The company was originally called Arcadia until Emerson released their Arcadia 2001; making the change to avoid potential legal troubles.

The end of Starpath: apparently some "firm commitments" for sales didn't come through, and they ran out of money. At roughly the same time Epyx lost a lot of staff who formed another company. Since they shared some common investors, the two companies merged in November of 1983. Later Epyx went bankrupt too, but before doing so Atari had gained exclusive usage rights to all Epyx games for Atari systems (hence XEGS Ballblazer, etc..) but the official corpse of Epyx was bought by Bridgestone Multimedia. Bridgestone owns the copyrights of Epyx and retroactively Starpath. Atari still retains exclusive usage rights (in theory) and therefore had to be consulted to avoid litigation.

What happened to Sweat? The market was crashing, Starpath didn't have any $$, Eventually inspired Epyx's Summer Games but only a few basic Starpath routines were kept.

The mail order games: At the end, Starpath needed to get rid of stock (to pay bills no doubt), so they sold everything to A&B Sales, who got the up-til-then unreleased Swords Of Saros and Survival Island. These never had boxes or "normal" instructions and were shipped in a baggie.

Every Starpath/Arcadia game released, in PAL and NTSC formats (save Survival Island which only recently resurfaced for PAL) and an NTSC version of the most complete SWEAT! extant. Also, SoundX, a great Asteroids-clone pre-release version of Suicide Mission, and Carol Shaw's unreleased 1978 game POLO are present.

This CD acts as a standalone audio-CD, but also has an ISO-9660 data portion readable by a CD-ROM. Included on this data portion are a lot of image files as well as some development software which allows you to talk to the Supercharger to write your own games. A Vectrex portion includes high-quality cleaned-up overlay scans (much better than what you can find on the net) and legal ROM dumps, and more.

And don't forget the booklet. It is 4.25x5.5" in size, with an intro from Steve Hales, instructions, reviews, color cover and backcover, and more. The first 100 or so booklets were hand-initialed by Steve Hales. The pressing was limited to 400 units, about 350 of which were sold to consumers, the rest reserved as personal backups by the "Cyberpunks".

This CD is not for use with emulators. This is not an emulation! This CD is primarily an audio-CD to replace original Arcadia/ Starpath audio tapes and MUST be used with a genuine Starpath Supercharger cartridge and Atari 2600-compatible console (2600, 2600 jr., most 7800s, and so on). There is a data portion which requires a computer w/CD-ROM to use, but the computer will always only be a cross-compiler and file-server for the actual Atari 2600 hardware. Neat, huh?

TITLE	PROGRAMMERS	BOXID#	CAT#
Supercharger + Phaser Patrol	Craig Nelson + Dennis Caswell	1	AR-4000
Communist Mutants From Space	Stephen Landrum	2	AR-4101
Fireball	Scott Nelson	3	AR-4300
Suicide Mission	Steve Hales, Steve Landrum	4	AR-4102
Escape from the Mindmaster	Dennis Caswell	5	AR-4200
Dragonstomper (orig Labyrinth)	Steve Landrum	6	AR-4200
Killer Satellites	Kevin Norman	7	AR-4103
Rabbit Transit	Brian McGhie	8	AR-4104
The Official Frogger By Sega	Steve Landrum	9	AR-4105
Party Mix	Dennis Caswell	10	AR-4430
Sword Of Saros (orig Excalibur)	Jon Leupp?	11	AR-4201
Survival Island (orig Jungle)	Scott Nelson	12	AR-4401
Sweat! (Beta)	Scott Nelson	N/A	N/A

Bonuses included:

All known "preview" demo versions:

Commie Mutants
Fireball
Suicide Mission
Mindmaster
Dragonstomper
Killer Satellites
Rabbit Transit
Frogger
Party Mix *


Legally included Polo proto *
Dragonstomper beta "Excalibur" *
Suicide Mission beta "Meteroids" * +
Ed Federmeyer's SoundX utility *

* = NTSC only
+ = closest thing to vector asteroids you'll get on the 2600.


TV STANDARDS DEFINED:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


• NTSC-- refers to the television standard for north america and Japan:
  60hz, fewer scanlines than PAL.
  Playing a PAL game on an NTSC TV usually results in a hopelessly rolling display.
• PAL-- refers to the television standard for Europe and some of Asia: 50hz, more scanlines than NTSC.
  Playing an NTSC game on a PAL machine results in badly altered colors (many revert to grey).

