Old Atari Design Docs Online

gribbly writes "Forget emulation -- now you can read classic Atari design docs!" It's all documents from the early 1980s, I think, and looks totally...I dunno. It's like taking a journey into the past.

Comments

This will never catch on

[91degrees]

What do this "Atari company" think is going to happen? Do they really think that people are going to buy these machines? Even if they do, are people really going to be putting coins in again and again with no chance of a financial reward?

This is a ridiculous idea and its never going to catch on.

Re:Feature priorities askew?

[Olivier Galibert]

The video subsystems were completely different for computers than for arcade machines at this time[1].

Computers:
- framebuffer
- hardware support for scrolling of the pixels
- blitters
- hblank interrupt for effects

Arcade games:
- n planes of tile oriented video (i.e, the screen is divided into 8x8 elements selected by number)
- sprites generator (usually a plane of its own)
- priority manager
- hardware support for global scrolling of the tile planes
- horizontal and vertical line scrolling
- vblank interrupt only

There were numerous variants, of course, and some games used a framebuffer (williams games, mostly), but this is the usual architecture. It trades off genericity (you can't really draw a line in a no-framebuffer, tile-based system) for efficiency (zero-cpu-cost layers, independant busses for the graphic roms which are directly connected to the tile/sprites ICs, etc....). That's mostly what made them so impressive compared to the quite feeble CPUs they were using.

OG, mamedev

[1] Now everything has been unified under a common 3d-oriented architecture.