One thing I've always experienced in life, is that it's absolutely guaranteed to change on you. And that's exactly what has happened with my interest in developing retro hardware. I'm no longer feeling the buzz and excitement I once had, and of course something else rushed in to fill the void.
Here's my back story...
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A little over 10 years ago, I had rediscovered the Atari 8-bit computer after stumbling upon AtariAge and was shocked to still see a lot of activity and development being done with these systems. It had been a few decades since I left the scene, with my last endeavor being to design a color video genlocking system called the Studio II. Something that I had tried to market, but after receiving only a small amount of pre-orders was soon abandoned. However I did manage to fulfill and deliver all of those pre-orders.
In reality there were two versions created, one being the Prism Studio, of which only two units got built, and was soon followed by six Studio II's getting produced. The Prism Studio marked the beginning of this project which was built into an off the shelf metal utility project box, and used a hand etched circuit board. It had a pot that allowed fading the overlayed Atari video in and out over the external video source, and had a rotary switch which picked a particular luminance bit from the Atari that could selectively disable the fader, thus staying present when all other luminance levels were faded.
Here's my back story...
-------------------------
A little over 10 years ago, I had rediscovered the Atari 8-bit computer after stumbling upon AtariAge and was shocked to still see a lot of activity and development being done with these systems. It had been a few decades since I left the scene, with my last endeavor being to design a color video genlocking system called the Studio II. Something that I had tried to market, but after receiving only a small amount of pre-orders was soon abandoned. However I did manage to fulfill and deliver all of those pre-orders.
In reality there were two versions created, one being the Prism Studio, of which only two units got built, and was soon followed by six Studio II's getting produced. The Prism Studio marked the beginning of this project which was built into an off the shelf metal utility project box, and used a hand etched circuit board. It had a pot that allowed fading the overlayed Atari video in and out over the external video source, and had a rotary switch which picked a particular luminance bit from the Atari that could selectively disable the fader, thus staying present when all other luminance levels were faded.
Atari Prism Studio Manufactured in 1993 Prism Studio was the prototype, with only one being sold. This quickly got replaced by the more refined Studio II version, which replaced those manual controls with memory registers that could be poked directly by the Atari.
At the time I was still working for a company that produced video camera systems for inspection of sewer pipelines to look for cracks and other faults. While I was there I learned a lot about how analog video worked, and also the techniques behind genlocking that to a computer, which I quickly adapted to the Atari 8-bit system. After all the Atari 8-bit computer system was my personal computer from 1981-1994.
At the time I was still working for a company that produced video camera systems for inspection of sewer pipelines to look for cracks and other faults. While I was there I learned a lot about how analog video worked, and also the techniques behind genlocking that to a computer, which I quickly adapted to the Atari 8-bit system. After all the Atari 8-bit computer system was my personal computer from 1981-1994.
- Here's a LINK to a discussion at AtariAge about the Studio II.
So getting back to my discovery of AtariAge in May of 2015. I was very excited to see all the interest and development in modern day upgrades for the Atari 8-bit platform, and found myself very quickly jumping into the conversations in the 8-bit forums. It was there that I caught a thread about the TransKey. Specifically someone was looking for one. Well that turned out to be my very first Atari product that I developed and sold back in 1990, and quite frankly I had many times envisioned a rebirth using modern technology. So one thing led to another and TransKey II (TK-II) was born. The idea really began to take shape, and then got fleshed out in real hardware with the first target being the Atari XEGS. This later morphed into a few other iterations, all having the ability to allow a PS/2 keyboard to be plugged in and replace or augment the stock keyboard.
As time passed I found myself making all kinds of upgrades for these retro machines beyond the TK-II, and ended up taking it all the way to the creation of three unique Atari motherboard projects based on the integration of the original 40-pin Atari VLSI chips. I even set off in an entirely new non-Atari direction with the development of a ColecoVision Game Console clone.
All of these projects can be seen on the pages of this website. And in most all cases the PCB gerbers, BOM, schematics, and firmware are freely available as downloads.
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So even though I was quite prolific in the retro computer arena, I eventually came to the conclusion it was time for a change. This resulted in closing down any new development about five months ago. And to be truthful I'm not feeling any urge to get back into it again. Of course I'll never say never, but I seriously doubt that I'll ever pick up where I left off.
It certainly has been a fun ride!
- Michael
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