>
> 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.
I would not be so sure about this. The Intel Audio/Video chip in the O2 (which I believe was custom designed for Magnavox) is more complex then the TIA in the 2600 since it handles all the video display logic internally plus it has a built in 512 bytes of character set data. Intel may have been able to develop and manufacture these chips cheaper the Atari because they had a little more experience in chip development then Atari did at that time.
> 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.
I wonder exactly when the O2 was released. I am pretty sure the 2600 came out at the end of 1977 for Christmas, if the O2 came out early in 1978 then thier R&D may have been completely parallel and one company may not have had much info on what the other was developing.
Dan Boris
PS. I am not trying to advocate 1 system over the other, It's just interesting to compare the technology.
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