On Thu, 11 Sep 1997, Greg Miller wrote:
> Well, I guess it depends on what you consider too expensive... What were the
> original retail prices of the 2600 and O2? And there might have been some
> other part of the 2600 whose cost they had to make up for.
The TIA chip was considered state of the art in 1977, when even Pong
systems were still selling for almost as much as a 2600 debuted for.
Atari was obviously the only source of these chips. They also had to get
massive quantities of 6507s made.
I don't know where Magnavox got their Intel chips from, but I suspect that
the fabrication methods for whatever custom silicon exists in the O^2 was
considerably less expensive to manufacture than the 2600s chipset.
If the O^2 was really a year after the 2600 in R&D then that would explain
the video memory, in part. Computer evolution was amazingly fast between
76 and 80. We went from pong systems to the Atari 800 and much of that
was fuelled by dropping prices on CPUs and memory.
--
Archives updated once/day at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsubscribing and other info at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/stella.html
