mos6507's Blog

It's really a pity that the Chimera is cancelled, i was looking forward to it. So i also hope that batari's Harmony Cart will get finished one day.

Sorry to hear that you finally had to pronounce it dead. There are other people, some hanging out here at AtariAge, who could probably have picked up the ball where Delicon dropped it. Maybe someday one of them will be looking for a project and contact you about finishing the hardware.

 

Maybe there's a retro gaming enthusiast engineering firm somewhere that could incorporate the functionality into a future project.

 

Whatever the future may hold for Chimera, you should know that at least one of the less ambitious of us out here appreciate the effort you put forth and are impressed by the progress that was made.

I will probably send all my prototype hardware to Batari in case he can do something with it.

This is a shame as I have been looking forward to the Chimera for some time. Fortunately the Harmony is very close to completion and will go some way towards providing similar functionality. With any luck, the next version of the Harmony will be able to do many of the things that Chimera could, e.g. multiple peripherals.

 

Chris

That's sad

Too bad, but long live Harmony!

It's really a pity that the Chimera is cancelled, i was looking forward to it. So i also hope that batari's Harmony Cart will get finished one day.

 

It's a shame that Chimera and 4A50 have died off, but at least in the case of 4A50 the killer was seeing that the Harmony board can do almost as much, and in some ways more, and it's a lot cheaper. Aesthetically, I prefer the 'purity' of the hardware approach in the 4A50 cart (as opposed to using a micro that would be powerful enough to implement an entire game even without using the 2600 at all) but the raw cost to produce the 4A50 cart would be about $25 before any markup, and I just don't see people paying the necessary premium to buy 4A50-based games.

This is a shame as I have been looking forward to the Chimera for some time. Fortunately the Harmony is very close to completion and will go some way towards providing similar functionality. With any luck, the next version of the Harmony will be able to do many of the things that Chimera could, e.g. multiple peripherals.

 

Chris

I don't want to make any promises about Harmony II before Harmony is done, but I will say that certain peripherals will require the next generation of microcontroller, and I probably won't warm up to that until the prices fall significantly (I'd say a couple of years.) The current Harmony could still support some peripherals, though. They would need to be shared with the devices already on the I2C and SPI bus, but as long as the other devices are deselected, there would be several I/O lines available.

It's really a pity that the Chimera is cancelled, i was looking forward to it. So i also hope that batari's Harmony Cart will get finished one day.

 

It's a shame that Chimera and 4A50 have died off, but at least in the case of 4A50 the killer was seeing that the Harmony board can do almost as much, and in some ways more, and it's a lot cheaper. Aesthetically, I prefer the 'purity' of the hardware approach in the 4A50 cart (as opposed to using a micro that would be powerful enough to implement an entire game even without using the 2600 at all) but the raw cost to produce the 4A50 cart would be about $25 before any markup, and I just don't see people paying the necessary premium to buy 4A50-based games.

There are more expensive ARM chips that have bus hold circuitry that could support magic writes, so at least in theory, 4A50 could with with one of those chips.

 

Currently, these chips are also too expensive for standalone use, but I expect this to change in a few years.

There are more expensive ARM chips that have bus hold circuitry that could support magic writes, so at least in theory, 4A50 could with with one of those chips.

 

If the ARM can accurately glean the bus timing, I would expect that magic writes could be used with the existing hardware, using bus capacitance to hold things for 100-200ns or so. Given an ARM, though, I'd probably do things somewhat differently from the way I did them in 4A50, since 4A50 was designed around the design capacity of the Xilinx XC9536XL CPLD.

I was excited about Chimera since it was going to be faster and easier to use than a the Krok cart. It seems Harmony will be just as fast and easy to use, so the news of Chimera's death doesn't sting as bad knowing that Harmony is on the way.

;)

 

I was excited about Chimera since it was going to be faster and easier to use than a the Krok cart.

Nah.