The Starpath Supercharger is an expander for the Atari VCS and plugs into the cartridge port, but there the resemblance to a cartridge ends. The unit itself is about eight inches long and slightly wider than a cartridge. On the top of the device is a handle with a lead for a cassette recorder coming out of it.

The way the Supercharger works is to replace the cartridge ROM with RAM like in a normal computer, and a cassette interface.

This means that games for the Supercharger are on tape and only cost about 10.

There are a number of advantages with this device over a normal cartridge game apart from the price. The graphics with this system are superb. The quality of graphics is dependent on the amount of RAM memory that the computer or game has. The Atari normally has about 128 bytes of RAM, only some of this is used for the graphics screen. The Supercharger extends this RAM memory to 6272 bytes; some of this needs to go to store the program that is loaded in from cassette, but much more than the Atari's original RAM can be given over to the display.

The biggest test of any games system is the games that it plays. The games that are available for the Supercharger are fantastic when compared to other Atari games, and some are even graphically better than the more recent Intellivision and Colecovision systems.

There are some good points and one bad point about the games being on cassette. The bad point is having to wait thirty seconds for the game to be loaded into the computer - but computer users have been waiting up to twenty minutes for a game to load for years. The good points outweigh this though. The price of the games are a third of the normal price for games, the complexity and aforementioned graphics ability of the games is much better. One feature of some of the games is a multi-load system, this means that, say in an adventure, the game would be played in parts and you would load the game in bit by bit.

There are plenty of games available for the Supercharger. One game, Phaser Patrol, is included with the system.

This unit is a real must for any serious Atari owner. The Starpath Supercharger is available from Silica Shop, 1-4 The Mews, Hatherley Rd, Sidcup, Kent. I'd also like to thank Silica Shop for the loan of the Supercharger and games for it.