> The entire remaining space on the mainboard is dedicated to the video decoding hardware (besides a couple of RAM and ROM chips).
This wonderful post points out a fascinating cultural shift that I've never seen written up but is visible in the traces of various papers.
Although there was a Cambrian explosion of computer designs in the 1960s and 1970s they did follow a common evolutionary path, to whit: there really was a central processing unit, and around it fed various peripheral parts, primarily memory, I/O (channel controllers) and the like.
A lot of the vocabulary and assumptions of minicomputers and microprocessors came from this world, though the big difference in the late 60s was letting the CPU do some of the I/O (and one of the weird things about C, fundamentally a minicomputer language, was that it didn't have IO keywords or commands).
So when the Alto was designed one of the biggest weird things about it was not the bitmapped display itself but its support: the bus speed was only 3/2 the screen refresh rate! That blew people away (in fact if you wanted to do a lot of computation you'd end up blacking out most of the screen for a while).
==
The games developers went the other way: they started with hardcoded logic and only later were able to use MPUs. so to them they'd just accelerate part of the design with the computer. You can even see this as the domains started to merge; the early Atari computers like the 400 and 800 weren't only what we'd call today game consoles but had built-in sprite hardware that you could call from your programs.
This wonderful post points out a fascinating cultural shift that I've never seen written up but is visible in the traces of various papers.
Although there was a Cambrian explosion of computer designs in the 1960s and 1970s they did follow a common evolutionary path, to whit: there really was a central processing unit, and around it fed various peripheral parts, primarily memory, I/O (channel controllers) and the like.
A lot of the vocabulary and assumptions of minicomputers and microprocessors came from this world, though the big difference in the late 60s was letting the CPU do some of the I/O (and one of the weird things about C, fundamentally a minicomputer language, was that it didn't have IO keywords or commands).
So when the Alto was designed one of the biggest weird things about it was not the bitmapped display itself but its support: the bus speed was only 3/2 the screen refresh rate! That blew people away (in fact if you wanted to do a lot of computation you'd end up blacking out most of the screen for a while).
==
The games developers went the other way: they started with hardcoded logic and only later were able to use MPUs. so to them they'd just accelerate part of the design with the computer. You can even see this as the domains started to merge; the early Atari computers like the 400 and 800 weren't only what we'd call today game consoles but had built-in sprite hardware that you could call from your programs.