3 Feb
2002
3 Feb
'02
10:55 a.m.
On Sun, 3 Feb 2002, Curt Vendel wrote:
From: "Tothwolf"
<tothwolf(a)concentric.net>
Well, a really good scan of each side of the boards would do as a starting
point for most of the true hardware hackers. Most of the time would be
spent on sections of the board other than the main processor anyway. I
imagine there are some nonworking or unfinished boards floating around out
there somewhere too.
What might really be nice, is to get permission from whoever still owns
the design for the units to reproduce them. With today's manufacturing
techniques, the boards would be the least expensive part to reproduce. The
most expensive parts of a reproduction that involve a molded plastic case
are having the molds duplicated. I wonder if Atari stored the molds for
this thing away somewhere... Heck, even back then Atari decided it was
worthless, maybe they'd be willing to put the design in the public domain
;)
-Toth
On Sun, 3 Feb 2002, Curt Vendel wrote:
Of the two known boards sets, neither one of us is really interested
in having someone tinker with them and take chance to damaging them or
their components. Someone would also need to find suitable
replacement for the COPS411 MCU and read off the current code and port
it to a newer MCU say from Microchip or others. There are only 3
empty shells out there, so I doubt the demand would justify the
work... IMHO, or maybe not :-) There are only two fully assembled and functional
units, Al Alcorn
doesn't even have one and he was the head of the Atari Cosmos project,
but he does own a set of the plastic shells. I have one of the
functional units and a CES mockup, the other is owned by a former
Atari engineer from Atari's special projects unit. Here is a link to
images and history of the Cosmos at my site:
http://www.atari-history.com/cosmos/cosmos.html
Why doesn't someone reproduce the boards used in the system and install
them in the empty shells? That is, if someone wants one badly enough.