what are the possibilities?

[+grafixbmp]

Hello all. Haven't posted in a while buthad a working idea about 2600 hardware.

One of the biggest problems for programers is racing the beam on the 2600. If only they could get more clock cycles out of the hardware. Well, what if they could?

If this could be possible, it could do for the old 2600 what many people are doing with their newest consoles. Modifying them!

Now I know people have been modifying Atari's before but I was refering specificaly to the hardware itself. If it could be possible, why not rig a way to overclock the hardware in a way so that it is double the clock cycles for the TIA and in-turn the CPU as well.

 

Like this. The heart of the system is making the TIA do what you want right. and so the TIA was built to encompass how a TV works. Well then, by doubling the speed of the TIA, shouldn't you get twice the horizontal resolution. 80 instead of 40 pixles? THis would also allow for more time to do more things on the screen and would allow one to double everyhing. Of course this new setup would need it's own custom game code to work. Programs written spicificaly for overclocked 2600s.

The only downside (among other things) would be frequency shifted audio that would need to be retooled so that noone gets ear spliting headaches from hi pitched noise from the tv.

I only wrote this to findout if A: could be done in some form or fassion and B: to get a response to it. It's nothing major just a big WHAT IF???

[Kroko]

Why do you want to do this ? I mean if you want something more powerful than the 2600, you have a lot of options. I am not sure if it can be done at all, but I am quite sure there would not be many people who would modify their console. Most people like to 2600 exactly as it is

[Bruce Tomlin]

With most other consoles, you're only racing the vertical sync, and timed events use scan line interrupts or counters in the video chip, so overclocking works fine with old games, and has a beneficial effect on games which require too much computation.

 

But the 2600 is not just "racing" the beam, it's locked in sync with it. Most of the important tricks require you to write to the TIA at a specific point in the scan line. As in after some things are displayed, but before other things are displayed. So whatever you do won't be compatible with old games.

 

Sure, nobody is stopping you from hooking up a 1.5x or 3x (the pixel clock is 3x) clocked 6502 clone to the TIA (assuming the TIA bus interface doesn't fail at the higher speed), but nobody is going to play your games either. And you can't just overclock the TIA to get more pixels, since it controls the horizontal sync. Even an 80-pixel TIA clone would still need new registers. (FYI, that 40 is just the playfield pixels. The horizontal resolution is the TIA is 160 pixels.)

 

The other option would be to somehow get a PIC or other microprocessor working in a cartridge, but then you have to find a way to stop the 6502 from accessing the bus.

 

Overclocking consoles is a pointless obsession when it comes to writing new games that depend on it; much more so with the 2600.

Edited June 25, 2007 by Bruce Tomlin