Proprietary Atari chips being reconstructed
Bill Kendrick
I saw some hints of this on Facebook, and just noticed this
article at the top of the front page of AtariAge
( http://www.atariage.com/ ), which also links to their
forum section, where the topic is being discussed:
http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/154479-new-gtia-chips/
"Atari Chips Reborn"
December 14, 2009
Curt Vendel of the Atari History Museum and Legacy Engineering has
been hard at work reconstructing several proprietary Atari chips,
including the GTIA (used in the Atari 8-bit computers and 5200), the
MARIA (used in the Atari 7800), and the TIA (from the Atari
2600). There is great potential for creating new Atari machines in a
variety of form factors, based on Curt's work. When asked about these
new developments, Curt had the following to say:
"Many in the Atari community, myself included, have cobbled together
one thing or another to keep our systems alive. A dream for everyone
has always been the possibility of perhaps a new Atari 8-bit
system. As many know, I have most of what was Atari's mainframe
archives, among them are what are called "Tape Outs"--these are 9
track reel to reel tapes that in the 1980s and early 1990s would be
sent from a chip design firm--such as Atari's "ASG" (Atari
Semiconductor Group) to a place called a "FAB" which is a chip
fabricator. The final layered data files are in a streaming binary
format called "GDS" and this data instructs the FAB on how to process
and create actual IC chips.
I've been spending a great deal of time as of late recovering the data
from the tapes, having to massage them to process and create a viable
GDS and/or DB file so that the actual chips could be plotted and
tested with some software that I use. The effort has been successful
for the most part and several of Atari's proprietary chips are coming
back to life in simulation. Now we need to see if they can be
recreated in a FAB at a reasonable cost. What is the potential of
this? Doing the chips in smaller SMT packaging, and potentially
bringing back to life some of the later CMOS designs of combo chips
which could lead to a SoC - System on a Chip. This is all very early
work, but the future just got a little brighter in terms of preserving
and continuing the legacy of Atari's custom IC chips."
You can read all about Curt's hard work over in our Atari 8-bit
Computers Forum. In addition to technical discussion (which includes
Curt Vendel), you'll find various high-resolution images of the
reconstructed chips.
Enjoy!
--
-bill!
Sent from my computer