ARM based/enhanced Atari development, MISTer FPGA, and preservation
I had a recent discussion on the MiSTer FPGA discord. It started off as a discussion about preservation that eventually led to enhanced games and their use. I really enjoyed the back and forth discussion.
I think some of the discussion went a bit off the rails due to misconceptions about who actually created these ARM enhancements, such as CDFJ. My impression is it is believed to be from random, lazy homebrew developers and not the best of the crop of current Atari developers who put
Nope, this is not what is happening at all and this shows a lack of understanding about the architecture of the 2600. The ARM chip does not turn the 2600 into an I/O device. It assists at creating a custom instruction stream for the 6507 to run. The 6507 is running code the entire time and 100% of the display is produced via this 6507 code. Take any screenshot of any released ARM-based game, and this static screen can be hard-coded to display without an ARM chip at all.
This is why A
