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Bryan
Edewaard is known as programmer for the Atari 5200 game
Castle Crisis,
which Bryan added Easter Eggs and extra paddles.
(4 players at once).
When it comes to programming, Bryan is experienced in 6502,
680x0, 80x86, and Jaguar RISC assembly, as well as C++ and Visual BASIC.
He has worked on a variety of systems including the Atari 2600, 5200 and
Atari 800 series computers.
Also Atari ST series computers, PC under DOS and Windows, and even Atari
Jaguar.
Bryan also collects and repairs classic video arcade games.
Bryan also worked in music stores, Radio Shack, as a programmer, digital
engineer, game designer, and technician.
An he even worked briefly for Atari Corp.
But we ColecoVision fans knows him for:
Bryan
Edewaard's MegaCart
As you may know
already, regular ColecoVision cartridges are limited to 32 kilobytes of ROM
data.
This, along with the ColecoVision's single kilobyte of RAM, severely
limits the kinds of games that can be coded for the console.
Titles like
Gateway to Apshai are probably the most elaborate games you're going to see
within these harsh hardware limits.
Over 20 years after the commercial death of the ColecoVision, Opcode
Games is proud to introduce a solution to the ColecoVision's 32-kilobyte ROM
limit: namely the MegaCart !
This piece of hardware is designed by Bryan Edewaard,
which fits into a regular ColecoVision cartridge shell, implements
bankswitching schemes that go far beyond 32K.
There are several variations
of the MegaCart: 128K, 256K, 512K and 1024K.
About the MegaCart:
There is no 64K variation of the
MegaCart because the PCB architecture doesn't really support it.
If a game fits
inside 64K, a 128K MegaCart will have to be used, which means a lot of
available space on the MegaCart will remain unused.
The exclusive property belongs to Bryan Edewaard.
He streamlined the MegaCart PCB to make it as cheap to produce as
possible.
It's mady by: ICD / TSD (Temporary Sanity Designs), a partnership of
Bryan Edewaard and Damien Jones, started early in 1995.
TSD's main objective is to produce quality software.
All a programmer need is to add is an EPROM chip with software
encoded into it.
Bryan is ready to sell MegaCart 1 PCB for a reasonable price, so you
only need to seek him out and ask him about it.
To encode game data into a MegaCart will an 40-pin EPROM burner do the job nicely, as far as the
ColecoVision software is concerned.
It's really not that different from a
regular ColecoVision PCB/EPROM setup.
There's no extra RAM in a MegaCart
It's not technically impossible, but such a MegaCart would be
far more expensive to produce.
The
solution to add extra RAM to the ColecoVision is via the
Super Game Module from
Opcode Games.
So you can break the ColecoVision limit of 32K and add extra RAM via the
Super Game Module, in that way can you program a really nice game.
The bankswitching method
used in the MegaCart is such that the ROM addressing space is divided into two chunks of 16K, and one of these chunks
can be switched at any time.
Therefore, no matter what MegaCart model is
used, only 32K can be adressed at any one time by the software.
The programmer must design the game with this constraint in mind.
Most of the games we all want to see released on ColecoVision require
more than 32K of ROM space, so those will necessarily make use of the
MegaCart.
Newer games that require a Save Game feature,
refers to the new
MegaCart 2 also called: Super Game Cartridge.
The MegaCart will play a major role in the future
ColecoVision games is definately not an exagerated statement.
The first ColecoVision game that used the
MegaCart was
Pac-Man Collection,
the 2nd was Mario
Brothers.
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