Atari 7800 eXpansion Module (XM)

[TrekMD]

Well, I figured I'd post an update on this.  The XM is delayed again as Curt is having health issues.  One of his heart valves is not functioning properly and he needs surgery for it.  Apparently they are tying to do a less invasive procedure which will be helpful for his recovery.  What this means is that the January 30th deadline will be missed.  Health comes first, so we can just wish Curt well with his procedure. 

[Cryptic33]

Very impressive and makes me realise I have found the right forum. As mentioned by others, the screen shots are very good. I want to dig out my XE machine now

[TrekMD]

Very impressive and makes me realise I have found the right forum. As mentioned by others, the screen shots are very good. I want to dig out my XE machine now

Glad to have you here.  Enjoy!

[TrekMD]

You can get Beef Drop and Circus carts with POKEY chips in them though, I have one!

The whole point of the XM is adding the POKEY and RAM which up until now people have had to add to carts themselves. This has made games more expensive and POKEY chips and the right RAM chips are getting scarce now. So the XM isn't really doing anything that 7800 games were not already doing, Atari did plan to actually make an XM back in the day anyway, this XM mostly follows the original plan.

What he said.    The XM stops people from having to cannibalize the existing carts with POKEY chips or extra ram or both. 

[onthinice]

Rich kids get the XM. I think DavyK has hit it on the head. Can the 7800 homebrew community support both or will this cause a riff and make the 7800 implode on itself?

With new next gen consoles coming plus the OUYA, I can see some gamers having to choose between retro consoles and modern instead of both.

[TL]

Rich kids get the XM. I think DavyK has hit it on the head. Can the 7800 homebrew community support both or will this cause a riff and make the 7800 implode on itself?

The 7800 scene are embracing it already 

[onthinice]

I wonder how many 7800 owners will buy?

[TL]

I wonder how many 7800 owners will buy?

They already have massive pre-orders

[onthinice]

Thousands or millions of pre-orders?

[TL]

Thousands or millions of pre-orders?

This is the Atari 7800!

We are talking hundreds I would have thought. A large amount of the user base anyway.

[onthinice]

Thanks. Sadly, I will not be one of them. Maybe next Christmas!

[TrekMD]

Since the topic of discussion became the XM, I moved the posts about it from the Let's Compare Burger Time thread to this thread. 

And yes, there are hundreds of XM units already presold.  I think the preorder has sold out as well.

[TL]

Latest update:

May 27th - As most have heard, I'm finally feeling better and I've gone back to work on the XM, sadly my partner on this project - Mark (Groovybee) has moved onto some other work and is no longer involved in the XM it would seem.   Mark has been great, he's been a real champion in helping on this project, but it has been a very long process and we all do these things for the love of the hobby, no one is obligated to stay on a project.   However the Rev 3 design was based on idea's and features Marked wanted to incorporate into the XM design, and the BIOS is all Mark's work.   Without Mark's involvement I cannot implement the logic he wanted to put into the design since I don't know what he wanted to lay it out as nor where he wished to tie in. Also some of the features may have required a further modified BIOS to support these features.  I am not a 7800 Coder and I can't write the BIOS.   Mark also has all of the sources to the BIOS so I couldn't alter it anyway.   So I have decided on a compromise - I am going to take many of the benefits from the Rev 3 designs, go back to the Rev 2 which was a working platform and incorporate those Rev 3 improvements where feasible and then use the last stable BIOS Mark had delivered for the project and put everything together.   Perry has a friend who is an Analog Audio guy looking over the Yamaha portion of the XM schematics to see if he can fix some of the shortcomings with the design.

So basically the final design will be a Rev 2.5 design.   I've also decided that once the XM's are released I am putting all of the schematics into PD so those who'd like to tinker, hack and improve upon the XM design.  Perhaps if Mark decides to get back involved in 7800 development at a later time, maybe he will release the BIOS as PD, but that is solely his decision and I would respect either way he would wish to go with that.  My releasing of the schematics doesn't obligate him to release his BIOS.   So I've started working on wedging the 68Pin 1504AS back into the Rev 3 boards, and re-routing the traces and removing all of the additional Bus partitioning and secondary Address Bus lines out of the design and getting to a Rev 2.5 'Hybrid' design which will be functional and do what was initially intended before feature-creep added to the design.

I will post more info in 2 weeks, I'll also see about bringing a working XM to the Too Many Games show June 14-16th in Pennsylvania.

[Shadowrunner]

Doesn't sound like the best news so hopefully this gets sorted out and finished.
Also hope they still plan to produce more units then just the pre orders. I'd been thinking about ordering one but I see the paypal link on the XM site is gone now so looks like I missed out. Hopefully I can still get one when they're finished.

[TrekMD]

Hopefully things get worked out and we get a unit with the working software as version 2.5, as Curt is calling it.  Not sure why Mark decided to stop supporting this but he has been very busy developing games for the Intellivision of late.  Whatever the reason, it certainly adds another wrinkle to this.