Reverse Engineered Video Chip

I recently picked up another interesting chip for the collection.

During the first console wars of the last 1970s and earl 1980s, I remember a friend having a ColecoVision console and that it seemed to be in a different league compared to the Atari 2600 I had. The ColecoVision also had a feature I wasn't aware of until recently.

In 1982, Coleco sold the Expansion Module #1, that let it play Atari games. What an awesome feature! An Atari 2600 at one time had an MSRP of $125. The 2600 expansion module only cost $60. And the library of 2600 games was much larger than Coleco's offerings.

An interesting fact about the expansion module was that it actually contained everything needed for a console and just passed the ColecoVision's power in and video out through. This was possible due to the Atari 2600 largely using commodity hardware like a 6507 (a reduced pin count 6502). However, Atari's video/sound chip, the Television Interface Adapter, or TIA, was proprietary. Coleco broke the functionality into four separate chips with one handling the proprietary video interface.

The reverse engineered chip, the 73192, was produced by VTI (later more commonly known as VLSI) for Coleco and also Intellivision. Lawsuits and countersuits followed with Coleco eventually agreeing to license a couple of Atari's patents.

As with most of my technology collectables, I try to keep things compact. So I removed the 73192 from the board and have added it to the collection.