Atari "Graduate" Computer as a Hobby Project?

[Dr. Van Thorp]

http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/cons...2600/a3000.html

 

http://home.comcast.net/~vbriel/

 

The above links are to two web pages of interest.

 

The first page describes the unreleased "Graduate" computer console that was supposed to make the 2600 in to a desktop computer.

 

The second page describes a recently built clone of Apple's original Apple I computer. You can buy these replicas assembled and in kit form.

 

The Graduate, according to the web site, was developed by a startup founded by some Commodore defectors. It was never released, reportedly because Atari got overambitious about the specifications for the machine, and kept demanding that the developers add new features to the design. This prolonged development, and gave competators time to grab market share and lower their prices, dooming the Graduate.

 

Some unreleased prototypes of Atari games have found their way in to the hands of Atari 2600 enthusiests. People are still making new 2600 cartridegs and building new hardware for the Atari 8-bit machines.

 

Would it be too far of a stretch to suggest that a version of the Graduate could be built by hobbyinsts, based on what information is available? The web site offers a dead link to a 115-page PDF file containing the original design notes. Also, it appears that someone has the original prototypes that are shown in the photos on the web site.

[Curt Vendel]

It really wouldn't be too difficult to do with today's technology... If I can secure the schematics and some additional technical materials, I will post them...

 

I'd be hard pressed to have my prototype tinkered with to try and reverse engineer.

 

 

 

Curt

[Godzilla]

just get a compumate, i got mine CIB for like $30 from australia on ebay. lot easier than trying to fabricate a graduate :-)

[Dr. Van Thorp]

http://www.heimcomputer.de/english/konsole...0compumate.html

 

I found this web site. I didn't know that such a thing actually made it to market. It had a 16k basic and 1750 bytes of RAM. I would have rather had an 8k basic and 8k of RAM, but maybe there was some design limitation that I don't know about.

[mos6507]

The thing is, what qualifies something like this as a "computer"?

 

If it's programmability, we already have that with things like the Supercharger and Cuttle Cart. You just have to cross-assemble from the PC.

 

If it's tinkering with Basic, yeah, there is the Compumate.

 

If someone were to do something here they should get really ambitious and put some kind of operating system in there and hack in a file system. Or write a simple text editor program or serial terminal emulator, something other than a game.

 

The trick is to do as much as possible with the stock 2600 CPU. The 2600 doesn't leave much room for general purpose computing tasks because it's so busy just updating its display and there are no interrupts to utilize.

 

Even with more ROM and RAM you still face that dilemma.