tdn@cmu-cs-spice.ARPA (Thomas Newton) (03/13/85)
Although the Atari 800 has a right cartridge slot, it is also possible to make
16K cartridges that work as if one had cartridges plugged into both the left-
hand and right-hand slots on an Atari 800. The advantage of the 16K cartridge
is that it can work on Atari 400s, 1200XLs, 600XLs, and 800XLs in addition to
working on Atari 800s. Of course, it takes 16K of addressing space, leaving
the Atari with only 32K of easily-addressable RAM.
The BASIC/XL cartridge from OSS uses some sort of bank-switching scheme that
allows it to have 24K of ROM while taking up only 8K of addressing space (the
same as the Atari BASIC cartridge or the built-in BASIC on XL machines). It
leaves 40K free. I don't have one, so I'm quoting these details from memory.
-- Thomas Newton
Thomas.Newton@cmu-cs-spice.ARPA