Atari 2600 HDMI Prototype

[retromod]

nothing new from the HDMI front. christmas, vacation and finally some strikes prevented any progress.

I've heard the implemented a new MCU to control the chipset and dug deeper into the video processor internals as the list of options is awful large.

Hope we'll get some progress here as I want to implement HDMI into the 5200 consoles first.

[retromod]

Some time passed through. I've noticed newer TV sets allow to adjust the 3D effect so the 3D effect is much better than on old 3D tv sets. Most likely an additional 3D chip is not required anymore to increase the effect.
I will see soon as I'm planning to sell a brand new 60" TV set and moving the current 50" one into my workshop ;-)

I've also tested with some old Philips TV sets and the output is much better than on modern TV's. Even it is a TFT screen (a videopac console with RF output is nearly identical to RGB niveau on that TV!). Really amazing how well a $25 TV is working in comparison to my $1000 tv set.

The guys have not updated the HDMI mod yet as they are waiting for my firmware to influence and manage the HDMI output chip. As there is less documentation and only a I2C description of the commands it is more a peek and poke job. Sadly to say that the RGB mod has higher priority here so no further progress to report.

I saw some guys currently implement Coleco and Intellivision RGB mods based on FPGA for color translation. Not sure why this is required as original vendors of the VDP of both consoles outlined how to connect to RGB nearly 25 years ago... so in my opinion most likely only to protect the mod. Also not sure why they required a framemeister or hdmi converter box to connect to TV. As a HDMI converter is not really a quality improvement my guess is that those guys are not very "selective" in output quality. You can't connect a mainstream HDMI converter to a retro console without having quality issues (specially lag, artefacts, bleeding, block graphics due to upscaling).

[retromod]

Yesterday i visited the guys from the HDMI project and they made big progress. A very basic firmware was written and the circuit reworked. The output is now much better due to the tweaking of the chipset.

Current target price is $60 and the board itself is too big to be installed on an Atari junior console. But it fits into Atari homecomputers, colecovision, 5200 and 7800. Nevertheless the board requires some optimization in size and production needs. The firmware allow to alter the sharpness from rf quality to emulation quality. With increasing sharpness some kind of jitter pattern starts during scaling, which requires a solution. But the overall picture is great and due to a mcu we now have the possibilities to implement all the other goodies as well (like osd, stereo surround, crt emulation etc.). Another feature the chipset is offering is conversion of colors and refresh rate between ntsc and pal so theoretically it is possible to play ntsc titles on pal consoles without flickering and incorrectly colors! but this only works if the console chips do not depend on the timing itself.

So roadmap is to optimize the board, reduce the production costs and implement the EX mod features as well. Target could be q4/2015. we are also looking for possibilities to produce the whole boards as we want to avoid soldering of 200 pin smd chips.

Solution will be available for atari 2600, 5200, 7800, coleco and intellivision. Home computers will not be supported for given reason. As we already have an independant solution for sega megadrive it is unclear which one will be offered for that console. If we are able to reduce costs and it is cheaper than the other solution we will drop the expensive one.