This combination of Warner's financial support and increasingly exciting games helped Atari sell millions of VCS consoles by Atari's iconic CX40 joystick. It was such an exciting thing. The first VCS units shipped with two joysticks, a single pair of paddles, and the two-player Combat cartridge, which contained several tank and plane action games.
Although these games were simplistic and not much better than games for rival systems, their variety hinted at what was to come. Indy even came packaged with two steering driving controllers, adding to the system's initial array of impressive control options that would be expanded on over the life of the system. Inside cover of a Atari Inc. The design featured sharp angles with black plastic and the famous wood-grain styling.
In , Atari released a revised model with lighter RF shielding and a slightly streamlined case. The last VCS revision, released in , moved two of the six switches to the top of the unit. In , Atari released the Atari SuperSystem. This design was streamlined like the previous revision, but with an entirely black exterior.
Atari's success peaked in , after which a glut of poor third-party game titles and bad licensing decisions caused heavy losses throughout the industry. Product dumping, with high volumes of poor-quality games sold at or below cost, caused full-priced, high-quality game sales to suffer. By , The Great Videogame Crash had taken a lot of companies out of business, due in no small part to Atari's own inflexible inventory requirements at retail outlets the year before, with the company requiring retail outlets to stock more product than consumer demand could support.
In that same year, Warner Communications sold a large portion of their interests in Atari, their former money maker, to ex-Commodore executive and founder, Jack Tramiel, who had no desire to pursue the stagnant videogame market. Tramiel shelved both an unreleased redesign and its backward-compatible next-generation successor, the ProSystem , in favor of new Atari computers. Existing and inventory remained in the various sales channels and continued to sell, but two years passed before Atari attempted to reclaim their dominance in the home videogame market.
Ironically, Atari could have distributed an earlier version of the NES if a prior agreement hadn't fallen through. A few new cartridges were made available in by companies such as Activision, but there were no new Atari systems to go with them. However, after the NES revived America's passion for videogames, Atari firmly reestablished its presence in with the long-awaited releases of the mothballed Atari Jr.
The Jr. Pushed as a budget-friendly option in comparison with other systems, the continued to sell fairly well in what had become a very different market. Atari itself ceased to exist as a company in The name and intellectual assets have been sold and bought several times since. In , to take advantage of the well-known name, France's Infogrames Entertainment SA, itself a software development and publishing company dating from the s, rebranded its global operations as "Atari. This new entity established itself as a major software publisher for consoles, portables, and computers.
Finally, after about four years of other manufacturers releasing TV Games of variable quality based on classic Atari VCS games, the new Atari got it right. Its second attempt in , the Atari Flashback 2, featured accurate renditions of 40 old and new VCS games. In fact, internally, right to its compatible controller interfaces, the Atari Flashback 2 so accurately recreates the original VCS hardware that it can even be hacked to incorporate a cartridge port, continuing a home videogame legacy that began almost 30 years earlier.
With miniscule system memory and Motorola's 8-bit microprocessor running just over 1 MHz, the VCS seems at first glance anything but a powerhouse. Sound is limited to two channels, but, if thoughtfully programmed, can support decent sound effects and music. Graphics, while displayed at a fairly low resolution and with limitations on the number of flicker-free objects per line, can nevertheless draw from an impressive color palette.
Colors and color cycling became the VCS's signature feature, enabling interesting effects that helped extend the effective life of the console far beyond what could have ever been imagined. There was just enough inherent power in the VCS with the right combination of clever programmers over the years that it became one of the first systems to support nearly every game genre and related accessory imaginable.
At first, success was elusive. Even though several of Atari's first game releases were translations of their own arcade titles, none were popular enough to send consumers rushing out to buy the console. That killer app was followed the next year with Asteroids, Atari's first home-grown, smash-hit arcade game translation.
Asteroids also introduced bank-switching, a technique that allowed access to cartridge memory beyond the prior 4KB limit. Although the earliest VCS cartridges were generally 2KB - 4KB in size, greater memory sizes -- including modern homebrews at 32KB and beyond -- allowed for increased depth and complexity, contributing to the system's impressive longevity.
Another notable early title was Atari's Adventure , a pioneering graphical action adventure. It was also among the first games with a notable "Easter Egg. Robinett included the Easter Egg to protest Atari's policy of keeping programmers out of the spotlight and thus immune to better offers from rival companies. They founded Activision in , one of the earliest and best third-party software developers.
Atari was already reeling when the U. The collapse had a combination of causes, including market saturation and competition from personal computers, which were an even more general-purpose form of hardware. Along the way, Atari was sold, and sold again. Still, the line survived.
The last was released in What was innovative in the may now seem pedestrian, but that merely underlines how innovative the was. The principles on which it was built and that it helped to popularize—general-purpose hardware and separate software—have endured for over 40 years.
Craig S. China has taken another step toward semiconductor independence with Alibaba announcing the design of a 5-nanometer technology server chip that is based on Arm Ltd. But, impressive as that feat is, an even more significant chip design development by the Chinese tech giant may be making available the source code to a RISC-V CPU core its own engineers designed. This means other companies can use it in their own processor designs—and escape architecture license fees.
The company made both announcements at its annual cloud convention in its home city of Hangzhou last month. The Chinese government is funding a lot of startups that are designing a variety of chips. The number of newly registered Chinese chip-related companies more than tripled in the first five months of from the same period a year ago.
And the biggest Chinese technology companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Huawei are developing their own chips rather than banking on those from Intel, Nvidia, and other United States-based companies. China is intent on developing semiconductor independence, both in design and manufacture of state-of-the-art chips.
The urgency for doing so has been helped along by U. The sanctions extend to any Huawei suppliers that use U. The United States, alarmed at China's campaign to bring Taiwan under its control, has also begun an ambitious program to 'reshore' its semiconductor manufacturing after allowing much of it to migrate to Taiwan. Around 80 percent of the world's semiconductor production capacity is in Asia, and nearly all the most advanced logic chip production is in Taiwan.
No Chinese semiconductor foundry has yet achieved the 5-nanometer processing needed to make Alibaba's new ARM-based chip, so it is still beholden to Taiwan for manufacturing. But the implications of Alibaba's general choice of Arm and RISC-V instruction set architectures is perhaps more consequential for the long term. An instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the language in which software talks to hardware, and thus determines the kind of software that can run on a particular chip.
Most servers use CPUs based on Intel's x86 instruction set architecture. But UK-based Arm, which licenses its instruction set architecture to chip designers, has been gaining a foothold in this market. RISC-V, which refers to the fifth generation of an open-source reduced instruction set computer architecture created by U.
This past June, China hosted the fourth annual RISC-V summit, bringing together industry, academia, and government to talk about the future of the architecture. In the wake of the U. Unable to buy Intel chips because of the sanctions, Huawei most recently sold its x86 server unit to a company owned by China's Henan province. From the beginning, the company indicated that it intended to open the CPU's source code—the hardware description language that describes the structure and behavior of the CPU core's electronic circuits.
Atari unsuccessfully pursued legal action for a while to keep Activision from publishing games on ther platform. Another publisher, Imagic, was founded by Atari and Mattel Electronics alumni the following year. The Atari , which never featured any kind of copy protection, was mobbed as publishers as diverse as Parker Brothers to CBS began making and publishing video games.
The flood of games and lack of quality control from other companies left many customers dissatisfied, which eventually became another factor in the video game crash. Retro Consoles Wiki Explore. Generations soon. General Console Cleaning List of repairs List of teardowns. Explore Wikis Community Central.
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