Airborne Avenger
Atari, 1977
Atarians, The
Atari, 1976
Middle Earth
Atari, 1978
Space Riders
Atari, 1978
Time 2000
Atari, 1977I've been doing some reading into Atari pins, and slowly learning some of the basics of how the MPU operates, and I came across a few mentions of there being a universal MPU for Generation 1 games, for both the short and long MPU variants.
Does anyone happen to have any photos of these?
I repaired many Atari Gen 1 CPU boards but I never saw the "universal" one. It is the same as the others but with all the transistors, ULN2003 lampdrivers and 74145 switch selectors populated. The Atari documentation is very nice and gives you a good understanding about how their Direct Memory Controller operates. They took a very different approach as Bally, Williams and Gottlieb. Only Zaccaria has a more or less same design. I like to work on those Atari games, it is like pioneering as there is not a lot (usable) info about those games available at the web.
Marco
Quoted from MarAlb:I repaired many Atari Gen 1 CPU boards but I never saw the "universal" one. It is the same as the others but with all the transistors, ULN2003 lampdrivers and 74145 switch selectors populated.
I kind of thought that might be the case. Thanks for confirming.
I've been finding several things in these games that seemed to be ahead of their time, or were really neat design choices. But there were also several oddball things that nobody else seemed to do.
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