The old cartridges for the Commodore 64 use EEPROMs to store their data, and the newer Flash carts use either a Flash chip or an SD card to put a whole bunch of games in a small plastic brick. [Stian] and [Runar] thought that wasn’t good enough – they wanted to program cartridges in real time, the ability to reboot the C64 without ever touching it, and a device for coding and testing. What they came up with is the latest advance in Commodore cartridge technology.

The device presents 8k of memory to the C64, but it doesn’t do this with Flash or an EEPROM. Instead, [Stian] and [Runar] are using a dual-port static RAM, specifically one from the IDT7005 series. This chip has two data busses, two address busses, and /CE, /OE, and R/W lines for either side of the chip, allowing other digital circuits to be connected to one small section of the C64’s memory.

Also in the cart is an ATmega16 running V-USB to handle the PC communications. It takes about 1 to 1.5 seconds to transfer an entire 8k over to the cartridge, but this chip can read and write the RAM along with the C64 simultaneously.

If you want a box that will give you the ability to put ever game in existence on a single cartridge, this isn’t the one. However, if you want to write some C64 games and do some live debugging, this is the one for you. The Eagle files are available, and there’s a video demo below.