Good work man! It will be emulated soon right? I heard that this chip have a rom and are impossible for to emulate and are in mess dump list for 11 years. But i think that not is impossible, consoles like nintendo wii u can to be emulated and the emulation of a console from 1977 are impossible
I've been looking at this fascinating chip recently in my spare time. The program ROM (lower left) looks like it uses a 13-bit word, with four of the bits used less often than others. It has an 8-bit address, so 256 words possible can be stored. I think this is an entirely unique register-only microcontroller, with some of the registers hooked up to video gen circuitry.
The rectangle in the middle is probably a character/shape ROM, I don't get how the characters are stored in it yet though.
The reason this has not been emulated yet is that documentation has been lost to time, plus it has only been used in two consoles (Telstar Arcade cart 1 & Commodore 2000K) I wasn't even able to find a pinout after searching online for a while.
Well, I don't back down from a challenge like this. We'll crack it someday.
The VCF Computing History Museum at InfoAge in Wall Township, NJ has an unpackaged die that Al Charpentier has verified is his MOS Pong I.C. Matches your decap, so its a 7600.
Wow amazing
ReplyDeleteThe rom program inside can be extract?
Good work man! It will be emulated soon right? I heard that this chip have a rom and are impossible for to emulate and are in mess dump list for 11 years. But i think that not is impossible, consoles like nintendo wii u can to be emulated and the emulation of a console from 1977 are impossible
ReplyDeleteI've been looking at this fascinating chip recently in my spare time. The program ROM (lower left) looks like it uses a 13-bit word, with four of the bits used less often than others. It has an 8-bit address, so 256 words possible can be stored. I think this is an entirely unique register-only microcontroller, with some of the registers hooked up to video gen circuitry.
ReplyDeleteThe rectangle in the middle is probably a character/shape ROM, I don't get how the characters are stored in it yet though.
The reason this has not been emulated yet is that documentation has been lost to time, plus it has only been used in two consoles (Telstar Arcade cart 1 & Commodore 2000K) I wasn't even able to find a pinout after searching online for a while.
Well, I don't back down from a challenge like this. We'll crack it someday.
Was a pinout ever found?
DeleteKen Shirriff analyzed the die shot: https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1567203153224892417
DeleteOld Vintage Computing Research did a couple of articles:
http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-pong-you-could-program-possibly-mos.html
The VCF Computing History Museum at InfoAge in Wall Township, NJ has an unpackaged die that Al Charpentier has verified is his MOS Pong I.C. Matches your decap, so its a 7600.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I just found out a datasheet is available: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/10/finally-mos-76007601-video-game-array.html
Delete