They may have taken chips from machines for R&D but they certainly couldn't
do that economically for thier production units. At the time there was a LOT
of potential money in the videogame industry, especially in the 2600 arena,
so Coleco probably put a lot of money and resources into doing the reserve
engineering. Put a dozen engineers on the project working full time, they
could come up with a clone pretty rapidly. Of course there is also the
possibility of industrial espionage, they very well could have gotten access
to classified info from people who worked (or used to work) at Atari. As big
as the industry was at the time this would not have been unheard of.
Dan
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-stella@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-stella@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
> Behalf Of Chris Wilkson
> Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2001 2:36 AM
> To: stella@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [stella] Midified VCS...
>
>
> On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Glenn Saunders wrote:
>
> > How did Mattel and Coleco do it seemingly so easily? They
> didn't obtain a
> > stash of TIA chips from Atari certainly.
>
> Easy. They bought machines and took the chips from them.
> Same thing I did
> before I finally broke down and bought chips from Best. I
> mean...you have
> to engineer the entire system anyway.
>
> -Chris
>
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