Starpath Supercharger

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The Supercharger and a few game boxes

The Starpath Supercharger was an add-on module created by Starpath to expand the game capabilities of the Atari 2600 video game console. The device resembled a long game cartridge with a handle on one end. The Supercharger interface multiplied the Atari 2600's RAM 49-fold, from its meager built-in 128 bytes to 6,272 bytes, i.e. giving it an extra 6 KB, allowing for larger games with higher resolution graphics. A cord coming out of the side of the cartridge plugged into the earphone jack of any standard cassette player. Games for the Supercharger were stored on normal audio cassettes.

By providing these capabilities, the Supercharger made the Atari 2600 much more like the low end home computers of the era, aside from the alphanumeric keyboard the console lacked (simple numeric keypads were available from Atari as add-ons, however).

With a small modification, the Supercharger can be used to easily test homebrew code for the Atari 2600 on a real system.

Note that the complete library of games, including the prototype Sweat, was also released on CD as Stella Gets A New Brain by CyberPuNKS (Jim Nitchals, Dan Skelton, Glenn Saunders and Russ Perry Jr),. There were two releases, both sanctioned by Atari and Bridgestone Multimedia (who had obtained the rights to the Starpath library some time ago) - the first release (a limited number not-for-profit release) also included the previously unreleased Atari prototype, Polo by Carol Shaw, and the second release included the Supercharger prototypes Meteroid (an early version of Suicide Mission) and Excalibur (an early version of Dragonstomper), as well as a number of homebrew games by permission of their respective authors, and the song Atari 2600 by Splitsville, fully licensed from the band.