Curt Vendel

That is a superb implementation, 2 thumbs up on the nice planning and design.

Those look great! Nice and crystal clear.

Actually I have the full E Sized sheets of them which would give everyone crystal clear images. I will make a point to have them all scanned...

There are some chip files and other technical docs. I'm trying to see if any tape outs were done, possibly chip plots. I'm working on reading the GDS II's from the Silver chip tapes now that are part of Rainbow (Silver & Gold)

Yes... but that was actually what they did - they put a TIA and and GTIA on the same board and were getting them to work together. It was a kludge but it was to show something could be done. The reason it was shot down was that management was tired to recycling the same old 4-7 year old technology. The GCC design was a fresh new device and it worked. Part of the issue was the Sunnyvale engineers didn't like that they had to work with an outside company. This was a problem with a lot of project, they didn't want things from the WCI/NY Atari lab either and that was Atari itself and it was headed by Steve Mayer who was one of the founders of Cyan Engineering - Atari Grass Valley, where the TIA and the Colleen were created. WCI/NY was where the designs for Janice (later renamed Jan) - the all in one combo 2600 chip, were started. The original design for Elizabeth - (NY-LIZ) which was originally a 600 XL computer that would be able to more easily port 2600 games to it and enhance them... again, these all got rejected from Atari Sunnyvale... if it wasn't done there, they felt it was beneath them. Bad way to work.

Could be... checking that.

Exactly.. there are almost 178 (Several of the Dev's are also pre-orders so the count has gone down) people who are in front of the line with pre-orders, until everyone is taken care of first, none of the XM's being made are being sold for new orders.

So, getting some video's and feedback from the developers, they are hitting the RAM pretty hard and looks like they are getting some random pixels on the screen, seems to be thermally related. We are looking at the issue and trying to isolate the cause. This is very helpful that the dev's have the XM's only so that they can really push them hard and anything still lurking can be resolved. Mark is busily working on the End User BIOS and I also found a missing ground to a PAD for the SIO, so these tiny things are being sorted out. Nothing is going to be a show stopper, so this is just getting any final issues out of the way so that we can make sure that the user versions are as bug free as possible. Something I'm going to say. The XM's are going to come with a disclaimer on them. There is a lot of hardware in these units and we all have to remember that our 7800's are 28-35 years old. I had to replace PacManPlus' 7805 and one of his caps on his 7800 because it wouldn't power up with the XM installed. Once those were replaced, the 7800 with the XM powered up fine. So there is the possibility that a persons 7800 may need repairs if they don't work with a XM installed. I might have to consider given it, its own P/S to power it to reduce the pull the 7800's.

I don’t recall making a promise. It’s something I threw out there. Maybe it can be looked at later on, let’s just get everyone their XMs first.

Probably in 2 weeks, I still have 3 more here I am preparing. Waiting on the final end user BIOS and we just need to complete the signature sense for the Versa boards. I need to make sure this is all locked down, its important to support CPU's boards as many people have them and I don't want them to not be able to use them.

Finally compiled everything and finally got all of the data put into a menu menu'ing hierarchy I've wanted to implement for a long time. RAINBOW page will be updated soon. Waiting for some documents to come from Kevin Savetz and I have a bunch of chip tape outs and other materials I'll add in. The AMY stuff is already up in the RAINBOW page. http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/aed/OMNI/

Yes, however even after a patent expires, you have what’s called Trade Dress (the look of a product) however just like trademarks, trade dress has a 3 year non-use abandonment clause. Atari stopped making the classic 77/78 joysticks in 92 and by 94 the patents had expired. 96 Atari ceased to exist and was merged into JTS which ran a division called Atari Interactive. In 98 Hasbro buys all the game copyrights & IP from JTS, Infogrames buys Habros gaming assets - Atari Interactive among them. So from 96 through 2001 Atari is a software only company. No hardware has been produced. Their last know hardware - the Jaguar is the only thing people remember of Atari and the only controller is the Jaguar controller. Atari has abandoned its trade dress on its joysticks, it can’t argue Residual goodwill because everyone in mainstream culture has forgotten about Atari, it’s been a software company for 5 years straight until the Jakks Pacific 10in1 license. On their console, that’s a lost cause... Atari back in 1984-1992 abandoned the entire trade dress of the 77-83 VCS design, in 83 Atari itself abandoned its wood grain usage. Most of the mainstream public only knows the 2600 as the wedged shaped 2600jr design. Atari has ZERO standing on that. This case is a no win for them.

Atari has ZERO rights of ownership of the old joystick design. I can tell you this for a fact. I’ve been selling my USB Classic Controllers for 12 years and Atari has known about this since day one and I even had their head of legal confront my in 2008 and said there was nothing Atari could do. The patents expired, they haven’t used the design in over 13 years 92-05 so they can’t claim trade dress either. Atari has knowingly allowed the sale of joysticks that are similar to the old 78 design and their actions (or lack of) remove any form of argument for them to use. Furthermore, Hasbro bought IP rights, no patents, no designs, no holdings. Atari owns game copyrights & trademarks, therefor Infogrames has no position of enforcement of product trade dress.

Those were upgrades for 800XL's and they were just called 800XE's, those are not the Atari released 800XEs

Oh, just wait, its gonna be getting a LOT worse for Atari on that case. {insert evil laugh here} The fun is only just beginning....

I would recommend trying to make it SIO2PC compatible so you have something that is a well established protocol & system.

You should ask CPUWIZ if his Devcart is still available. does this serial communicate through joystick port #2 from a PC to load a game into memory and run, that’s what Perry Demo’d with when he did the XMYM Tracker.

I have a lot but almost all are May-June 84’s and a couple of April 84 protos

Dev Unit #6 shipping out of Mike (Rev Eng) this morning. Synthpopalooza #7 is going out to Synthpopalooza and Mitch Orman has XM #8 and a box of 7800's he loaned me heading to him Weds. Shawn... stay tuned.

Looks neat.

Here, hold my beer...

Only shipping to Devs at this point... not much sense for everyone to have XMs when there are only a few games that use just some of its features. Now the coders can work on XM specific games now that the real hardware is ready

Wholly crap Mike!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can't wait to see what kind stuff you're gonna do once you get your XM Dev unit next week!!! That was such an incredible demo on the XM.

Boards arrived and I'm building all 5 at the same time. I will be shipping these out on Monday and will post up where they are going to.

Ummmm... Yeah, but then I'd need to order more!!! LOL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!