Burning to EPROM & Real Hardware#

A .bin that runs flawlessly in Stella is only probably a working game. The emulator is forgiving in ways a real Atari is not: it zeroes RAM for you, it never has a marginal solder joint, and it doesn’t care whether your ROM image is the right size for the chip you’re about to program. Getting your code onto a cartridge that plugs into a real console exposes a second category of bugs that have nothing to do with 6502 logic — they live in chip selection, address wiring, image layout, and the analog reality of 40-year-old hardware.

This chapter walks the path from .bin to a working cartridge:

• Choosing the Chip — EPROM vs. EEPROM vs. flash, sizes, and what programmer to use.
• Preparing the ROM Image — org, padding, mirroring a 2K game, and where the reset vectors must land.
• Wiring the Cartridge — the cartridge edge connector, chip-enable polarity, and the pinout differences that bite everyone.
• Gotchas: Works in Stella, Dies on Hardware — the failures the emulator never reproduces.

The single most useful habit: change one variable at a time. When a freshly burned cart shows a black screen, it could be the image, the chip, the wiring, or the console. Build on a known-good board with a known-good chip so that when something breaks, only one thing changed.