Martnez Moctezuma Xavier Pacheco Bolaos Jos Ramn

The original Atari was a pioneer in arcade games, video games, home and personal microcomputers, and its dominance in these areas remained a major force in the computer industry and entertainment in 80s

CPU: MOS Technology 6507 @ 1,19 MHz Audio and video processor : TIA. 160 x ~190 pxeles, 128colors in screen but with a maximum of 4 colors for line; monoaural sound of 2 ways. (RAM): 128 octetos en la consola dentro del chip MOS Technology 6532, many games can add at 256 octetos integrados en el cartucho. (ROM): 4 KB er cartridge (32KB or more if the cartridge uses memory paging).

Input: RIOT chip controlled includes: Two DE-9 ports to connect screw less joysticks, paddles, trackballs, pedals, steering wheels, 12-key numeric keypad (0-9, # and *) and any other type of control with additional functionality developed by another company. This type of port became a factor standard for connecting joysticks and gamepads, called Atari standard that used a vast majority of 8bit computers in the eighties, and even some 16-bit: Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC , Commodore 64, MSX, Master System and Mega Drive, among many others.

Six switches: Power (on / off), TV signal (mono / color), level of difficulty for each player (A / B), Select, and Reset. Except to the power switch, the games could (and did) assign other meanings to other switches. In the models that followed the original difficulty switches were reduced and transferred to the rear of the console. Out: audio and video signal to TV via a RCA connector (with NTSC,PAL or SECAM depen ding on the region, game cartridges can be used interchangeably between machines NTSC and PAL / SECAM, but if the standard does not match then usually appear distorted or the image colors are not stable).

The Atari 2600 console in its design was conceived to address up to 4K memory capacity, using 12 address lines A0 to A11 included. Where it can be concluded that it is only capable of running programs to address capacity or 4K or smaller games. But it generated a technique to run larger programs "Bank Switching" which is explained below.

The connection port of the cartridge is easy to understand, has two buses, the data (D0-D7) which communicates by Atari and game memory, the address bus (A0-A11) which addresses the program instructions. It has the Vcc and Gnd, pin 2 and 1 respectively. Pin 7 (A12) is used as an enabler for memory cartridge or CS (chip select), to use an EPROM must be reversed because the CS signal is active low. Pin 13 (Gnd) is used for connection of a cartridge when you insert a game that bridges the pin 1 to pin 13, so in the cartridge pin 13 may be taken as Gnd or earth.

As indicated previously the Bank Switching is a technique used to achieve larger programs connect to the port of Atari. If you remember the Atari port only has 12 address lines that is only capable of addressing memory up to 4K in size. Technique is used Bank Switching, which is performed by software and hardware to route some larger memories. The technique is as follows: The page program in blocks of 4K or 8K program is divided into two pages or banks (Bank) as the ATARI is capable of addressing 4K of memory and placed in a program code subroutine that allows the gap between the two pages and creates a circuit that allows the jump between the 2 physical memory pages.

Most Atari games made for 4K in size over the technique used F8 Switching Bank which manages address 8 4K memory blocks or games to 32k in size. The idea raised is the following, we use specific memory addresses that are detected by hardware, which are used to select the banks physically, as shown in the table