The Starpath Supercharger (originally called the Arcadia Supercharger) is an expansion peripheral cartridge created by

Starpath Starpath was a U.S. company known for creating the Starpath Supercharger in August 1982. The company was founded under the name Arcadia Corporation in 1981 by Alan Bayley, Robert Brown, and Craig Nelson. It changed its name to Starpath shortly ...

, for playing cassette-based proprietary games on the

Atari 2600 The Atari 2600, initially branded as the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS) from its release until November 1982, is a home video game console developed and produced by Atari, Inc. Released in September 1977, it popularized microprocesso ...

video game console A video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home consoles, which are generally placed in a permanent location connected to a ...

. The device consists of a long cartridge with a handle on the end, and an audio cassette cable. It adds 6 KB to the Atari 2600's 128

byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

s of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * Raj ...

(increasing it 49-fold to 6,272 bytes of RAM), allowing for the creation of specially compatible games which are larger and have higher resolution graphics than normal cartridges. A cable coming out of the side of the cartridge plugs into the

earphone Headphones are a pair of small loudspeaker drivers worn on or around the head over a user's ears. They are electroacoustic transducers, which convert an electrical signal to a corresponding sound. Headphones let a single user listen to an au ...

jack of any standard cassette player, for loading all Supercharger games from standard audio cassettes.

Games

All Supercharger games were developed by Starpath. ;Initial releases Listed in order of release: #'' Phaser Patrol'' #'' Communist Mutants from Space'' #'' Fireball'' #''

Suicide Mission A suicide mission is a task which is so dangerous for the people involved that they are not expected to survive. The term is sometimes extended to include suicide attacks such as kamikaze and suicide bombings, whose perpetrators actively commit s ...

'' #''

Escape from the Mindmaster ''Escape from the MindMaster'' was a video game for the Starpath Supercharger addon for the Atari 2600 published in 1982 by Starpath. ''Escape from the MindMaster'' utilizes a tape cassette through the Starpath Supercharger. This is used to b ...

'' (prototype is called ''Labyrinth'') #'' Dragonstomper'' (prototype is called ''Excalibur'') #'' Killer Satellites'' #'' Rabbit Transit'' #''

Frogger is a 1981 arcade action game developed by Konami and manufactured by Sega. In North America, it was released by Sega/Gremlin. The object of the game is to direct a series of frogs to their homes by crossing a busy road and a hazardous river ...

, The Official'' #'' Party Mix'' ;Mail order releases These games were available only via mail order after Starpath declared bankruptcy. *'' Sword of Saros'' *''

Survival Island ''Survival Island'', also known as ''Three'', is a 2005 erotic thriller survival film written and directed by Stewart Raffill and starring Billy Zane, Kelly Brook, and Juan Pablo Di Pace. Plot Jack and Jennifer are a wealthy couple who are yach ...

'' ;Prototypes *'' Sweat: The Decathlon Game''The Dot Eaters - Epyx , The Dot Eaters
''Scott Nelson, one of the former Starpath programmers, had created a decathlon game for the Supercharger called Sweat!, but when the company merges with Epyx the project is shelved.'' *''Going Up??''

Compatibility

The Supercharger is compatible with

, Atari 2600 Jr., and the Sears Video Arcade consoles. Due to the shape of the Supercharger, it does not normally fit into the ColecoVision's Expansion Module #1, which is an adapter that allows the

ColecoVision ColecoVision is a second-generation home video-game console developed by Coleco and launched in North America in August 1982. It was released a year later in Europe by CBS Electronics as the CBS ColecoVision. The console offered a closer expe ...

to play

games. However, if the cover of the expansion module is removed or an extender is used, the Supercharger will work. Extenders were sent to customers who called Starpath about such issues. The Supercharger does not work on many

Atari 7800 The Atari 7800 ProSystem, or simply the Atari 7800, is a home video game console officially released by Atari Corporation in 1986 as the successor to both the Atari 2600 and Atari 5200. It can run almost all Atari 2600 cartridges, making it one ...

systems (which is typically backward compatible with the

), although it does with some early models of the system. After Atari installed a circuit to fix a compatibility issue with the 2600 version of '' Dark Chambers'', it subsequently caused incompatibility with the Supercharger and some other games that use the FE

bank switching Bank switching is a technique used in computer design to increase the amount of usable memory beyond the amount directly addressable by the processor instructions. It can be used to configure a system differently at different times; for exampl ...

method.

Reception

Danny Goodman of '' Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games'' said that the Supercharger's "graphics are something else", reporting that the diagonal lines in one game under development were among the smoothest he had seen in any console.

Legacy

The complete library of games, including the prototype ''Sweat'', was also released on audio CD as ''Stella Gets A New Brain'' by CyberPuNKS (Jim Nitchals, Dan Skelton, Glenn Saunders and Russ Perry Jr.). There are two releases, both sanctioned by

Atari Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French publisher Atari SA through a subsidiary named Atari Interactive. The original Atari, Inc., founded in Sunnyvale, Cali ...

and Bridgestone Multimedia, who had obtained the rights to the Starpath library some time ago. The first release is a limited number not-for-profit product, which also includes the previously unreleased

prototype, ''Polo'' by

Carol Shaw Carol Shaw (born 1955) is one of the first female game designers and programmers in the video game industry. She is best known for creating the Atari 2600 vertically scrolling shooter ''River Raid'' (1982) for Activision. She worked for Atari, Inc ...

. The second release includes the Supercharger prototypes ''Meteoroid'' (an early version of ''Suicide Mission'') and Excalibur (an early version of '' Dragonstomper''), in addition to a number of homebrew games by permission of their respective authors, and the song ''Atari 2600'' by Splitsville, fully licensed from the band.

References

External links

STARPATH/ARCADIA FAQ
last modified 1/5/1995

CYBERPUNKS" Project FAQ, last modified 3/5/2000 by Glenn Saunders {{Atari 2600 Atari 2600 Video game accessories