Atari 2600

System Specs

Links

Tech Files

TIA Information

Patents

Development Software

Development Systems

Emulators

Schematics

System Specs

Processor: 6507 (I slightly stripped down version of the 6502)

Speed: 1.19Mhz

RAM: 128 bytes

ROM: 4K Cartridge ROM space without bankswitching

Sound: TIA custom Atari graphics/sound chip.

Graphics RAM: None
Colors: 128
Sprites: 2, 8 bit wide; 2, 3, 1 bit wide; All sprites full screen height
Background Graphics: 40 pixels wide by 192 lines high.

I/O: Joystick and console switch IO handled byte 6532 RIOT and TIA

Ports: 2 Joystick ports, 1 Cartridge port, Power in, RF output

Links

Atari Age

This is my favorite site or Atari console news, and information. It covers the 2600, 5200, 7800, Lynx and Jaguar. Also check out the excellent message board, you may see a post from me on there.

Kevin Horton's Home Page

Kevin is a classic video game tech guru, especially for the 2600. His page is going to have a lot of tech info on the 2600 as well as other systems. Check it out!

Nick Bensema's 2600 Tech Page

This is probably one of the most complete 2600 programming pages I have found.

Stella Mailing List Archive

This is an archive of all the messages from the Stella Programming Mailing List. This is currently one of the best places to discuss 2600 programming and the archive contains a lot a good information and source code.

Atari 2600 Source Code Page

This is a nice orginized archive or 2600 source code that has been posted to the Stella mailling list.

Technical Files

For detailed information on the TIA check out my TIA Tech Page

For information on the 6507 microprocessor goto by 6502 Processor page.

Stella Programming Guide (PDF): The official Atari 2600 (Stella) programming manual from Atari.

Changing Atari VCS Graphics - The Easy Way (PDF): An article by Adam Trionfo

Patents

US3793482: VIDEO IMAGE POSITIONING CONTROL SYSTEM FOR AMUSEMENT DEVICE

US3728480: TELEVISION GAMING AND TRAINING APPARATUS

USRE028507: Television gaming apparatus

USRE028598: TELEVISION GAMING APPARATUS AND METHOD

Development Software

DASM.ZIP: This is an excellent 6502 cross assembler for MSDOS. It supports pretty much any feature you could want in an assembler including macros, and the ability to produce raw-binary files. Thanks to Bob Colbert for porting this assembler from the Amiga.

2600gfx.zip: These programs allow you to extract graphics from Atari 2600 binary files into a text file, then turn the text file back into a binary. You can use these programs to put your own graphics into 2600 games.

distella.zip: This is an excellent Atari 2600 cartridge disassembler. I creates re-assembleable code, puts in register labels, and automatically separates data from code.

Atari 2600 Development Systems

There are a couple of different ways of loading your code into the 2600 to run it. I use a custom built RAM cart with a battery backup, and a PIA card that goes into a slot in my PC to read carts and to write to my RAM cart. Here are some links to pages with different development system ideas:

 

Saltine's Supercharger Page:

The easiest approach to doing development is to use a Starpath Supercharger. The Supercharger was a device that plugged into the 2600 and allowed you to load games from tapes. This page contains a program that will turn binary files into .WAV files. You can then connect your Supercharger to the output of your sound card and download the .WAV file to the Supercharger.

Saltine's Multicart Page:

This page describes how to modify an old Activision cartridge to turn it into a multicart. This same technique can be used to easily create a RAM cart with the addition of some sort of battery backup.

Emulators

One of the easiest ways of doing 2600 development is to simply run you code on an emulator. There are a number of emulators currently available for MSDOS, Windows, and other platforms. For development work I recommend PC Atari by John Dullea.

Here are some links to good 2600 emulators:

Virtual 2600

A 2600 emulator for Unix. This is the emulator that my Virtual VCS is based on.

PC Atari Emulator:

This is an excellent Atari 2600 emulator I have seen for MSDOS! It is fast, acurate, runs most cartridges, has some sound, has a built in menu, and debugger. If you get any 2600 emulator, download this one.

Stella:

This is a very good emulator that runs on Linux, Unix, MSDOS, Power Mac, and Windows. The page has full source code and binaries.

A26 Home Page :

This emulator was written specifically for MSDOS. It has some bugs in the emulation, and it does not have a lot of features, but it is very FAST and very small. If you want to play the games at a normal speed on a lower end system, this is the emulator to go with. Source code is also available.

Z26 Home Page :

Another good 2600 emulator with source code available.

Virtual VCS V0.60:

Virtual VCS is an MSDOS port of the x2600 VCS emulator (later now known as Virtual 2600) which was written by Alex Hornby. This was the first emulation project I worked on and I was quite proud of the results. I have stopped further development on it since it has been superceeded by other much better 2600 emulators, and because I have moved onto other projects. I am leaving the source and binary here for educational purposes.

Virtual VCS and x2600 are distributed under the terms of the GNU Public Licence.

Click here to download version 0.60 of Virtual VCS.

Click here to download version 0.60 of Virtual VCS source code.

NOTE:

Due to the flood of good Atari 2600 emulators in the past few months I will not be doing any future development on VVCS. I am very glad to have provided the first non-commercial Atari 2600 emulator for MSDOS and to have given a boost to some of the later 2600 authors, who's emulators are now superior to mine.

Schematics

The following are schematics that I have traced out by hand. I cannot guarantee that these schematics are accurate, or that they are the same for all versions of a piece of equipment. These where all draw with Orcad, exported to a DXF file, imported into Corel Photopaint, then exported as a GIF.

Starpath/Arcadia Supercharger

Logic

Atari 2600 VCS Rev 13:

Audio/Video

Main Logic

Ports/Switches

Power/Clock

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Dan Boris - danlb_2000@yahoo.com