Cosmacotron
First Draft: January 21, 2025

In the '70s, RCA used Joseph Weisbecker's "FRED 2" computer system in an arcade cabinet called the FREDOTRONIC. If it's the same as the FRED 2 described here, that means that it had an 1801 CPU, a proto-1861, 2K of RAM, and a tape drive to load programs. The games it ran look quite primitive, no surprise there. Does Swords count as the first fighting game? I wonder...

I've always wondered what fully-specced hardware with the "finalized hardware", the 1802 and the 1861, would have looked like. Of course the RCA Studio II eventually came around, a 1.78MHz 1802 CPU with an 1861 video chip and 512 bytes of RAM, but it runs in the 64x32 pixel mode with a keypad for control. If you go take a gander at the CDP1861 datasheet you'll see the following: "The display is a bit map of memory. Each bit in the display memory corresponds to one spot on the video screen. Logical 1 (VDD) bits in memory correspond to white or lighted spots in the display. The highest resolution that may be produced is 128 vertical by 64-horizontal segments. This resolution requires 1024 bytes of memory for the display.". What if we multiplied the video memory by four and had 1K of program memory and 1k of video memory, not just 256 bytes of each? Give it some joysticks, maybe some sound hardware instead of a buzzer if we're feeling really special...

I'm starting on this project today, January 21 of 2025. Will it get done this year? I guess we'll find out.