This year, the Penultimate Cartridge turns 10 years old. A lot has changed over the years, let's have a bit of a look back at how it all started.
10 years ago this week, I published a blog post about the first Penultimate Cartridge.
Ah, the old logo, I haven't seen that for a while (thank you to WayBackMachine for archiving that).
Wait, what?
Yes, there were several revisions of clunky, hand made, Penultimate Cartridges from me, before the current slick TFW8b versions.
This is a bit like when you find "From Genesis to Revelation" and realise that "Trespass" wasn't actually their first album.
This was the first which actually had "Penultimate Cartridge" written on the PCB.
(I have gone back and tidied up a lot of the old posts I link here, made the pictures larger and fixed all the text alignments. I try to do that these days whenever I link to an old post. There is an archive of those links on my Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/collection/1750459)
I had posted about the previous version at the end of 2015.
I was calling that the "Penultimate Cartridge" in the post, but I had just written "vic20 rom/ram" on the PCB.
"More revision of that to come, on the way to 'the Penultimate Cartridge'. I've decided to call it that as every time there is a Final or Ultimate cartridges there seem to be quite a lot of versions that follow it. So I thought I'd be honest with the name on this one."
So, yes, I do know what the word "penultimate" means, no need to tell me in the comments like someone always does.
Menu Button
I had designed the board so it fitted into the shell from a standard VIC20 cartridge, with a bit at the back sticking out of a slot which they all have but is rarely used.
I think only the IEEE-488 cartridge actually used this, but maybe others.
In the second post, I had commented:
"It does make for a lot of DIP switches. This leads me to think it would be easier to come up with some sort of menu driven system which writes out to an I/O latch to set these options then reset the system. I suspect that will be the next stage of evolution."
I had been talking to this guy on the internet calling himself "Rod Hull". I have heard rumours that he does in fact have two real arms, although neither work particularly well at times.
Rod runs a business called "The Future Was 8 bit", and I had bought one of their SD2IEC drives previously and sent them some damaged VIC20 cases that had been victim to "wrap it in a bin liner and send via the cheapest courier" type ebay sellers.
Rod encouraged me to continue down the menu driven system route, and the first real Penultimate Cartridge was born
I prototyped that on a V2 PCB, and was soon ready to move to a PCB, V4 this time since I had used V3 on a bit of a dead-end.
A Wrong Turn
There was a V3, where I added an SD card reader (only took another further 9 years before we actually had that).
The idea at the time was to integrate an IEEE-488 adapter and a PET microSD (the predecessor of the SD2PET) onto the cartridge with the microSD slot on the bit of the PCB that sticks out.
Although the prototype was somewhat less integrated.
Neat idea, but the IEEE-488 interface needed a ROM in block 5, meaning you couldn't load a 32K game with it, so I gave up on that.
V4 Menu Drive Penultimate Cartridge
These V4 boards did not have any DIP switches, and had only a single menu button sticking out the back of the case.
Still fitting in a standard case and using the slot at the back.
Whilst I was continuing to develop the firmware, I had another revision of the board as I had moved the two big chips over the centre line, and some VIC20 cases have a central support which hit the top of the chips.
You can see that more clearly in the clear cases, is that clear?
The new revision had the chips moved away from the centre line and the word "menu" written in large, friendly letters at the top.
So there it was, the first menu driven Penultimate Cartridge.
I sold a few of them via PayPal "buy now" buttons on the blog post. Back in the day when international trade was cheap and easy, and actually encouraged.
The "buy now" button wasn't great as I had to have a drop down with one price for UK shipping, and another for international buyers, and of course everyone just clicked on the UK one as it was cheaper.
I also (briefly) sold these on ebay. I think I sold 5 and then someone in Italy claimed they didn't receive their cartridge and got a full refund from ebay, even though I had proof of postage etc.
Shortly afterwards, I got a support query from a user in Italy. Odd that, I had only ever sent one there and that one had allegedly not arrived.....
The refund on that wiped out the profit from all the cartridges I had sold so far. I don't think I have sold anything on ebay since.
These days, I sell via Tindie with various international shipping options automatically selected, and photos of the boards at a jaunty angle on my world famous, well battered desk.
The eagle eyed amongst you might have spotted the date codes on the chips in the photo above.
2025?
Yes, that is a freshly built V4.3 Penultimate Cartridge.
Why?
Well, that is the first in a limited edition, 10th anniversary reissue of the original design.
