Atari has launched collectible arcade circuit boards of retro classics | Hacker News Reader

Atari has launched collectible arcade circuit boards of retro classics

retrododo.com

120 pointsajdude65 comments

What letdown -- they're unpopulated PCBs. I'd buy Major Havoc in a second if it was ready to pop into my Tempest machine. :)

Yeah... but the manufacturing processes for those chips are long, long gone. Nobody's building fabs for CPUs like the MOS 6507 which only have 3,218 transistors in total (seriously). That CPU hasn't been in production since 1992, so any replacement would be a complete redesign, or an FPGA packaged inside to simulate that part, which would no doubt cause its own griping. It would also be pointless, because emulating a 6507 cycle-accurately is pretty easy nowdays. Same goes for the other chips. If you can emulate with perfect accuracy because the tech was so primitive back then; what's the point of making what will still be a redesign?

At that point, just build a MiSTer (FPGA-based reimplementation), then get or build an arcade cabinet adapter to have your MiSTer provide the brains.

https://misteraddons.com/products/mistercade

So they’re selling a reproduction board, that does not actually work with original hardware, for over $200 a pop? That’s some expensive wall-art.

> that does not actually work with original hardware

Well, if you were to populate it with the chips from your old board, it would work. So as a replacement part if it was just your PCB that was cooked, it's not a terrible option. Just having the option to get such a brand-new ancient part is still valuable, regardless of cost.

On the bright side, I could spend $500 more on Mac Pro wheels.

I’m not sure I would even trust it. But if everything was socketed it might be a fun project.

I definitely wouldn't trust it if they're not certifying that they work and providing the exact revision of the board. Even boards that appear to have the same layout may be different - it was common to screw up a trace layout on a first version and need to manually solder bodge wires during assembly.

They are providing the specific revisions: Lunar Lander, Warlords (Rev D), Black Widow (Rev A), Gravitar (Rev C), and Major Havoc (Rev D).

And their site also states "These boards use the original bill of materials, follow the original schematics, and can be used to replace damaged original boards by using the original parts from these boards."

Walk into an art gallery sometime and you'll see even more expensive wall art.

Then can you emulate a 6507 cycle-accurately on a surface mount board that fits within the package envelope of an original 6507 DIP-28?

That exists but for 6502. The 6507 was not used on arcade boards, just for the 2600 home console. (Of course it could be easily modified to be used as a 6507)

This is a link to some emulated 6502 cycle accurate units both using ARM or FPGA

https://github.com/MicroCoreLabs/Projects

The 6507 is just a cut-down 6502 without all the address pins broken out. You could fit a 40-pin chip on an adaptor board hovering above the PCB on an Atari 2600, for example.

You may need to do some Grievous Bodily Metalwork to make the screening can fit.

> Nobody's building fabs for CPUs like the MOS 6507 which only have 3,218 transistors in total (seriously).

But you can still buy 6502 compatibles built on other technologies and processes, right? (Not sure if you can get them in DIP but still.) Differences in voltage levels are bound to cause changes, but jumping straight to emulation seems excessive (even if it’s probably actually easier).

You can still buy 65C02 chips (DIP, CMOS version) from Western Design Center [1]. I've bought a few in recent years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Design_Center

The WDC 65C02 is a current product which you can buy for a couple of dollars direct from the foundry.

Most of the TTL stuff is current manufacture, although you may need to adjust passive components used around "straight" TTL if you use modern 74HCT-family chips.

It's a piece of piss to build 1970s computers with cheap modern jellybean parts that Farnell keep in stock by the million.

Agreed. They could have the whole decorative thing, and in a little corner put an STM32 and breakout components, with the whole emulated game... I'd pay good money for something like that.

You might really like my friends little niche gaming cabinet company (custom full size arcade cabinets)

https://www.instagram.com/arcade_army/

Would it kill any journalist or website to link to the company that you are talking about in your article? [0] Why yes, yes it would.

As an aside, I have the spool of the original Lunar Lander for a PDP9 (or 11, but I think 9)... at one time there was a forum and they told me that some people would purchase / take it, as I did not want to chunk it, and I just do not want to hang on to one more thing for life... but I lost that forum/bookmarks in the midst of a computer crash. I wonder if anyone is still interested in that kind of stuff, as I thought MAME etal made that kind of collecting less desirable.

[0] https://atari.com/collections/reproduction-pcbs

It's more collectable now than ever. Put it on eBay to see it's real value.

If youre looking to give it away, I can give it a very good home!

I sold the last of my vector games to a friend a couple years ago. I threw in a Major Havoc board for free since he has a similar cabinet to try it in. Then I Googled it and found someone who did a from-scratch cabinet build and could only find a board for... $1200. Ah one man's former hobby is another's treasure!

