This Atari 5200 Cartridge Uses a Raspberry Pi to Swap ROM Images

Old Atari home video game consoles, like the 5200, are highly sought after by both gamers and retrocomputing enthusiasts. But, in addition to the console itself, you need ROM cartridges in order to actually play a game. A lot of popular carts are easy to find and relatively affordable, but rare ones can be quite expensive, and maybe even impossible to find. For that reason, it’s very helpful to have a way to load downloaded ROM images, and this special multi-ROM cartridge makes that very convenient.

YouTuber Smbakeryt built this multi-ROM cartridge to make is as easy as possible to swap out ROM images on the fly. He started with a genuine Pac-Man ROM cartridge that is readily available for just a few dollars. He then replaced the ROM chip with a 32K dual-port static RAM chip. Because it is dual-port, the memory can be accessed by two processors at the same time. In this case, those are the Atari 5200 and a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

The Raspberry Pi Zero W hosts a web interface that is accessible by any computer or smart phone on the network. Smbakeryt can pull that up on his iPhone, and then select a ROM image from a list stored on the Raspberry Pi’s SD card. The selected ROM image is then copied onto the dual-port RAM, and the Atari 5200 is reset and loads whichever ROM it finds on the RAM. That makes is easy to quickly swap between ROMs from a huge library on the Raspberry Pi.