Repoker de Ases ( game pack by 4Mhz )

[AHack]

Out of curiosity, I presume these cartriges could of been made in the 80s? But I guess it would of been too expensive back then... but it would of been nice if some company did a memory expander that had a cartrige slot built in, so that you could expand a 464 to 128k with the option of slotting in ROMs. Now that would of been a game changer back in the 80s. It sort of reminds me of the Mega-games that Imagine were working on back in the 80s.


Anyway, it did not happen but thinking about this it would be nice if someone built a memory expander that has the option to slot in a ROM cartrige. Doing it this way the ROM never needs to include RAM. I think an add-on like that would be a better benifit as a future format for game releases. As well as a ROM cartrige slot I would also include an option to allow a USB memory stick to be used. I would love a setup like that but have no skills to make it.

[TotO]

Anyway, it did not happen but thinking about this it would be nice if someone built a memory expander that has the option to slot in a ROM cartrige. Doing it this way the ROM never needs to include RAM. I think an add-on like that would be a better benifit as a future format for game releases. As well as a ROM cartrige slot I would also include an option to allow a USB memory stick to be used. I would love a setup like that but have no skills to make it.

http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/amstrad-cpc-hardware/ctc-ay-a-new-cpc-expansion-board!/

[Cholo]

at: Ahack: Quote "Out of curiosity, I presume these cartriges could of been made in the 80s?"
Ah yes, there was a fair bit of hardware like the dk'tronics modules, rom boards & similar plug-ins like audio/speech & cheat/poke extensions (like MF2). But never any game cartridges that i can recall. And it puzzled me for a while because other systems like c64 had carts & even a console like Sega Master System had not only the main cart port but also a "thin card" port too.


So it wasnt impossible price wise even though the cassette tape price of 1,99 pounds is a hard one to argue around, there is still the "instant loading"-luxurary of carts worth considering. So it clearly wasnt the price alone.


It wasnt untill 20 years later that i got a used c64 and finally understood why the Amstrad never had game carts. Still remember the first time i hooked up the 5,25" drive to the c64 and tried to run a game. 15 mins went and i though the loading had crashed, but another 2-3 mins and the loading stopped, that is where it began to uncompress the data. At that moment i realised the amstrad had something .. the amstrad 3" floppy drive loading most games in 30-40 seconds .. that made carts kinda pointless on the amstrad, but certainly a very easy sell on the c64 (along with speedloading carts and similar loading boosting hardware).


Why would anyone buy a locked cart of like a 64k byte game if you with a amstrad DF1/DDI have access to 2x 180kbyte that loads in seconds & that you can reuse/overwrite, add/delete to etc? People wont buy a expesive cart just to same 30 seconds. That being said one 3" floppy did cost nearly 10 pounds in Denmark &
didnt drop in price during the amstrad years (but did in UK i think). Later 3,5" and 5,25" amstrad floppy drives also loads at the same speed as 3" floppies.


So why didnt i realize this back in the 80'ies when i was a kid and only had the 464 and no disc drive? Well, most of the original cassette games i bought was usually "boosted" by using a fast loading protection like speedlock and the pirated games i got was usually equally optimized with baud 2000-2700 & speedloading (removes empty gaps between blocks) thus most games actually loaded in 7-8 ish mins and certainly no where close to the cruel pain that is the c64 normal port speed (300 baud? no offence ment to c64 people).


I guess this is also why silicon discs never got popular. And the Plus range may have had cart ports but then floppy storage had already reached 880k/720kb+ floopy storage. And the GX4000 .. well, its was just too late.

[AHack]

@Cholo That's all very interesting. I guess back then the publishers would not of justified the costs of producing a cart for a machine like the CPC because they considered it a porting platform for the Spectrum. In a way you probably needed the killer game for that. A game like Pinball Dreams could of been a game for cart but unfortunatly all the CRTC tricks were not discovered yet. In a way these modern carts for the CPC will keep the machine going, especially with a game like Vespertino.