Changes

The practise of some GX4000 cartridge game developers was to put an almost unchanged game from the CPC into a cartridge for the Plus/GX4000.

Sometimes such games had some features removed because the 128KB only cartridge had less capacity compared to a 3" disk (178K with standard DATA format with later disc games used around 210K on each disc, compared to 128KB used for most cartridge games) and in addition there was no way to store game state (i.e. the cartridge contained an EPROM and the ACID protection chip only, no EEPROM or RAM). It is worth noting that 256KB and 512KB (max capacity) can be used with cartridges but most used 128KB ROMs.

Of course this practise didn't help the [[Plus]] range at all and was almost as shameful as the [[Speccy Port]] technique.

Another problem came from the fact that both the 464Plus and GX4000 (essentially a cut down 464Plus) had 64KB ram. As a result using the Plus features to the full was not so simple if the game was to run on these systems. If 128KB ram was the minimum then this would have allowed more flexibility for graphical data, sampled sound etc and would have easily enhanced a 64KB only game.

*[[Batman (Cartridge)]]

*[[Barbarian 2 (Cartridge)]]

*[[Mystical (Cartridge)]]

Some other cartridge games looked similar to the CPC version, but did have some enhancements. Some examples:

*[[Crazy Cars 2 ( Cartridge )]]

*[[Fire and Forget 2 ( Cartridge )]]

This was better than the direct ports.

Thankfully most of those games were known as good games on the CPC. The bet was that it would still be a good game on [[Plus]].