Old Vintage Computing Research

The 21st century direct-to-TV game console: a dirt-cheap toy dragging poor ports of cherished games to a more downmarket age. If you couldn't afford the real device, your alternative was these inexpensive, inadequate facsimiles faithful only to one's gauzy recollection. As their chipsets are generally grossly underpowered and optimized solely for cost, the vast majority didn't even try to run the original games precisely as they were, and the quality of the resulting rewrites sometimes showed their software to be as rushed as the hardware. (Even today, where true emulators are more plentiful, the SoCs these devices use often still require compromise.) There were certainly standouts that are practical miniatures of the original systems, notably the Commodore 64 Direct-to-TV and Atari Flashback 2, but the remainder during their zenith in the early 2000s were more like this Intellivision and two Atari 2600 imposters, playing uneven resurrections on unrelated silicon. But it turns out these three (and others) have something in common besides the bargain bin: they're all derived from our favourite chip, the 6502. In fact, the two Atari imposters even embed the 6502's 16-bit descendant, the 65816. How do we know this? Rampant speculation, foggy memory, datasheets and vidcaps — and taking them apart, of course.