The Arcadia (or Starpath) Supercharger is a device which allows you to play beefed up games on your Atari 2600. Games ship on cassettes and are loaded onto the system via an audio cable that connects to a tape player. The other way is to hook up the cable to your computer and pipe a sound file to the device. For 2K and 4K games, you can use a tool called “makewav” which encodes an Atari 2600 binary ROM file into a WAV encoded audio file. I have “ported” the utility so that it can be built on Mac OS X; I use the term loosely since I had to do very little to get it to build. You’ll want to run it like this once it is built:

$ makewav -ts atarigame.bin

Which will produce a WAV file of the same name + a “.wav” extension. You may also want to locate a CD called Stella Gets a New Brain, which is a complete compilation of the games released for the Supercharger. If you decide to rip the audio tracks to an MP3 file, be sure to use a very low compression for maximum fidelity and open the file in a piece of software like Audacity to make sure that the audio is duplicated on both channels; this is because your laptop has stereo output but the Supercharger only accepts mono. You will likely need an interface adapter which converts your stereo signal to a mono signal, but a better way might be to simply find yourself an old stereo audio cable, cut it and the wire going to the Supercharger, and solder one signal line from your stereo cable + ground to the mono cable’s signal line + ground. While attempting to use my Supercharger, I found the noise introduced by the adapter and the oxidized cable from the 30+ year old device was causing a lot of interference, after I cut out the middle man things worked perfectly.

Once that is done, try The Official Frogger by Sega — it’s awesome!

Categories: Atari 2600
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