Thanks for your response, Phillip.



This is certainly a valid question and certainly is a valid reason for considering 6502 emulation. I would say that such a platform would run our own binaries. The more I think about 6502 emulation the more I think it'd be pretty tricky due to the external parts (ANTIC, POKEY, GTIA, etc.) that would have to be emulated. Without emulating those parts the classic binaries aren't going to work even if the 6502 instruction set is perfectly emulated.

What would we do with such a device? Probably not much, really. It seems it is probably a proof of concept rather than something genuinely useful. Once the device was built it could be fun to see what all we could make it do; I can see a sub-forum or special area of 8052.com being dedicated to projects based on the underlying platform. It would be interesting to see just how much we could each make the platform do. Who'd be first to implement Asteroids on the 8052? :)

Again, I think this is mostly a hobbyist challenge. To try to do something because we can--not because there's any compelling reason to. It's like climbing a mountain "because it's there." After all, if someone wants a computer they should just buy a computer and not build one based on a part that really isn't even meant for this.

On the other hand, if it had a mini-VGA screen and was small I've long had the desire to build my own GPS navigation system for my car. So perhaps a platform like this could have niche uses for each of us.



I don't plan on designing this thing for mass production, but I would like it to be based on readily available parts so that anyone that wants to build one can build it without looking for old obsolete CGA cards. I personally would be in favor of CGA or VGA output rather than simply text output. Once again I'm not familiar with these cards but if they somehow take care of video memory, etc. it might actually be easier to have 640x480 resolution than a lower resolution that the 8052 itself would have to manage.

Is there any such thing as "VGA on a chip?" Or does VGA require an entire card with memory external to the VGA chip itself, etc.?



Yes, I've seen the IDE interface code for the 8052 and have been meaning to play with it for some time. I have a couple of old IDE drives here plus an extra 20GB laptop HD.



Heheh, I might actually devote some effort to this. I'm sure I don't have time to do it all by myself and this would have to be considered a "fun hobby" rather than anything useful or commercially viable. But if there are even a few other people that would be interested in spending a little time I'm sure that this could be done by spreading out the design and development work among interested parties.

Also, I should make it clear that my goal wasn't and isn't really to make an 8052 Atari computer. I wasn't really considering making it Atari-compatible or using Atari disk drives, etc. I was mostly holding out the Atari as an example of what I think an 8052 computer ought to be capable of.

Regards,
Craig Steiner