I've never really dug into arcade hardware before but this is the third time in a week I've seen either a bare chip of a full cartridge assembly and I am curious now: was it possible to swap this boards between machines and they would just work, assuming they had the right controls? Was each publisher using their own connector or was there an industry standard?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Amusement_Machine_and_Ma...

    Was each publisher using their own connector 
    or was there an industry standard?

Before the JAMMA standard, it was truly chaotic. Manufacturers didn't really have their own per-manufacturer connectors; it was more like each individual game had its own custom wiring setup.

Manufacturers would sometimes release upgrade kits for specific existing machines. For example, Atari created Black Widow as an upgrade kit for existing Gravitar machines (and only Gravitar)

JAMMA wasn't a magic cure for everything. It specifies pinouts for buttons and things but there can still be e.g. video sync issues. But it was a huge step forward.

In Japanese arcades you would see a lot of these standardized cabinets. They allowed arcade operators to swap in a new JAMMA (etc) game at low cost with close to zero effort. Sega's Astro City cabinet is probably the most famous, I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_arcade_cabine...

There are some examples of a manufacturer using the exact system for several games. Williams, for instance - the hardware that ran Joust also ran Robotron 2049 and several other games, requiring no more than a ROM swap and controller layout change.

It's actually not uncommon to find out that a Joust cabinet has painted-over Robotron 2049 panel art and vice versa, depending on how many orders of what they got in a particular week.

Cool!! Thanks for the knowledge.

Depends... They were mostly all swappable. I've got a vintage arcade cab that has been converted to the "JAMMA" standard/pinout. Some PCBs (but not all) that aren't JAMMA can be converted to JAMMA using an adapter you put on the PCB.

It was extremely common in some places (tennis clubhouses, bowling places, etc.) to have one or two arcade cabs and then semi-regularly switch the PCB inside it. For some cabs you could even change the "marquee" (the top of the arcade cab, above the screen: typically showing the name of the game) easily too, so that it would match the PCB inside.

People running bootleg arcade cabs typically wouldn't bother changing the marquee: they'd just swap the PCB (typically for a bootleg PCB).

Source: https://whynowgaming.com/atari-launches-new-range-of-replica...

Store: https://atari.com/collections/hardware?filter.p.product_type...

I feel like Atari is missing a trick by not going after the Edu market. They could make it easy for students to rebuild old games and old boards, through some sort of subscription program for school.

My guess is that this wouldn't be appealing to a younger crowd. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and it is the older folks with the interest and the cash to make efforts like these viable. For Edu, something slapped together around Retropie that is cheap and not difficult to assemble is already popular.

I suspect you are right. The systems are clever compromises against the affordable technology options of they day. What feels clever/satisfying will differ by era. Or, as I assume you are anticipating, kids these days also have their own good and interesting ideas.

For a younger, student electrical engineer, they could easily gain the appreciation for the engineering that went into these things. Especially as a someone who wrote a lot software prior to completing my EE training, I wanted to learn on something that was fairly “pure” to learn major concept and patters on: a large MCU that only breaks out into a bunch of connectors is not it. While convenient and inexpensive, it doesn’t let you learn the more basic concepts that empower you to understand what is going on a at the lower levels of its operation.

I would love to be able to teach (or have had the opportunity to learn) system architecture from analysis of arcade cabinets, starting with a CPU, adding ram, rom, peripherals, etc. Ben Eater’s 6502 computer kit[0] comes very close and is closer to the ballpark of what I would want out of a learning experience.

[0]: https://eater.net/6502

They wouldn't be very useful in education unless you could populate them with difficult to obtain chips. It is essentially the schematic in PCB form. Depending upon what they included in the silkscreen, it would be even less than a schematic (e.g. you would not know the specifics of each component). The education market would also expect some accompanying materials, such as the theory of operation and datasheets that are under copyright (assuming they haven't been lost to time).

How could a PCB without ICs make a "stunning wall piece". I am not even talking about functionality but aesthetically the appeal comes primarily from the chips in concert with the connection traces.

This would be a fun project if the sold a pack of all of the chips too. Anyone know if you can still buy all of these? It would NOT be a fun project to de-solder all of this from an old board (IMO).

There is a lot of jellybean TTL chips on these that are easy to get still. But then there are chips like Pokey's that are no longer made. You either have to salvage one from somewhere [0] or get something like an FPGA repro [1].

But that isn't your biggest problem. These are vector games, so your real problem is sourcing the no-longer made vector monitor that is scarce, finicky, and driven by voltages that could kill you. And then there is all the associated high voltage bits like the flyback transformer. The other route to go is to vector mod a plain-jane CRT by rewinding the deflection coils [2].

[0] https://www.ebay.ca/sch/i.html?_nkw=atari+pokey+chip&Brand=&...

