re atari processors in article apr das harvard edu squish endor uucp shishin yamada writes the atari used a cpu just like their entire bit line xe xe computers as well as the game machine wrong it has a the had some extra asic chips that were basically modified graphics chips and pia s for the joysticks it had one custome chip not an asic in the sense that word is now understood the tia sometimes known as the although most other manufacturers list that as the cia complex interface adapter tia stands for television interface adapter and it handles sound paddles and the minimal video hardware the possessed there was also a standard ram i o timer riot plus a voltage regulator and if memory serves a timer that s all later model might have incorporated many of the chips into one asci as the weight of the machines and part count decreased a lot over the years not according to the servicing documentation i have here the did not change intenally very much at all additionally i think the used k k and up to k of rom for their games roms were mapped into the upper k of the s address space k and k games were fine but later k and k games needed bank switching atari and others made much of these huge cartridges i have no idea how much ram it had to work with but i would hazard a guess of or k ram wrong it had bytes of ram from the riot this was multiply mapped into both page pseudo registers and page stack and also throughout the bottom k of memory tia registers also sat in this address space as bytes of ram was somewhat limiting some later cartridges also carried ram themselves which was interesting as atari had provided no write line to the cart this was managed by mapping the reads from ram into one address range and the writes into another but all the time this scheme ate into the very scarce rom address space ian
