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Retrocomputing

Questions tagged [chip]

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General questions about computer chips and chipsets in retro hardware. Use a specific chip’s tag instead if available.

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Early microprocessors typically had data bus width of 8 bits. Dynamic RAM chips were typically 1 bit wide, used in rows of 8, but mask ROM chips were typically 8 bits wide. As I understand it, this ...
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I'm going to be adding infoboxes to some of the classic stand-alone chips on the Wiki. I'm starting with sound chips. I could not find a transistor count for the AY8910. Can anyone find one? Normally ...
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Was embedding 2048 bytes of RAM directly into video generating chip technically/economically possible in 1987? The RAM access scheme is to write individual bits and read 16-bit words randomly.
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Imagine that in the year 198x I decided to develop a 68000 computer. Unfortunately, I realised that my chipset must include a couple of 64-pin chips. What would be the consequences for me in terms of ...
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I want to build my own computer with retro-ic's. One of those ic's that I want to use is the W65C51 from Western Design Center. I am trying to connect it to a Arduino to learn how to interface with ...
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The Commodore 64 bitmap mode video memory layout is, from a programmer's viewpoint, odd; instead of a linear sequence of bytes, the first 8 bytes are stacked vertically, then the next 8, and so on. It ...
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The NES CPU was a copy of the 6502 with the BCD circuitry removed. As I understand it, this modification was motivated by a theory that BCD was the only part of the 6502 that was actually patented, so ...
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Having spent the last however many decades believing Commodore Semiconductor Group was a simple rename of MOS Technology, I just watched a video – quite interesting in its own right – which casually ...
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The original version of the 6502 was rated for 1 MHz, but before the end of the decade, the CPU was available in a 2 MHz version. Presumably what changed was Dennard scaling: make the transistors ...
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One pf the pivotal historical events of the 8-bit computer industry was the acquisition by Commodore of MOS Technology in 1976. This gave Jack Tramiel the vertical integration he wanted, and led ...
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I'm interested in the design of the VIC, the video and sound chip in the Vic-20. (Not too be confused with the VIC-II, which has been discussed elsewhere on the site.) I haven't been able to find an ...
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This is a question about mask ROM (not EPROM) chips of the 8-bit era. The size of DRAM chips increased by factors of 4, so there were 4kbit chips, then 16kbit, 64kbit, 256kbit etc. The natural width ...
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It seems difficult to find any detailed technical information online for the 85xx chips used in later Commodore 8-bit computers. For example, there's an excellent archive at http://www.6502.org/...
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The VIC-II, the video chip used in the Commodore 64, was the most sophisticated video chip of any 8-bit personal computer. I'm curious about how long it took to design. According to Wikipedia In ...
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There was a time in the early 80s when 64k RAM chips had a significant defect rate, such that half-bad ones could be obtained at a discount. Some computer manufacturers such as Sinclair and Tandy took ...
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Looking at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Commodore-64-1541-Floppy-Drive-04.jpg I started thinking the following: There are too many chips in that drive. It is crying out for a ...
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The Acorn Electron, trying to provide 32K of RAM as cheaply as possible, uses four 64k chips, for a 4-bit data bus. Obviously, this involves trading away some performance. (In all the following ...
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An 8-bit computer wanting 64K of RAM, could most straightforwardly use eight 64kx1 DRAM chips (64kbit, 1 data line). The Commodore 64 initially did this, but in the mid-80s, the cost-reduced redesign ...
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The Fairchild Channel F, released in 1976, was the first modern game console, in the sense of being the first one to accept games as software, rather than just modular configuration switches. Looking ...
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I'm interested in the development cost of different kinds of chips in the 70s and 80s, both for its own sake and because it aids in the understanding of historical events; in technology and business, ...
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One of the most valuable graphical features on early computers that had it, was hardware scrolling, that allowed the horizontal position of the screen to be adjusted by one or more pixels, thereby ...
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The Z8000 was Zilog's entry in the 16-bit microprocessor market; it was unsuccessful in large part, as I understand it, because it took too long to debug. According to https://thechipletter.substack....
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I was at the Ontario Science Center with the kid today and came across one of the few bits of tech from when I was a kid, a machine that speaks the word “coffee”. It consists of six seemingly ...
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The earliest CMOS microprocessors (RCA 1802, HP Stirling RISC, et.al.) were slower than contemporaneous NMOS microprocessors and Bipolar logic computers. (IIRC, both the 1802 and the 6502 could be ...
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Starting in the late seventies, the microchip industry generally switched from NMOS to CMOS, primarily because CMOS circuits use less power, though they also have other advantages like more noise ...
