KEY FINDINGS
• Video game consoles these days may not have a sense of home decor, but some computer companies still believe in the aesthetics of wood paneling. At its release, the 2600 sold for $199. In today’s coin, that’s $879. In comparison, the launch model of the PlayStation 3 cost only $599. As soon as users figured out that the Atari 2600 could play more games than just Pong, the 2600 became massively successful, selling 1 million units in 1979.
• Instead of following the trend of building a limited number of games into the system, the Atari 2600 uses removable cartridges to store games like SpaceInvaders, Pac-Man and Pitfall. Each player can select the difficulty of the game they’re playing by simply flipping a switch from “A” to “B”. Which one was harder is anyone’s guess.
• There are four screws holding the upper and lower case together. These screws in the back are at an odd angle: Almost 30 degrees off of vertical. Strange. With a design that is unseen in just about any other electronic device, the motherboard is propped up and sits at an angle of 30 degrees inside the Atari. Now those case screws make sense! And finally, cables that are not soldered to the board! The RCA cable is easily removed.
• The motherboard easily lifts out. The only things securing it down were the angled screws we removed from the outer case. The case of the 2600 is 2.6 times larger than the motherboard. The motherboard is dominated by an ominous metal box, likely the EMI shield. A few short twists with pliers and the shield lifts free; Atari gets a +1 on repairability for not soldering the shield to the motherboard. The back of the Atari 2600 motherboard has nothing interesting on it, except a great appreciation for throughhole soldering and hand-drawn circuits.
• The Atari 2600 stores games in read-only memory chips housed in external cartridges. This allows for a potentially infinite number of playable games for the console. Atari’s custom chip, the Television Interface Adapter (TIA) is the moneymaker of the 2600, as it enables multiple colors, increased graphic capabilities, and sound. Because memory was so expensive during the 2600’s design, the video processor has no external RAM. As a result the CPU must send video data to the TIA one line of video at a time.
• We give the Atari 2600 a big plus for repairability. Every component is attached via through-hole solder, so replacing a burnt-out resistor or IC is quite feasible. However, parts are now almost impossible to get hold of.