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The New York Times has an article about Atari's Flashback video game console:
This month, I bought a retro Atari gaming console for $39.99 at a Bed Bath & Beyond in suburban New Jersey. It was a few feet from a set of Calphalon pots and pans and a display of oven mitts 11 rows deep. So that tells you something about the intended audience.
[...] Somehow, Atari never dies. The console, known as the Flashback, was one of the best-selling items in early November at Dollar General, one of the nation's largest chains. Considering that Atari is down to a mere 18 employees, perhaps no company is squeezing more nostalgia out of an old product this holiday shopping season.
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Woman on Street: Sir, you are drunk; very, very drunk.
Winston Churchill: Madame, you are ugly; very, very ugly.
I shall be sober in the morning.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday December 04 2017, @02:10AM (3 children)
I was 20-21 (I went bar hopping with these folks when I turned 21). At work I used a logic analyzer to figure out the game chip in each cartridge was a (2716?) PROM with the (read? maybe CS, it's been a while) line inverted. At work we had a system to both burn and read EEPROMs, and it had a disc drive attached. I figured out how read the PROMs. The hardware guys made a board with a ZIP socket to accept an EEPROM. Group of maybe 10 of us, one would bring in a cartridge, we'd read the PROM on to the disc drive, then anyone could burn an EEPROM (handily enough, they were easily available at work as our product used some 20-30 in each box), plug it into our custom cartridge, and play the game.
/ this was the time TRS-80s and Apple somethings got popular
// they used the same DRAM chips personal computers did
/// had a real problem keeping those memory chips in stock, until we'd all max'd out our memory
//// Have I mentioned statute of limitations yet?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Snotnose on Monday December 04 2017, @02:30AM (2 children)
PROM - Programmable Read Only Memory
EEPROM - Electrically Erasable Read Only Memory. Put a chip in a magic box and you can reprogram it.
ZIF - Zero Insertion Force, sockets with a lever used to install/remove chips
CS - Chip Select
DRAM - Dynamic Random Access Memory, 16k was a pretty coin in 1980.
logic analyzer - if you don't know, don't ask. You ain't a hardware geek and will never understand us
Apple/TRS-80 - aww come on, you're just dicking with us now
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Monday December 04 2017, @12:50PM
I was going to comment that you probably meant ZIF, not ZIP, but you found it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:38AM
"EEPROM - Electrically Erasable Read Only Memory. Put a chip in a magic box and you can reprogram it."
Kids these days, when I was your age we only had EPROMs and needed a UV eraser. ;-)