I understand it never left the prototype phase to ship. 14 year old me was never going to afford one. But adult me hoped I had missed it and could buy one. Alas.
Is your username "brass monkey" by chance? Do you remember talking to a "defender" via CB radio in the 80"s?
If not, no worries. Was something in your words reminded me of those times.
I wanted one too! Nice machine, fast disk, built in goodies!
Even though it would not see a graphics system upgrade, the special chips allowing ANTIC to work on RAM apart from the CPU would allow the full exploitation of the graphics system, and give the machine a nice speed boost with a 6502 freed of the screen DMA.
The demoscene shows us what throwing lots of RAM at the graphics could do!
Alas no. Where I grew up in Canada, CB Radio wasn't as big as it was in the states. Would have been really cool to meet up with someone I knew in the 80s like this.
What I see in the Atari, C-64 and even the 8086 demoscene today is amazing. Better tools to help you edit/compile/run/debug code faster leaves so much more room for creativity
The CB chatter was great. At one point, more than a dozen of us would gather on channel 21 to just talk. Phone time was hard to get and person to person. Adults for miles around would listen.
Re: scene
I love the scene and yes! We do have great tooling.
If not, no worries. Was something in your words reminded me of those times.
I wanted one too! Nice machine, fast disk, built in goodies!
Even though it would not see a graphics system upgrade, the special chips allowing ANTIC to work on RAM apart from the CPU would allow the full exploitation of the graphics system, and give the machine a nice speed boost with a 6502 freed of the screen DMA.
The demoscene shows us what throwing lots of RAM at the graphics could do!
What I see in the Atari, C-64 and even the 8086 demoscene today is amazing. Better tools to help you edit/compile/run/debug code faster leaves so much more room for creativity
The CB chatter was great. At one point, more than a dozen of us would gather on channel 21 to just talk. Phone time was hard to get and person to person. Adults for miles around would listen.
Re: scene
I love the scene and yes! We do have great tooling.