Why?
Well, I thought people might be interested in revisiting the earliest days of the Penultimate Cartridge, and completing their collection of Penultimate Cartridges.
Please note this is the 10 year old design, with the 10 year old firmware.
It has the following specifications:
- Replica version 4.3 PCB
- Original V4.3D firmware with no updates or bug fixes or extra features
- Menu button to select ROM or RAM options
- RAM expansion offering up to 35K RAM (selectable as 0K, 3K, 8K, 11K, 24K, 27K, 32K, 35K)
- 39 ROM titles (see photos in the listing)
- Autostart of text adventure ROMs
- Boot to "*" or "FB20" from disk (not included)
- Sockets for all ICs
- Hand built and numbered
I can supply that in a clear TFW8b case if you want to show off your original Penultimate Cartridge, whilst also protecting it.
Speaking of which, back to the history lesson.
The Case
TFW8b liked the menu version and wanted to make it better.
It needed a case he said.
During one of many long, late-night phone calls planning this out, I took these photos of how we thought it might look.
Yes, that is two C64 cartridge cases sticking into the back of a VIC20 shell.
Remember at the time, there weren't any VIC20 cartridges cases with that design, they were all plain with one big label, which you couldn't read once it was inserted into the VIC20.
That was fine until you inserted it into the VIC20, and then you couldn't read what it was.
The Penultimate was to follow the size of the standard VIC20 cartridges, but with the lines and always-readable-label position of the C64 cartridges.
Rod then took an enormous gamble and commissioned the tooling to make proper injection moulded VIC20 cases, specifically for the Penultimate Cartridge.
The PCB was also rearranged by his PCB guy to fit the new case.
Gone was the bit sticking out the back, there were now proper buttons, one on each side. The left was the menu button as before, now illuminated, the right was now a reset button.
All in, with the tooling and the boards, that first run of Penultimate Cartridges cost TFW8b £26,000.
£26K in 2016 must be about $1M today.
That's a lot of green jelly.
Remember that before sending the "why doesn't it cost £1" or "can you just send me the files so I can make my own" type emails. Doing these things properly costs money.
We went through a few revisions getting the case to close perfectly, although the brown was a little chocolately, and we refer to these as the "Caramac" versions.
We finally managed to dial it in to something more like Rover P6 "Mexican Brown", with various different shades on the way there.
I don't think we consciously planned these as the "silver label" versions, although they did have silver labels, and we later moved to vinyl labels with colour on a white background......
The menu at this point was still my text version. Fast and functional, but not very pretty.
Controlled by pressing the keys highlighted in white or by joystick.
Those went into production, and did quite well, feedback was very positive but could it be improved?
TFW8b introduced me to Misfit, who had recently produced the excellent "Pentagorat" for the 32K expanded VIC20.
Misfit conjured up a demo of a graphical menu system which looked great, so I was able to merge that with my menu code and the Penultimate + was born.
This was a very slick product by now, with a new label, a sleeve, a larger ROM and the new graphical menu.
I kept refining the menu code, adding more and more titles, and working out ways to cram more into the space available.
But we kept running out of space, so the Penultimate +2 was born.
This had two ROM chips, double the capacity, and the menu program was redesigned so that it could load PRG files directly from ROM, rather than having to be converted with separate loaders as I had before.
This also added the built in file browser to save having to go back to the root folder to load FB-20 each time.
And finally, we are up to date with the Penultimate +3.
This added an integrated SD2IEC, finally achieving what I had first tried 10 years ago with the IEEE-488 version. But being an SD2IEC wired to the IEC port, this was fully compatible, and didn't tie up block 5.
There is quite a difference inside, more than double the number of chips and a lot more complexity to support all the new features.
The +3 also boasts a built in DOS wedge and a turbo loader.
Now you could put games onto the SD card and load them pretty much as fast as if they were in ROM, answering the frequently asked question "can I add games to the penultimate cartridge"
Adverts
That latest all-singing, all-dancing version, the Penultimate +3 is available from
And the very much simpler 10th anniversary reissue of the original version is available here
My Tindie store also contains all sort of kits, test gear and upgrades for the ZX80, ZX81, Jupiter ACE, and Commodore PET.
Patreon
You can support me via Patreon, and get access to advance previews of blog posts, and progress updates on new projects like the Mini PET II and Mini VIC and other behind the scenes updates. This also includes access to my Patreon only Discord server for even more regular updates.
