Wanted: Cromemco assistance

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Thu Aug 22 02:29:00 2002

Curt Vendel wrote:

> I am planning on purchasing a Cromemco Z-2 system shortly, it has some
> special purpose Atari designed boards installed and was used within
> Atari to develop Atari 2600 VCS games. However the unit is missing
> the front cover, disk drive and OS software. If anyone can point me
> to a site(s) with good information on the systems and anyone who may
> have spare parts to sell like boards, keyboard and so forth, please let
> me know, thanks.

Are you sure it was for 2600 development? The ones that I've heard of
were for 400/800 development. Basically they had the Atari 400/800
circuitry grafted onto an S100 bus. There was a 6502 CPU card. The
system had the POKEY, ANTIC, and CTIA chips, but I don't recall whether
they were on the CPU card or a separate card. The memory card was a
standard S100 card. In principle, you would be able to run at least
some of the regular Atari 400/800 software on it. The disk controller
in the system was for development use only, and was NOT compatible with
any regular Atari disk controller, although you could write a handler
for it, and perhaps Atari had one. But you could hook up an 810, 1050,
or the like just as with a "normal" Atari. And of course the EPROM
programmer was not a standard Atari 400/800 feature.
About ten years ago, I bought a binder full of docs on the 400/800
dev system from Weird Stuff Warehouse. Unfortunately the system itself
was nowhere to be seen, so either it had already sold, or was in the back
warehouse somewhere, or (less likely) Weird Stuff only got the docs.
I still have the binder. It's somewhere in a collection of about 400
Conticos and boxes, and I don't know which one. Eventually I'll find it
and get the stuff scanned.

But if what you have was really for 2600 development, I don't know
anything about it. Given how early the 2600 was developed, I'm dubious
that they would have used S100 gear, but it's possible.
Received on Thu Aug 22 2002 - 02:29:00 BST