9. Kung Fu Flash
I've been looking forward to digging into the Commodore 64/128's wide selection of games as a new owner and have mostly focused my attention on the simpler cartridge games available for the platform thus far. While cartridges are generally quicker to load and more reliable than disk-based games, swapping cartridges is not always convenient and can put undue wear and tear on your Commodore's cartridge port, as well as the cartridges themselves. Despite their generally durable casing, the cartridge ROMs are also starting to show their age and can occasionally fail. These pitfalls can be avoided by using a cartridge emulator that allows the luxury of loading a set of games via a removable SD card and freely switching between them, rather than swapping between a stack of cartridges on your desk.
The Kung Fu Flash is a cartridge emulator using an open-source hardware design by Kim Jorgensen and is available from several different manufacturers using different PCBs and casings. I chose to purchase the version offered by Retro Rewind, which uses a durable sparkly-black casing similar to their C64/128 Wi-Fi Modem. The cartridge supports both NTSC and PAL versions of the C64 and 128, though I tested it on an NTSC C128D specifically.
The device is similar to game-console cartridge emulators like the EverDrive in that it is a microcontroller emulating the operation of the cartridge ROM and its associated circuitry, such as memory mapper chips to facilitate larger programs. Beyond cartridge-based games and productivity software like Magic Desk, this hardware also allows users to take advantage of "freezer" cartridges like the Action Replay or disk drive accelerators like the Epyx Fastload.
The Kung Fu Flash uses a Micro SD card for storage that must be formatted using the FAT32 file system. Once this is complete, booting the computer with the cartridge inserted will take you to a simple launcher screen that can be used to load your program or image of choice. In addition to .CRT (cartridge images), the Kung Fu Flash also supports .PRG/.P00 (binary program) and .Dxx (disk) formats. Support for disk images unfortunately seems to be imperfect - the device's documentation states that it won't work with fastloaders or software needing direct hardware access, and only a portion of the Commodore DOS commands are supported.
Eager to get started, I formatted an SD card, loaded it with a few cartridge and disk images, then booted my C128D to the cartridge loader menu.
What better game to test a Kung Fu Flash than Irem's Kung Fu Master? The loading screen filled me with promise, but disaster quickly struck in the form of a garbled menu screen on multiple attempts.
Not one to let go without a fight, I suspected an update to the Kung Fu Flash's firmware might be helpful. This process involves downloading an update (.upd) file from the developer's Github site, copying it to the SD card, and running it from the launcher.
The firmware update took less than a second - I hit the Return key, it hit the update screen, it came back from the update screen with the proper (newer) firmware version number. Alas, the Kung Fu Flash still wouldn't run Kung Fu Master. I suspected the cartridge ROM dump may have been corrupted, but the same ROM image worked fine in the VICE C64 emulator, so it appears the issue was one of compatibility between the game and the Kung Fu Flash, or the game and my C128D itself.
Other cartridge images like Pac-Man and the previously-reviewed Spitball loaded without any issue, convincing me the device was functional. Results with disk images and .prg files were mixed - a .PRG file failed to load at all and booted me back to BASIC, a .D64 image worked fine, and Maniac Mansion froze immediately after being loaded. Disk loading times were extremely quick compared to cartridge games, though I couldn't figure out a way to use double-sided disk games.
The cartridge has 3 buttons on its casing - a soft-reset button, a "menu" button to go back to the loader menu, and a "special" button that is utilized by freezer cart software. The buttons all felt responsive and did what they were supposed to do. I also noticed that after power-cycling, the cart remembered the last game loaded while it was plugged into the computer, which is a neat touch.
Thus far, I believe this to be a useful (if flawed) device that's best used for cartridge-based games and would make a good pairing with either a legitimate Commodore disk drive, or a disk drive emulator such as the SD2IEC+. Though I understand that some of the device's limitations are expected (Commodore hardware didn't exactly let you load disk-based games from the cartridge port in the 80s, either), I'm still impressed with some of the "above-and-beyond" features offered by the Kung Fu Flash and am hopeful that support and functionality will improve with future firmware updates.
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