Re: [stella] What would you do with more RAM?

["Glenn Saunders" <cybpunks@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

What you are describing is what was done in the Atari 8-bit home computer, 
which is at its core a single-scanline kernel-based machine, it's just that 
the kernel is arbitrated by ANTIC which gets its direction from RAM.  You 
can still drive an Atari8 without ANTIC on as if it were a 2600, and some 
early games do that.

The closest we've seen to that on the 2600 is the DPC chip and the 
Supercharger.  The DPC makes ROM feel like RAM insofar as it provides an 
automatic sliding window to ROM so you can do all absolute accesses rather 
than indexed.

With the Supercharger it's almost as good but obviously with only 6K to work 
with you can't do a completely generalized display engine.  You have to 
optimize it so that only certain things get stored in strips of RAM.



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