Self Organizing Systems researcher and self-confessed mad scientist, Alex Mordvintsev, has shared a spectacular new CMOS FET-level visualization. In the video below, you can see the Floppy Rescue homebrew ROM running on a FOSS silicon clone of an Atari 2600. What is magical about the video, though, is that the data being fetched from ROM is visualized using multicolor light traces. The scene is almost as mesmerizing as witnessing attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
This simulation tool appears to be still in development and not distributed, as Mordvintsev indicates they are still “working on it.” The embedded video starts with a full-screen overview of the Tiny Atari 2600, which is a clone of the classic VCS console’s SoC that forms part of Tiny Tapeout 9. Then the camera zooms in and around, from one end to another, showing the pulsing light travelling through the circuit’s gates and wires.
The signal propagation, as data is loaded from ROM, is shown as a colorful, evolving pattern. Moreover, you can see on the VGA monitor panel, to the right, that it takes the whole video (32s) to display just half of the Floppy Rescue title screen. That would usually load, in full, in an instant on an Atari 2600, meaning this visualization is massively slowed down, so it isn’t an opaque blur.
By today’s semiconductor standards, one might describe the Atari 2600 as Neolithic, but in this animated video, the Tiny Atari 2600 looks so futuristic due to the visualization style. The original 2600 was built around three core chips: the MOS 6507 CPU (a cut-down version of the MOS 6502), the TIA (video, audio, input, and collision detection), and the RIOT (RAM, I/O, and timer). These have been folded into an SoC for the Tiny Tapeout project, and that is what you are seeing in action in this video.
Atari hits and misses
We’ve written about the 1977 vintage Atari 2600, also sometimes called the Atari VCS, several times before. Last November, the Atari 2600+ Pac-Man Edition was rolled out to scrape more cash ($169) from the old games barrel. More ambitiously, in 2021, Atari launched a ‘modern’ VCS based on a Ryzen APU, but that was a $399 clunky flop, as you can read in our review.
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