Kickstart C16 & Invasive Action Cartridges [C64]
http://www.cosine.org.uk/
Reviewed By J. Monkman
Sometime back in the end of 2007 I emailed T.M.R about the possibility of creating 8KB cartridge versions of some the smaller games in his highly acclaimed Commodore 64 back-catalogue. Naively, I was under the impression that it would be a simple job of saving each game executable with a special header, then burning the resulting files onto EPROM chips, fiddling about a bit with PCB kits and cartridge cases and presto! A new C64 cartridge release would be born. In hindsight, how wrong I was...
Initially poo-pooing the idea, T.M.R explained that it would be a little more complicated than I'd optimistically hoped and essentially involve revisiting a lot of old code and relearning how cartridge loading works. However, I continued to express interest in the concept and persistently pestered him on and off for a month or so until one happy day I opened my email inbox to find two emulator-friendly cart images waiting for me. This is where the fun really began.
The next step was to find someone to help manufacture the carts, a process that T.M.R still believed would be too expensive to make the project viable even on a cost-price basis. After a lot of fruitless searching (and money wasted on foolishly trying to assemble carts myself) I eventually stumbled upon C64 enthusiast Tim Harris via his eBay Commodore Store; finally it looked as though the project would yield results.
The first game we collectively worked on was Kikstart C16, which itself was a source of many confused emails due to the fact that Kikstart C16 is a C64 port of the C16 version of Kikstart, and not a C16 cartridge. Using a standard black cartridge case and box artwork designed by T.M.R and myself, early prototypes were sold via a forum post at www.retrogamer.net and proved to be surprisingly popular - even with RGCD's own SirClive, who immediately voiced his regret at giving the game a 'so-so' review score back in RGCD #03 and gushingly praised T.M.R for his superb work.
At this point, we began work on Invasive Action, a quirky little arcade shoot-em-up developed by T.M.R under his Backward Engineering moniker and based on 'Ivasive Action', a game featured on the infamous Cassette 50 C64 compilation back in 1984. Now, before you write this one off ("Cassette 50? WTF! ROFL!", etc.), it has to be said that T.M.R's unofficial sequel is a pretty good laugh. It received a warm write-up in the now sadly-defunct C64 discmag Game Over(View) and is certainly a more than worthy addition to your C64 collection. In fact - and the same applies for both IA and Kikstart - considering the 8KB limitation, both releases compare more than favorably against the official Commodore library of 8KB cartridges released back in the format's popular years. However, to make things a little more interesting (and indeed saleable) Tim Harris suggested using transparent cases with the addition of an internally mounted blue LED - and if you look at the photos you'll see that the result is pretty eye-catching when the cart is plugged in!
Hype aside, I suppose that the real question is are they actually worth buying? Well, available at £13 each exclusively from the RGCD shop I'd have to say yes, but then I'm biased because this was my project to start with! However, it should be noted that both games are readily available for free in their original format (and are included with RGCD #05), meaning that buyers are not really getting any exclusive content, but the fact that these are strictly limited, real hardware releases mean that they'll appeal to most C64 hardware enthusiasts and collectors. Both Kikstart C16 and Invasive Action come presented in stylish hand-made cardboard boxes with either printed or in-game instructions, and the latter game's luminous attributes make it something quite special.
In conclusion, the really exciting news (for me at least) is that there are likely to be more RGCD C64 cartridge releases to come in the near future - I've already opened discussions with several interested developers and there's even the possibility of a C64 16KB cartridge development competition financed by RGCD in 2009, which (if it goes ahead) will hopefully result in a slew of releases and breathe new life into the much underrated commodore cartridge format.
(Please note that both Kikstart C16 and Invasive Action are PAL/NTSC compatible and work on the C128 as well as the C64. If you are a developer interested in working with RGCD to have your own game published in cartridge form then please feel free to drop us a line via our contact page).
