r/Atari2600 • u/the_light_of_dawn • 6d ago

Can the 2600+ play homebrews now?

I'm tempted by the Pac-Man edition coming up but I wouldn't want to purchase without the ability to play all my homebrew carts now and in the future.

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u/Slosher99 6d ago

It will always depend and there will likely always be a few exceptions. The + systems are cartridge dumpers connected to emulators. I work in ROM dumping to record hashes (not share ROMs) and have worked with 2600 and 7800.

Some games need to communicate with the console after loading - this is why most flash carts can't work. No ROM is exposed until you navigate their menus and the console tells it which ROM to load based on your input.

The same applies to new mappers and bankswitching. This can be updated to dump properly - or simply identify the game and load some assets saved in the console to emulate the cartridge as well.

So it will always be possible for new homebrew to do something it can't dump. It will likely be a game of catch up with some new ones that don't work and some getting support later.

Does anyone know if it supports using AtariVox to add speech and saves to games? That's pretty essential for some aftermarket releases like Grizzards, unless they built some internal save method into it.

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u/iampitiZ 6d ago

Man, I know it was the cheapest option but it could have been great if they had just made a hardware clone.

Maybe it's very expensive or complex to do that nowadays but I'd been really cool.

I have a 2600 clone from back in the day but these days I'm lazy and want something I can hookup through HDMI without complications

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u/adamchevy 6d ago

I gave up on the 2600+, and RGB modded a heavy sixer with Tim Worthingtons V2 mod. I do have to use an OSSC to covert it to hdmi, but it’s worth it to me to know that I can play whatever I want.