Even Better Than The Portable 2600

Walton C. Gibson writes: "Instead of a portable 2600, how about a device that plays EVERY 2600 game ever made in hardware, and it all fits inside a single Atari 7800 enclosure? Check out Bankzilla -- as well as some this guy's other projects like the NES music format, making a portable NES."

Comments

Livin' on Slashdot Time

[b1t r0t]

This thing is like three years old now. About the right lag time for a Slashdot article, though.

FWIW, the real reason he doesn't want to even try to sell these is because it would be an unholy pain in the butt. This ain't no Heathkit we're talking about here. I've done EPROM mods for the 7800 and ColecoVision, and installed region mods for Saturn and Playstation, and this is way above that. I've also made three cart dumpers, the first was a socket adapter for an EPROM programmer, the next was a rigged TRS-80 Color Computer, and the third was a rigged 7800, and I dumped quite a few rare cartridges with them.

The trickiest part of designing this thing was emulating all the bank switching schemes used on the 2600. There were well over half a dozen different schemes used, plus this emulates the Supercharger, which had its own bank switching scheme. An FPGA was used here to give maximum flexibility with a minimum of chips.

The reason bank switching on the 2600 was so non-standardized is that there was no R/W line, so you had to use special addresses to trigger bank switches, and separate address ranges for reading vs writing any RAM on the cartridge.

And then there were the cartridges with custom chips, like Pitfall II, which had a chip containing the music data, copied to the volume registers at the start of each scan line, and the Supercharger's main chip, which had to be removed from an actual cartridge and insterted into the project. The Stella TIA chip also had to be salvaged from a real 2600.

On top of all that, he's got an 8085 and TMS9918 to control it, and to generate the audio signal for the Supercharger games. That's like putting a second custom video game system into it.

Also not mentioned above is that Kevin wrote a Tetris for the 2600.

What Would You Pay?

[Fleet Admiral Ackbar]

The designer states that he will not sell this, and legally I can see his point. The question becomes, would any of us pay $199 for a mass-built one with Atari's blessing? I suspect that I would. What about the rest of you?

New Slashdot strategy

[Fervent]

CmdrTaco: "OK boys, we've run too many repeat articles. Any suggestions?"

Cowboy Neal: "Beer?"

CmdrTaco: "Already tried that. Hemos?"

Hemos: "How about we run another anti-Microsoft article? Or say that RedHat has 2000 bugs again?"

CmdrTaco: "Too plain."

Timothy: "I know. What if were to run an article similar to the repeated ones, but not nearly as engrossing?"

CmdrTaco: "Great idea! All in favor?"

All: "Aye!"

Cowboy Neal: "Beer?"

CmdrTaco: "Soon, son. Soon......"