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Title: Polish Engineer Creates Postage Stamp-Sized 1980s Atari Computer

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/06/03/...

Ars Technica's Benj Edwards reports: In 1979, Atari released the Atari 400
and 800, groundbreaking home computers that included custom graphics and
sound chips, four joystick ports, and the ability to run the most advanced
home video games of their era. These machines, which retailed for $549 and
$999, respectively, represented a leap in consumer-friendly personal
computing, with their modular design and serial I/O bus that presaged USB.
Now, 46 years later, a hobbyist has shrunk down the system hardware to a size
that would have seemed like science fiction in the 1970s. Polish engineer
Piotr "Osa" Ostapowicz recently unveiled "Atarino," which may be the world's
smallest 8-bit Atari computer re-creation, according to retro computing site
Atariteca. The entire system -- processor, graphics chips, sound hardware,
and memory controllers -- fits on a module measuring just 2x1.5 centimeters
(about 0.79x0.59 inches), which is roughly the size of a postage stamp.
Ostapowicz's creation reimplements the classic Atari XL/XE architecture using
modern FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technology. Unlike software
emulators that simulate old hardware (and modern recreations that run them,
like the Atari 400 Mini console) on a complete computer system of another
architecture, Atarino reproduces the original Atari components faithfully at
the logic level, allowing it to run vintage software while maintaining
compatibility with original peripherals. [...] The project, which began over
a decade ago and was first publicly demonstrated in December 2023, includes a
6502C processor, ANTIC and GTIA graphics chips, POKEY sound chip, and memory
controllers onto a single Lattice UP5K FPGA chip. Despite its tiny size, the
system can run at clock speeds up to 31 MHz -- far faster than the original
hardware's 1.79 MHz. While the Atarino can run vintage software and work with
the original peripherals, it brings several key improvements -- including a
modernized 6502 core with added instructions, a more efficient memory
architecture, enhanced video output via VGA and HDMI, extended graphics
modes, refined sound chip emulation, modular hardware design, support for
modern connectivity like Wi-Fi and Ethernet, and compatibility with
contemporary development tools like CC65 and Visual Studio Code. Ostapowicz
"plans to release complete kits with documentation, inviting the
retrocomputing community to experiment with the hardware," adds Edwards.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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