HYPERCART: THE FAST STUFF, IN ONE CARTRIDGE

Not everything on the bench is software.

Some of the best Commodore hardware ever made came late in the machine's life: RAM disks that load faster than anything else you'll see on a 64, RAM expansions, accelerator cards, big hard drives. They're rare now, and they each want a port of their own.

HYPERcart is our attempt to put those jobs in one cartridge.

How we got here

It started as a fast loader of our own. We measured, tested on real hardware, and found ours would be about as fast as the loaders that already exist. Not worth doing. The real gains are in the bigger devices, so we aimed there instead.

What it is

• A Raspberry Pi does the heavy lifting, sitting on the 64's cartridge bus.
• Memory to spare: a 64 MB RAM disk, as big as a fully loaded one of the originals, saved to an SD card, and an REU beside it.
• A turbo card's job, last of all, once the rest works.
• A small touch screen on the cart, showing what it's doing (and the HYPERcart logo, of course).
• It stands upright behind the 64, two boards in one case, instead of sticking straight out the back.

Where it is

The proof-of-concept boards are drawn: two boards, routed, checked and ready for the fab. When they arrive they'll go on a real 64, and we'll find out what works and what doesn't. This is a proof of concept, not a product yet, and we'll be honest about what it can and can't do when we know.