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According to a speech made by Morris Chang in Arizona, transcribed at https://interconnect.substack.com/p/globalization-is-dead-and-no-one When I started TSMC back in 1987, I had a dream. Probably ...
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I recently stumbled upon modern hi-res color photos of ancient soviet chip making equipment from the 80s: https://web.archive.org/web/20220520030420/https://ralphmirebs.livejournal.com/226489.html ...
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Were there any enhancement chips in officially-released games that were CPUs themselves and which ran the game code itself, relegating the role of the main CPU to that of a thin client? To elaborate, ...
forest's user avatar
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How does the technology keep improving despite having everything discovered already? I mean the same sized chips and electronics are used from year to year but with every new version of the main board ...
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This is a problem that has brought me headaches, so I will try to explain as best as possible. I have flashed with a Gbxcart several GBA ROMs in real cartridges (repro), working without any problem, ...
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Is it possible to hack Amiga Alice chip and use more than 2MB CHIP RAM? It's a long shot, but I assume if it was possible someone would have done it already? The maximum amount of Chip RAM in any ...
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The ZX Spectrum sold with either 16 or 48K RAM, necessitating an optional 32K memory bank which was achieved in a characteristically (for Sinclair) cleverly frugal way: with half-bad 64kbit DRAM chips,...
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The TMS9918 is still available, which is nice. But are there any other (better) video chips still on the (after-)market in any numbers? Obviously Commodore's VIC-II is not one of them.
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According to http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=S-SMP The S-SMP (perhaps: Sony - Sound & Music Processor?) is the audio CPU used by the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It consists of ...
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I'm trying to get an idea of the quantitative parameters of the computer industry in the era that saw the rise of personal computers. Of course, the industry as a whole was old by then; companies like ...
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In the history of computers, much is said of microprocessors, for good reason, but the relatively unsung RAM chips were equally important. Of particular significance were the 4kbit and 16kbit dynamic ...
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An interesting feature of the Apple II was that it had three rows of sockets for RAM chips, each of which could take either 4k or 16k chips. That meant the minimum configuration was 4K (cheap) but it ...
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It seems that integrated circuits of the 1970s tended to have 4-digit part numbers. This includes not only the ones that came to be well-known like CPUs (Intel 4004, 8008, 8080, 8085, 8086, 8088, ...
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According to https://jamiestarling.com/project-8088-the-8088-cpu-pinout/ One thing to note – the 8088 registers are made from dynamic memory cells – they have to be refreshed. The minimum clock speed ...
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The two most important chips in a game console are the CPU and GPU. In the Atari 2600, the CPU was a cut down version of the 6502, a very common low-cost microprocessor. The GPU was the TIA, which was ...
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Crystal Fire is a great book about the development of the transistor, but much less so for the IC side of things. What is the equivalent for ICs, and especially microprocessor development? I'm ...
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If you look at a die photo of a 6502, about forty percent of the chip is taken up by what's obviously microcode, both by its regular structure and by the obvious need for such from the instruction set,...
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6 votes
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There were 4 64k x 4-bit Integrated Circuit chips in the Amstrad-era Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2 and +3 models. These are known as the +2A, +2B (both +2 "black"), +3 and +3B (also both black cases). I ...
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Someone was recently selling an early MOS 6502 CPU on Ebay (date code 0277) in a ceramic package that had a couple of holes in it. You can see them clearly (under the tape, which presumably was not ...
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When troubleshooting older electronics, the usual culprits tend to be connections and capacitors. The "solid state" components, if they have failed, usually in the role of victim e.g. bad voltage ...
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I'm aware that 40-pins was a high-water mark for dual-inline package chips for a significant time; many CPUs of the early 1980s (8086, Z80, 6800, 6502, etc) used 40-pin packages, but no larger. ...
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The Cell, the CPU of the PlayStation 3, contained one conventional core called the PPE, and up to eight specialized vector cores called SPEs. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(...
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The PlayStation 2 provided backward compatibility with the PS1 by essentially incorporating an entire PS1 on a separate chip. It kept this arrangement permanently. The PS3 started off providing ...
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At the heart of the PlayStation 2 were a pair of custom chips, described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2_technical_specifications CPU: MIPS III R5900-based "Emotion Engine", ...
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In earlier years, it was common for DRAM chips to be one bit wide, so that an 8-bit machine would use eight of them to form one memory bank. Occasionally, 4-bit-wide chips would be used, e.g. the ...
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