[1] https://paradisearcadeshop.com/products/pokeyone-v2-fpga-ata...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci9qiGVMF7s

I recently had the chance to play a Vectrex System in the Nationaal Videogame Museum in the Netherlands and I'm sad to say that modern display tech can't replace these Vector Displays. They have that certain analog vibe to them that you can't replicated with a digital screen no matter how good it is.

Sadly, it's really unlikely that anyone is ever going to produce new CRTs again so I would highly suggest to visit your local retro arcades ASAP because these Displays will die and can never be replaced again.

True, but apparently OLEDs get close. Haven't seen them in action though.

BTW, I have a color vector machine called Space Duel. Kind of like a 3D color version of Asteroids with an amazing two player co-op mode that has two ships joined together with a short line segment. Each player can rotate and thrust separately. Where the pair of ships goes is the sum of where each ship is trying to go. Just so happens that Space Duel is convertible to Major Havoc as well.

> True, but apparently OLEDs get close. Haven't seen them in action though.

OLEDs get close in terms of response time, Input Lag and are straight up better in regards to contrast, black levels and color quality. But yo aren't getting the subtleties of a CRT like screen curvature, Scan Lines, etc...

Scan lines??? On a vector monitor???

Unpopulated PCBs WTF

Totally.

I think this is like the whole buying vinyl records to hang on your wall (of which I have several).

I suspect they're not really intended to be used other than for decoration

Populating those would be a huge pain as it appears all pads are soldered shut.

They aren't. There is a white background behind the original image which makes them look filled.

Are they even drilled? I don’t see vias on the bottom side either.

I'm guessing 200% to 400% margin on those ? PCBs are cheap and I'd imagine adding a bit of paint to on those isn't all that expensive in bulk.

Atari is a terrible shell of a company that should die already

Probably closer to 1000%. You can get working PCBs of that size for $16/unit from PCBWay: you can probably drive that price down a lot if you don't actually care about the PCBs working. UV printing costs on the order of cents, and PCBs are an especially easy substrate to print on (flat and thin).

From the Atari site, to be clear about the main motivation:

"At 11.5 x 20.75 inches, these boards are stunning wall pieces. These boards use the original bill of materials, follow the original schematics, and can be used to replace damaged original boards by using the original parts from these boards."

https://atari.com/products/lunar-lander-reproduction-pcb (under 'Product Details')

Those boards alone cost half a MiSTer.

Every time I see an Atari rebooted story I wish there were a way to connect with one of the luxury brand conglomerates like Kering, Hermes, Richemont, LVMH or another one about picking up Atari as a heritage brand and doing a real design and tech firm out of it that evolves a design language into new products.

The problem is these brands only know about one thing: creating Veblen goods.

So they'd turn Atari into overpriced Atari products that only the 0.1% would buy and it'd ruin the brand even more.

People who know how the luxury business works would know that Atari perfume would be perfectly accessible in every airport and drugstore. Notes of vanilla and tang crystals over bakelite and moldy carpet. Only half kidding.

A version of something like the Kyocera KY-01L or Punkt dumbphone (e-ink phones) but without the inferior Android OS, and for some smarter narrow use cases would be a play. We don't have luxury versions of tech because it's all too general purpose, where we can simulate the features of any other general purpose machine on any general purpose machine. There's no bar to any of it. The beauty of Atari was it just played games. The 2600 was a single purpose device, it was what it did. They failed when they had to compete with other general purpose computers.

I'd apply Atari to produce single purpose devices.

From the FAQ of atari.com:

> Do you ship to my country?

> As of this time Atari does not ship orders outside of the USA

It's a pity, I got interested in that Atari VCS as I was looking around on their website.

just use a proxy shipper

"Atari"

Nostalgia exploitation at its purest form. Mini-consoles at least had some function.

These can replace damaged boards so I think they serve good function of keeping old cabinets alive.

Except its generally not the PCB itself that fails, its the components on the PCB.

I don't know about early Atari PCBs, but in WPC era pinball, you get things like battery leakage corroding PCBs or power circuits where the traces lift from the heat (see that in CRT chassis too). Sometimes you can fix those, but too much repair and the board ends up a scorched mess.

$245. Yikes!

For a pcb. No components.

Yup, that's the price as a collectors item, but also as a spare part for devices that can be sold at thousands quids once repaired, so if the price was based purely on demand over offer it would still make sense. Whoever had the idea is a genius to me.

That's insane. Those are manufactured for at most $20 (assuming tiny quantities), and even if you lost all the original design files reproducing them isn't that expensive.

Why would even hardcore collectors buy these. Like a vinyl reprint but without the groove.

People have made replacement PCBs for the Amiga and C64 and populated them with original parts.

Very niche product/project, but you can replace a damaged PCB or build a 'new' retro machine (when combined with other projects to manufacture new cases and keyboards/keycaps for these machines)

Animation cels redux

no chips though

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