Comment on idea for a controller that sounds good on paper and I wanna share
DdCno1@beehaw.org 3 weeks agoI think this was an Atari 2600 on a chip though, not emulation, although I’m not 100% sure. Wikipedia states that the successor from 2005 used such a design, but surely this must have been the only way of creating this kind of low-cost device in 2002. I doubt there was anything cheap enough that could emulate even a system as basic as the 2600 in software back then.
barsoap@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
The 2600 used a MOS 6507, which is a cut-down 6502, which had ~3500 logic transistors (not counting the ones necessary because NMOS), running at a max of 3MHz. Add very primitive graphics and 8k RAM.
Can’t be arsed to slog through suitable processors but ARM cores back then could kill that thing dead. 2002 is six years after the Palm Pilot while Moore’s law was still in full effect. The 2600 is from 1977, two decades more ancient.
There should even be more than enough cycles left over to generate the video signal in software.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
Sure, but 2002 was a bit too early for ARM chips in what was essentially a cheap children’s toy. They were still too complex and expensive for this kind of thing at the time - not to mention, there were few emulators that ran on this architecture available, so it would have to be specifically developed.