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konsumer / dkart

An open-hardware and software Gameboy flash-cart and hardware peripheral framework
MIT License
28 stars 2 forks source link

Adaptation #2

Open danfayal opened 2 years ago

danfayal commented 2 years ago

Hello, Sir! How are you? Is there a possibility to adapt this idea for a video game like the Atari 2600?
Thank you in advance for your attention.

konsumer commented 2 years ago

Sounds interesting!

I have no experience with this, but I think it might be (tricky but) possible. The main trick is sending "commands" to the microcontroller (that serves up the SD card) via particular memory-locations.

You'd have to write game-side logic to push data to the "command location" similar to this (which is for gameboy, so you'd have to use another address, I'm sure): https://github.com/konsumer/dkart/blob/master/software/dkart.c#L19-L20 then trigger a reset, so when it reads from the cart, the correct ROM code can be served. if you can do that in an atari game, then it should work fine.

First step is maybe just verifying you can read/write some memory, and reset in atari ASM, then make a lil menu that can run on atari.

Looking into it, I think 128 bytes of RAM is going to be incredibly hard to work with. Maybe doable, but dang that sounds really challenging. The 7800 has similar hardware, but more RAM, so seems like it might be a bit more doable. I came across this.