New Pokey production near ?

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Just read this article on Atari Age: http://www.atariage.com/

This guy has access to the design (on tape reels !) of the custom Atari chips. It looks like all of them ! With that data (at least in theory) he should be able to get these chips produced again !

I'm a 8-bit Atari fan so I think this is fabulous news, but for our arcade hobby the best news is probably that this should make it possible to have brand-new POKEYs produced !

Although it seems that Pokeys are generally still possible to get (and they don't seem to die that often), I think there could be a good market for them. There are so many games that use it (and f.i. SW already has 4 of them) that it would be great to have freshly produced POKEYs around.

Here's a thread on AtariAge forum:http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/154479-new-gtia-chips/

I wonder if he also has data from any other Atari arcade custom chips ??
 
Just wondering how much it's going to cost to produce. Hard to tell how many layers it is, but it's probably 3-4 metal layers.

I know that reticle costs are anywhere from $1k-$50k, Betting on the lower end here, since there won't be as many circuits, and the mask size will be huge compared to what's done today. I mean those line widths have to be several microns wide. So that's upwards of around $25k-$50k for a complete set of photo masks. With that Die size you are probably looking at around 1000 die per 6 inch wafer. Most lot sizes run 24 wafers. Wouldn't think there would need to be a minimum order. Should be able to push it through with an SWR, there would need to be some initial tests done to make sure the process is right, but since the dimensions, etc are less critical than they are now, some 30 years later. Shouldn't be a problem.

Then there is cutting, packaging, testing.. Might be looking at a cool million just to do a small initial production run. But this is all based on a larger manufacturer. There may be some chinese fab that could do it for less.

But you may still be looking at a good chunk of change for a New Pokey.

It would be interesting to see..
 
There are still plenty of pokeys out there. I would imagine the cost to produce them would probably double or more the price we can get them for now.
I dont agree that they dont go bad often, I have seen alot of them go bad.
It is good news that the ability to reproduce them is available but I dont think we will see it happen anytime soon.
 
Well Curt, the guy with the tapes actually speculated about having those chips produced again, not me. He actually mentioned creating new Atari 8-bit hardware with a set of POKEY and KERI (an integrated GTIA and ANTIC, I never heard of an integrated version of those chips).
I know very little about the costs, but if any of those chips have a market, it is POKEY since it's market is wider then just the Atari 8-bit home computer architecture.

However, a SMD version won't be any good for us, but I guess an adapter would be possible.

But indeed plenty of POKEYs still around, but it's good to know the it's at least possible to recreate them should it be needed in the future.

I personally have never seen a bad POKEY. I've had and still have a range of 8-bit computers and I've seen a range of Centi PCBs, SW PCBs (containing 4 POKEYs each) and my MC and all had working POKEYs but I may have just been lucky.
At least it's not a chip that seems to have a high failure rate.
 
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