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Archive: https://archive.today/8UDZ8

From the post:

>In 1979, Atari released the Atari 400 and 800, groundbreaking home computers that included custom graphics and sound chips, four joystick ports, and the ability to run the most advanced home video games of their era. These machines, which retailed for $549 and $999, respectively, represented a leap in consumer-friendly personal computing, with their modular design and serial I/O bus that presaged USB. Now, 46 years later, a hobbyist has shrunk down the system hardware to a size that would have seemed like science fiction in the 1970s.

Archive: https://archive.today/8UDZ8 From the post: >>In 1979, Atari released the Atari 400 and 800, groundbreaking home computers that included custom graphics and sound chips, four joystick ports, and the ability to run the most advanced home video games of their era. These machines, which retailed for $549 and $999, respectively, represented a leap in consumer-friendly personal computing, with their modular design and serial I/O bus that presaged USB. Now, 46 years later, a hobbyist has shrunk down the system hardware to a size that would have seemed like science fiction in the 1970s.

(post is archived)

[–] • 2 pts

Pretty cool. After Sinclair put out the ZX80/81 and Spectrums the Soviet countries built clones like hell. I am guessing only Poland got Atari's because Jack Tramiel was Polish.

[–] • 1 pt

a 6502C processor, ANTIC and GTIA graphics chips, POKEY sound chip, and memory controllers onto a single Lattice UP5K FPGA chip

Sure looks a lot l like a MCM (multi chip module), unless this image is just an early engineering fixture that he prototyped before integration onto one chip and one process.

The guy must have access to circuit design libraries, developer and sim software, layout software, mask creation and a foundry. It's not cheap to do this, or at least it wasn't cheap 20 years ago. He must do extensive circuit analysis, determine current densities, critical path, production test solutions, test fixturing ... to integrate everything onto one small chip.