Jed Margolin, a former Atari engineer, hosts articles and archives on vector generators, XY monitors, and Atari internal memos.
HN commenters call the Atari mail and status report archive a priceless treasure and recommend the site for vector hardware history.
This whole archive is a an absolutely priceless treasure, from the '92 status reports:
EYES ONLY BURN BEFORE READING
To: Rick Moncrief 1 of 1
Fr: Jed Margolin
Re: Pirates
Dt: 26 February 1992
1. From the evidence, the Pirates have broken security on ASIC65. Guardians
has a problem because they use the same system. Consider the following:
read more at: http://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/Stat92.txt about when the 'war with the pirates' was hot.
Edit: they used a DSP32C I never knew that, that's a label I haven't seen in a long long time. I had a board with one of those as a co-processor in a 286 and it ran incredibly fast compared to the 286/287 combo, it also had a couple of DAC/ADCs on board. That was my intro to signal processing, I used it for all kinds of tricks and even adapted a raytracer to use it as a coprocessor. Fun times!
(this was the board or something very close to it: http://www.symres.com/webpages/products/legacydsp.htm )
edit2: more goodies:
Don't you just HATE to talk to rude people on the phone? Well,
SO DO THEY. Yes, YOU can be just as rude as the people you despise.
Like the way this is going? Of course not. It's arrogant,
it talks down to you, and you feel like you know better. Unfortunately,
sometimes we DO sound like we are above dealing with people on the phone.
We can make this happen less often by avoiding certain trigger
phrases. These are things "nobody likes to hear--not a spouse, not a
child, and…
This is great:
Due to a severe increase in demand, we are forced to state some
kind of policy on private archival backup tapes. Effective immediately,
anyone can have a backup done on a BYOT (bring your own tape) basis.
All of the above applies to floppies, as well as tape; floppies are
a little more convenient to store, but don't hold as much. Rough figures
follow:
Tape (2400 ft, 8KB block size) = 40MB storage, or 80,000 disk blocks
(figure 75K blocks after backup adds its own overhead)
Floppies (single density, our default) = .25MB, or 500 disk blocks.
Floppies (double density, YOU MUST SPECIFY) = .5MB, or 1,000 disk
blocks. If you want double density, all of the floppies to be written on
must be pre-initialized before the backup starts. Therefore, you need to
KNOW beforehand just how many floppies are to be used.
It makes me think about our company's 1MB web page download, as it would require 60ft of Atari tape storage. XD
[0] http://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/Vax83.txt
The color/3D Atari vector games used the Analog Vector Generator, which used op-amps to trace smooth lines of arbitrary length and angle on the screen. It also seems to fall out of calibration as the years go on, which is why you see a lot of Star Wars and Tempest machines with jittery images.
More information on the Atari vector hardware, written by one of the original engineers, is here:
http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm
On early pre-production Atari vector games, you could burn a hole in the phosphor all the way to the glass if you left the electron gun active too long without moving the beam. They added a "spot killer" circuit that turned the beam off if you left in place too long.
(From "The Secret Life of XY Monitors": http://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm)
see also https://github.com/schlae/scopetrex with the plan to build a clone.
You need a XY Monitor - https://jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm
or if you have a normal CRT, you can add the XY kit: https://www.retrorgb.com/vector-monitor-xy-kit.html
Tons of additional information here from an Atari staff engineer who worked on some of the XY games. [1] [2]
[1] https://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm
[2] http://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm