Original 2 sided FB2 Motherboard

[Curt Vendel]

I've been sorting and organizing my office and putting things into storage, so I've been gathering up all of the original prototype FB2 boards, FPGA rigs and other things and I stumbled across something I had totally forgotten about...

 

This was around April of 2005. Finally got the approval from Atari for coding several new games and the first prototype motherboard I'd spec'd out arrived and this was what I had intended to be released all along, the cartridge points all lined up in order of footprint for the cartridge legs, as well as several test points (as most know from seeing the XM's, I'm big on trying to make as much as possible accessible for hardware hacking on stuff.) so this was the original back side of the board. Unfortunately Atari's Sr. VP of Sales wanted to squeeze out every last dime of profit from the product, so the factory was ordered to do things on a single sided board which made having the nice orderly layout I wanted impossible.

 

So here is the only 2 sided FB2 PC board. I removed the onboard ROM and hot glued a breadboard with a PLCC32 adapter on it so that I could test the various revisions of the Menu's and the games as we got to the end of June for final ROM image to meet a ridiculous pre-ship deadline for Walmart of 80,000 pcs (another poor move on Atari Sales) and that turned into a disaster in its own making as they used the wrong Chip layout that was missing a channel of audio out... ah such is working with impatient people...

 

Okay, so here it is:

 

[+McCallister]

Cool information and nice story. Always nice to get background like this. Thanks for sharing.