This is exceedingly cool use of cartridges. Just as a thought experiment I've often wondered if some of the cartridge based consoles could be expanded considerably. Along the lines of this project, would it be possible to throw an arm chip in a cart and send these as h.264? I'm not at a computer but would love to see how differently some modern codecs compress.
This is exactly the sort of gem I love to find occasionally on HN.
Done not for money, but, if I may paraphrase George Mallory, because the challenge was there.
Someone had to do it.
Outstanding! And props to the author for creating a 2600-style manual for this with "The Jerk" (Steve Martin at his finest) on the front cover and "more great titles to add to your collection" on the back, including Star Wars and Kramer vs. Kramer. I'm curious why he chose "Model CX2615" for this though. That was "Demons to Diamonds" and was released in 1982, though his manual clearly shows "(c) 1977 ATARI, INC."
So the cartridge is the computer and basically treats the console as a dumb display? That's not as exciting as I was hoping.
Now, if we just add Sloot's compression technique, we can include an entire movie library on a single cartridge! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System
About four hours of total content from 4GB is really nice. The cartridges seem to go for $25. This is a cool medium to explore. Gonna have to put me on one of these.
Iām impressed! The way the 2600 does graphics I would have thought this to be impossible but you did it!
See also: the port of Dragon's Lair to the TI-99/4A.
Keeping it period accurate.. 7 more years until cloak and dagger would come out!
I wonder if this would run properly on a moded Atari Flashback 2...
Wow very cool
I love the absolutely crazy things happening in the retrocomputing space right now. We have these chips with many, many orders of magnitude more computing power available for peanuts, and the obvious thing to do is apparently to cram them into these ancient machines for fun.
Throwing a bunch of compute into a cart and using the "real" computer as a very bad GPU is such a fun idea.