This whole project was organized on the internet. Calls went out for 'tape donators' and a special hook was put into my email address to collect names onto a list of people interested in the CD once it is done. Eventually I gathered a team of people to help me. Russ Perry handling rights negotiation, Dan Skelton handling CD artwork, Jim Nitchals handling the initial tape remastering.

Believe me, it's a long story and I don't even remember the whole thing.

The CD has been sold out for a long time now.

It _was_ sold for only $15 plus shipping.

It is sometimes up for auction on RGVC.

There were only 350 made. Each has a hand-written serial number in either silver or gold ink.

---

The CD was written up in the following periodicals:
• Digital Press had a blurb on it
• 2600 Connection devoted a whole issue to it (which one again??)
• Replication News, a CD manufacturer's trade journal, had a piece on it (I have yet to see this one, BTW)
• Wired magazine had a collumn on it (February 1997, p. 171)
BTW, it also made the rounds through 3d0 and maybe elsewhere in the industry.

A poll conducted a several months ago revealed that about a half dozen people are planning to have completed a mature game in one year's time. Since then I've seen steady progress in at least a few individuals. Two or three new games may be written by the end of 1999.

**********************************************
**STELLA's 20th BIRTHDAY PROGRAMMING CONTEST**
***********SPONSORED BY CYBERPUNKS************
**********************************************


Ever since the Starpath Supercharger CD was released in late 1996 I had wanted to sponsor a contest to encourage programming but I had no way to provide a suitable prize.

All this changed when I shot at Nolan Bushnell's home for my documentary in the summer of 1997. I printed out a special "Happy 20th Birthday to Stella" signature certificate on parchment-style paper which has the following autographs:

• Nolan Bushnell - Father of videogames, founder of Atari
• Al Alcorn - co-founder of Atari
• Ron Milner - designer of the Atari 2600
• Joe Decuir - designer of the Atari 2600, 400/800, and Amiga
• Steve Mayer - designer of the Atari 2600
• Larry Wagner - original head of 1st group of programmers who completed Combat and wrote the number-crunching part of Video Chess.
• Larry Kaplan - Symbolic of the originator of 2600 programming tricks: Air-Sea Battle, Bowling, Bridge, Kaboom.

Only 4 of these certificates exist.

Piero Cavina won for his excellent game, Oystron.

No contest was announced for 1998, which is okay since no games were completed via the list. The only games that surfaced were THE CORE and ALFRED'S CHALLENGE, created independent of the list.

It is a birthday party for Stella, and a coming-together of many famous figures in Atari past where they discuss their groundbreaking work in front of the video camera. Call it "Stella: Anthology" if you like. I call it "Stella at 20: An Atari 2600 Retrospective".

The thesis is similar to an IEEE article from 1983 which states that the 2600 survived well beyond anyone's expectations due to its amazing flexibility, which was exploited by some very creative programmers. In addition, the piece will focus on the changes in the industry from the perspective of those who helped to create it.

Along the way we will learn the genesis of the machine and the games that made it famous and kept it alive for 14 years.

As for style, I'd like it to be visually exciting, not just simple talking heads. Lots of animations, sound effects and music, screenshots of the games, pan and scan on old photos (Ken Burns effect), and so on.

The focus has shifted somewhat, away from individual interviews and more towards a pure roundtable, casual chat approach. This has resulted in much more candid, looser conversations which, though harder to edit, are more of what I'm looking for, since more of the personality of each person comes through this way.

Mostly word of mouth via email. It was a domino effect as people knew people, or at least knew people who might know people. And getting them located was only half the battle, I also had to get them to commit to attending. This became easier and easier as people slowly committed (the power of peer pressure) until even Nolan Bushnell decided to participate.

During the winter of 1997 there was a contract dispute over post production services which drained the remaining funds from the project and left it nowhere near complete. What followed was a very long and painful year in which I tried to find a way to fund an editing system. Also in 1998, Jim Nitchals (who funded the shooting phase) sadly passed away and was no longer available to help. This January, as a final effort, I sent a plea to the Atari alums, asking for donations... That plea was answered and volume 2 of the series was released at the CG Expo in the summer of '99.

See the NEWS section for all future Cyberpunks updates. As a result, this FAQ will no longer be updated. Future products will have their own support pages.

-fin