14 Oct
2005
14 Oct
'05
1:44 p.m.
I have some former Atari engineer contacts at Tekmos, they supposedly
can back out GDS' to Verilog, so if it isn't too painful or costly a
process and it could be stepped back to where the core could be
resynthesised into modern ASIC or even just FPGA's this could be very
interesting. I have some tapeouts for AMY and SILVER which were a
sound and graphics chipset that Atari Corp. research had been working on
in 1983-4 that, according to notes and speaking with the engineers, was
a chipset that could've blown the doors off of the Amiga and just about
anything else at the time. It would be interesting to see if these
chips could be resurrected and examined. I know AMY did in fact work,
I have a proto 65XE computer with one wired onto it and Sight & Sound in
the Midwest had gotten the chip working and in fact had an AMY-2 chip
designed as well.
I'm going to convert some of these to ASCII just to examine in the
meantime. I'm also going to do a block view of the tapes again, one
block at a time and see if there is anything else besides the GDSII and
DB files on them. I have a bunch of Silos TDX simulation test tapes,
those may have some good info to yeild as well.
Curt
Steven N. Hirsch wrote:
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote:
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I've been sitting on literally hundreds of
chip "tapeouts" of various
proprietary Atari chip designs from the 70's through the 80's for various
chips used in their arcade, home video game and home computer systems. I
plethora of legacy designs that would've been a true loss to classic computing
and video gaming history had they lanquished to a point where the 9 track
tapes would've become unreadable.
(snip)
Well, I thought I'd share this info with
everyone as I know I've asked many a
times to the group if anyone could assist and I've been at this now since, oh
about 2003, so its good to finally be able to access this data at last.
Glad you worked that all out, Curt. Do you have the RTL description for
any of those, or even a netlist? In theory, a good LVS tool and lots of
patience could infer the netlist from the layout. In practice, it may be
extremely difficult to back out anything usable (I work in the field, so
this is not idle speculation).
Steve