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Hardware

Polish Engineer Creates Postage Stamp-Sized 1980s Atari Computer (arstechnica.com) 29

Ars Technica's Benj Edwards reports: In 1979, Atari released the Atari 400 and 800, groundbreaking home computers that included custom graphics and sound chips, four joystick ports, and the ability to run the most advanced home video games of their era. These machines, which retailed for $549 and $999, respectively, represented a leap in consumer-friendly personal computing, with their modular design and serial I/O bus that presaged USB. Now, 46 years later, a hobbyist has shrunk down the system hardware to a size that would have seemed like science fiction in the 1970s.

Polish engineer Piotr "Osa" Ostapowicz recently unveiled "Atarino," which may be the world's smallest 8-bit Atari computer re-creation, according to retro computing site Atariteca. The entire system -- processor, graphics chips, sound hardware, and memory controllers -- fits on a module measuring just 2x1.5 centimeters (about 0.79x0.59 inches), which is roughly the size of a postage stamp.

Ostapowicz's creation reimplements the classic Atari XL/XE architecture using modern FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technology. Unlike software emulators that simulate old hardware (and modern recreations that run them, like the Atari 400 Mini console) on a complete computer system of another architecture, Atarino reproduces the original Atari components faithfully at the logic level, allowing it to run vintage software while maintaining compatibility with original peripherals. [...] The project, which began over a decade ago and was first publicly demonstrated in December 2023, includes a 6502C processor, ANTIC and GTIA graphics chips, POKEY sound chip, and memory controllers onto a single Lattice UP5K FPGA chip. Despite its tiny size, the system can run at clock speeds up to 31 MHz -- far faster than the original hardware's 1.79 MHz.
While the Atarino can run vintage software and work with the original peripherals, it brings several key improvements -- including a modernized 6502 core with added instructions, a more efficient memory architecture, enhanced video output via VGA and HDMI, extended graphics modes, refined sound chip emulation, modular hardware design, support for modern connectivity like Wi-Fi and Ethernet, and compatibility with contemporary development tools like CC65 and Visual Studio Code.

Ostapowicz "plans to release complete kits with documentation, inviting the retrocomputing community to experiment with the hardware," adds Edwards.

Polish Engineer Creates Postage Stamp-Sized 1980s Atari Computer

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