Ah this is my most favourite cartridge I had as a kid, The Warpspeed cart! It took a long time to find a complete in box copy, but this one popped up on ebay last year some time. Often you only find the carts themselves.
Front of the slip case box. Pretty bland if you ask me! That 39.96$ sale price in 1988 is worth 85.38$ in todays dollars.
Back of the box, one thing to note, they did not change anything between V1 and V2 of the cartridges, they did update the manual, but I guess that was cheaper than a new run of full colour box slip cases.
Sliding the slipcase off we get a standard Cinemaware box cover, and inside a cartridge (does not come with two, but I have two carts, only one was complete in box).
You'll see a very convenient switch to toggle from C64 to C128 mode, I dont know any other reset carts that were C128 compatible! Things to note here, they are identical, but one has a V1 ROM and one has a V2 ROM. (The cleaner one is a V2). There is no way to tell by just looking at the box or the carts if they have a V1 or V2 ROM inside.
Under the carts you get a registration card, I used to love filling these with false information as a kid.
Check out that "Number of computer games owned, 0-2" and uh, apparently the dog decided to sleep on the couch when nobody was looking. doh!
With the registration card, you get a nice manual, its pretty slim (ie: no real breakdown of all the commands in the machine language monitor etc). We also get a copyright date, 1988. I dont know for certain if the V1 also had a 1988 or 1987 date.
Ah, here is the first paragraph in the manual and we know for certain it is for V2 because it specifically calls out C1581 drives, which V1 did not support. I belive that was about the only improvement of V2 over V1, and some of the loader routines were tweaked/fixed.
Aah the shot of the entire ensemble!
So the cart was pretty sweet, and was much like other carts of its time, but probably was just too late to the party in 1988. It had built in fastload that was dang sweet. Reset button (very handy!). Some file copy + disk edit utils. A very sweet inbuilt machine language monitor and of course the ubiquitous dos wedge (how did we ever live without a dos wedge?).
The ROM itself is "encrypted", and I put that in quotes because really all they did was swap data lines around. If you read the rom you get bytes that are bit shifted. Looking over the schematics it looks like all the C64/C128 toggle switch does is preload the value going to the GAME/EXROM (pine 8+9) of the cartridge port from high to low. (C64 sets high, C128 sets low)..
That all this works in 80 col mode on the C128 make it super worthwhile imo!