Timeline for What was the small (cheap) atari-2600 compatible personal computer (not legal) called, that you could program 2600 games, in the 80's?
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| Apr 6, 2022 at 1:06 | history | edited | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 25, 2022 at 16:39 | history | edited | bjb | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 24, 2022 at 13:20 | comment | added | Raffzahn | @paxdiablo Naa, great google-fu. Upvote. Seems like the second version expanded capabilities a lot - which the doubled ROM-Size indicates as well. Interesting point that the CPU clock is halved in computer mode . Like a DMA to drive the screen using the TIA clone. Not far from what Atari did with the 400/800 | |
| Mar 24, 2022 at 13:09 | comment | added | paxdiablo | Found more info that seems to support my computer-mode/game-mode hypothesis, and that's about as much as I could find on this system, thankfully before I got to the point of being banned from Retro by using up so much disk space :-) | |
| Mar 24, 2022 at 13:08 | history | edited | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 24, 2022 at 12:49 | history | edited | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 24, 2022 at 10:17 | history | edited | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 24, 2022 at 10:11 | history | edited | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 24, 2022 at 10:08 | comment | added | paxdiablo | You would probably have to put the computer into a "VCS" mode that would allow playing cartridges (activating TIA/RIOT and blocking A13-15 and whatever else is needed) and probably reboot to get back to normal but that doesn't seem too onerous. Still, supposition on my part, it's fun to speculate but I have no detailed knowledge of the Bit60 hardware. I'll adapt the answer based on your comment. | |
| Mar 24, 2022 at 10:06 | comment | added | paxdiablo | @Patrick, I concur, a generic 6502 system would probably have trouble. But there's nothing stopping you from disabling the top three address lines and intercepting specific regions for the TIA or RIOT. This latter bit is, after all, what the VCS did. Whether Bit60 did that, I don't know, but the fact that RIOT was a standard MOS chip would make it doable. The TIA may be trickier, I have no idea whether it was as well documented back then as now. In other words, all you need is some extra hardware. As a primarily software guy, I love making that assumption :-) | |
| Mar 24, 2022 at 8:39 | comment | added | Patrick Schlüter | It's probably very difficult to run VCS code in a 6502 system as the partial address decoding in the 6507 which had of consequence that the memory was shadowed several times in the address space was used intensively. TIA was in $00-$7F, RAM was from $80 to $FF in zero page. This was shadowed in page 1 which allowed to use stack operations for faster operations,p.ex. | |
| Mar 23, 2022 at 17:53 | comment | added | Raffzahn | (No, I didn't downvote, just abstained from otehrwise upvoting because) It might be due the answer holding mostly speculation - in text and as well in citation - better to be cut/left out, as they do not really add | |
| Mar 23, 2022 at 6:45 | comment | added | paxdiablo | If the downvoter would like to let me know how the answer is deficient (I have no idea how it could possibly be considered not useful in its current form), I'd be happy to improve it, | |
| Mar 23, 2022 at 4:33 | history | edited | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 23, 2022 at 4:27 | history | edited | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 23, 2022 at 4:16 | history | edited | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 23, 2022 at 4:08 | history | edited | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 23, 2022 at 4:00 | history | edited | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 23, 2022 at 3:55 | history | edited | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 23, 2022 at 3:49 | history | answered | paxdiablo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |