6 Jan
2010
6 Jan
'10
7:04 p.m.
Someone is acquiring and going through old 9-track tapes of chip design
files produced by Atari during their heyday. See http://www.atariage.com/
for the story. Does anyone know anything about what happened to
Commodore's design files?
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
6 Jan
6 Jan
7:32 p.m.
That's really remarkable. I imagine that the masks are probably worthless for
today's processes though. :(
It would be a fantastic aid in reverse engineering though.
________________________________
From: David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu>
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Sent: Wed, January 6, 2010 1:04:18 PM
Subject: Commodore chip design files
Someone is acquiring and going through old 9-track tapes of chip design files produced by
Atari during their heyday. See http://www.atariage.com/ for the story. Does anyone know
anything about what happened to Commodore's design files?
-- David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
7:36 p.m.
On Wed, 6 Jan 2010, geoffrey oltmans wrote:
I'm interested in seeing the guts of the SID. Perhaps newer and more
advanced ones can be made.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Someone is
acquiring and going through old 9-track tapes of chip
design files produced by Atari during their heyday. See
http://www.atariage.com/ for the story. Does anyone know anything
about what happened to Commodore's design files?
That's really remarkable.
I imagine that the masks are probably
worthless for today's processes though. :(
It would be a fantastic aid in reverse engineering though. 
11:06 p.m.
On Wed, 6 Jan 2010, geoffrey oltmans wrote:
That's really remarkable. I imagine that the masks
are probably
worthless for today's processes though. :(
s/probably/definitely/
It would be a fantastic aid in reverse engineering
though.
That's the real value. A decent LVS tool can derive a netlist from the
layout file. From there, it's grunt-work organizing devices into
functional gates and getting a usable schematic. Given the relatively
small size of ancient layouts, I bet that there are free tools capable of
this analysis.
For comparison, current processors can have upwards of a billion
transistors. Extracting the netlist for checking mask data against the
as-designed schematic is quite non-trivial. Doing it in a reasonably
short amount of time - even more so.
Disclaimer: I'm heavily involved with LVS and netlist extraction in my day
job.
Steve
--
8 Jan
8 Jan
1:55 a.m.
On 1/6/10 6:06 PM, "Steven Hirsch" <snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, 6 Jan 2010, geoffrey oltmans wrote:
Isn't this the process used to create schematics of the 4004?
Rich
That's really remarkable. I imagine that the
masks are probably
worthless for today's processes though. :(
s/probably/definitely/
It would be a fantastic aid in reverse
engineering though.
That's the real value. A decent LVS tool can derive a netlist from the
layout file. From there, it's grunt-work organizing devices into
functional gates and getting a usable schematic. Given the relatively
small size of ancient layouts, I bet that there are free tools capable of
this analysis.
For comparison, current processors can have upwards of a billion
transistors. Extracting the netlist for checking mask data against the
as-designed schematic is quite non-trivial. Doing it in a reasonably
short amount of time - even more so.
Disclaimer: I'm heavily involved with LVS and netlist extraction in my day
job.
Steve 
6 Jan
6 Jan
11:01 p.m.
That's list member and uber Atari historian Curt Vendel. And he
acquired them years ago, he has most of the Atari mainframe backups.
Marty
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 1:04 PM, David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote:
Someone is acquiring and going through old 9-track tapes of chip design
files produced by Atari during their heyday. ?See http://www.atariage.com/
for the story. ?Does anyone know anything about what happened to Commodore's
design files?
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
5478
days inactive
5480
days old
6 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
dgriffi＠cs.csubak.edu -
keithvz＠verizon.net -
oltmansg＠bellsouth.net -
rich.cini＠verizon.net -
snhirsch＠gmail.com -
wgungfu＠gmail.com