Atari on a Breadboard

[+mytek]

Or if you want something a little more accessible, the XLD version might be even better.

 

 

Building something like this as a breadboard would certainly be a challenge, and give you plenty of solder practice. In fact if you are duplicating the original system on a breadboard the complexity is many times higher due to all of the extra components required (resistors, capacitors, multiple DRAM instead of a single SRAM, ect.). The 1088 projects from an assembly point of view were greatly condensed by simplifying the circuitry required. Truth be told I never attempted what you are trying to do, and instead went straight into PCB creation. Now days these boards are so cheap to produce, that I entirely skip the breadboard process when developing something new.

 

Good luck on your project .

[+MrFish]

I like seeing "POKEY-L" and "POKEY-R" -- and the POKEY chips themselves -- right on the board like that.

[Not Steve]

I have ordered parts a couple of times and waited for them to arrive; I have used my time watching electronics videos on YouTube. Man to have had these resources as a kid!

 

So when I started, I wanted to look at the 600XL motherboard, and count the components and reassemble them as if it were some sort of a big jigsaw puzzle. After some thought, I realize that's not exactly what the deal is. Like, a lot of the components are definitely part of the main path, you have to have some of these resistors in place or the chips will burn up for example.

 

But then what happens is, you get your chips in place and make your connections, then you start going at the thing with an oscilloscope or a frequency monitor or something. You use capacitors to level out voltage and inductors to level out amperage. You fine tune the machine that you have created.

 

What I wanted to do was to recreate jimi hendrix's guitar from monterrey, perfectly, and then expect it to be in tune based on what it looked like. I guess maybe close to that. I was not considering that some of these chips had names like Sally and Pokey and are very very important, and some chips and other parts seem to be simple things that accomplish some task, more for being a computer than being an atari or whatever.

 

So yes, this is my learning project, and I learned not to do it like I wanted to do it. I have to start with a breadboard (I have several now) and a breadboard power supply (I just got two today) and I have to start putting chips in place. So yeah, I have to order a bigger project board from jameco but I am going to simply go for a READY prompt and then take it from there. So enough messing around, I'm getting ready to snap some chips into place and take some pics.

 

So thanks, now I get to look at all of these schematics for all of these chips. I have an arduino uno and two teensy ++ 2.0 devices, I may actually do a teensy to emulate the keyboard, send the pulses to the two keyboard controller chips and on into the system. That would add a nice aspect to make this deal more relevant (2019).

 

Pics in a week or so, maybe sooner.

[Not Steve]

 

 

I got my breadboards in the mail, got the chips set in place (I may have broke a leg on my RAM) and have labeled some chips. There is a power supply and a Teensy ++ 2.0 that I will use to send keystrokes to the controller chips.

 

I am going to set up a separate bus for A0-A15 and D0-D7 and will wire everything as best as I can. Ordering a single large project breadboard (solderless)

 

I'm pretty much just going to start with getting power to the chips and figuring out how to get some sort of a basic input/output, then I will take the rest of it in chunks and keep tweaking it.

 

Of course, I'm going to have to order a DIY oscilloscope kit and put that together, and get the heartbeat of this thing going. One thing I'd like to do is to be able to swap out the timer with a button and step through the execution, that would be cool.

 

Pics in 2 days.

[Not Steve]

Added some more pics.

[+mytek]

You are very brave to take this on .

 

I will be very curious as to how the capacitance of the proto-boards will affect the timing.

[Not Steve]

Oh good lord I got maybe 30% of the connections and it was obvious I was being WAY too dense, lol, need to spread out some. I had to pull it all and will start small and build up, this is going to take a while. Ordering larger project boards.