The Clones Never Sleep

While I was doing some research around the behavior of Atari ST hardware, I found several interesting sites with quite amazing hardware projects around the ST. There are several people who are in the process of building complete Atari clones based on VHDL (programmable logic chips)!

Here's a few very promising projects:

• S Like Suska - an active and far advanced clone project. It looks like the prototype is already running Nebulus in color, so this one has already passed one of the most important tests in my book. :-)
• Alltogether (PDF) - seemingly a successfully finished student project. The PDF linked here has some excellent details around the deeper behavior of the original ST chipset.
• VHDL page on atari.org - a list with several other projects around this subject.

While I've pretty much put my soldering iron away a long time ago, my Electronic Engineer's heart sings while looking at these sites.

It's quite possible that we'll all be able to buy one of those machines as a kit one of these days, and since these clones are a lot smaller and can probably be booted from Flash memory, this is a great way to move the Atari hardware platform into the 21st century.