Rom And Eprom Cartridges
ROMs are Read Only Memories. As you know, the ATARI operating system is on a 10K ROM board, and cartridge games are on ROM chips varying from 4K to 16K. There are two cartridge slots on the ATARI 800 and one on the ATARI 400 and 1200XL. The right hand cartridge slot on the 800 uses memory locations $8000 through $9FFF (HEX). The left cartridge slot uses memory locations $A000 through $BFFF for 4K and 8K cartridges and $8000 through $BFFF for 16K cartridges. When a cartridge is present, it will disable the RAM (on a 48K system) that uses the same addresses as the cartridge. At first glance, ROM cartridge software is a natural at being difficult to copy since no simple duplicate tape or sector copier would work here. However, reading ATARI'S technical user notes will tell you most of what you need to know to save the cartridge data to disk or tape. There are also several programs floating around that do most of the work for you. Another way is by using an EPROM burner (more details on this later).
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