For as popular as Atari was in their heyday, it wasn’t until well after they were on their famous decline that they released their first handheld, the Atari Lynx. In retrospect, competing with the Game Boy was not going to be a recipe for success even without considering their other problems as a company, and as a result was their penultimate console before exiting the market completely. But [Nick]’s most recent project asks what the world would have been like with an Atari handheld from their golden era, and has been working on this miniaturized version of the 2600.
Unlike any modern emulators which can easily handle Atari 2600 games in almost any form factor today, this console is doing it all with as much original hardware as possible. It uses much smaller switches and buttons compared to the original, and omits some other unnecessary hardware for today’s world like the RF modulator. [Nick] has also designed a custom PCB that reduces the overall footprint considerably as well, and has relocated the cartridge port in preparation for its eventual handheld shape. The result is a console using original hardware that’s less than half the footprint of the original.
Although there were around 30 million Atari 2600 consoles sold and the system is unlikely to be a real collector’s item anytime soon, [Nick] makes sure to note that no real 2600 hardware was harmed in this build. And, as far as its handheld nature, this is a stepping stone on the path to that eventual goal. We’ll look forward to an eventual system that integrates a screen and controller as well as a port for the original cartridges. In the meantime, here’s another handheld 2600 that fits completely inside one of those cartridges.
Wondering how this error is different from previous completed Handheld 2600 projects by Benjamin J. Heckendorn aka Ben Heck?
Didn’t Ben Heckdorn do a handheld 2600 at some point? Too busy right now to look in the HaD archives…
here it is: https://www.benheck.com/original-atari-2600-vcsp/
Ben only shaved down existing PCBs with a hacksaw. I don’t remember him ever spinning fresh PCBs from scratch for any of his projects. His book came out so long ago, it predated this modern world of inexpensive PCB manufacturing services.
There’s a way to make an even smaller 2600. The very late run of 2600 Jr has unicorn chip, either C101688-001 or C101688-002. This one chip combined CPU, RIOT, and TIA into one chip so you only need to wire in controller ports, switches, and cart slot connector.
Unfortunately it’s fairly rare as it was right near the end of 2600’s life, no one knows how many were made with one chip design, a post on AA forum suggests maybe 50,000 were produced. I have one myself.
https://www.digitpress.com/library/techdocs/2100_chip.png has schematic (not checked for accuracy) that would allow one to make a portable unicorn 2600 system
Nice! I’ve never heard of that chip.
Please share the pcb layout
https://github.com/nickbild/uTari