somewhat rare homebrew cartridge that is similar to the Supercharger, but the RAM is 64K and it supports many bankswitching methods. Not being produced any more

- Krokodile Cartridge: a flash cart that communicates with an RS-232 serial port. Supports 512K ROM and 32K RAM if I recall correctly. No longer produced.

- Harmony Cartridge: a 'flash' cartridge built around an ARM microcontroller. From what I understand, the MCU monitors the address bus and supplies the data bus with the correct byte. The MCU can also offload tasks from the 6507 and assist in various ways. 32K ROM, 2K RAM. Still produced, website here: http://harmony.atariage.com/

If you want to hack up an old PCB and use (E)EPROMs, the original Atari mask ROMs have the same pinout as a 2532 but are active high rather than active low.

You should definitely check out AtariAge as suggested, there's a lot of great info and people willing to help you out.

Wow -- I actually remember the Supercharger. A friend of mine had one for his 2600. Haven't thought of that thing in years.