Atari Video Computer System / 2600

CUTTLE CART

· Several different versions of the PlayBin audio converter software exist, in an effort to correct various incompatibility issues (ex: the manual bank-switching option doesn’t work in v2.0; v2.1 corrects this, as well as problems with Berzerk and Gunfight). The latest (and likely last) version is 2.3.

· The Cuttle Cart differs from an actual system with how it sets the state of the processor flags and the 2600's internal RAM. With a standard cart, when you plug it in and turn on the 2600, the RAM will be in a random state; the state of processor flags in a real system are unknown, but it’s assumed they come up in a known state. The Cuttle Cart, in order to properly play the Supercharger games, puts a portion of the RAM into a known state when it starts the loaded game. It also sets the processor flags differently than set on a 2600 hard reset. This preset condition will not affect most games, as they're not actively seeking out these values, but with games that rely on a RAM value being random to initialize a random number seed, the seed value would always be the same.  Games currently known to exhibit different behavior are Allia Quest (slightly more aggressive aliens) and Blue Print (generates different patterns).  This inherent difference can be (and has been) used by programmers to make their games incompatible on Cuttle Carts.  More information can be found in Chad Schell's post on StellaList: http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/200202/msg00027.html

· Depending on how the ‘transmit empty pages’ function is set, PlayBin has an option to skip "empty" data pages to speed up the transfer process. Any games that have empty pages where all the bytes are set to $00 will be affected if this option is enabled.  So far, only Xevious is known to show noticeable differences (see the Easter egg entry for more information).


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