PSoC or FPGA?

Woz claims so himselef in his book:

Granted, he's obviously not an unbiased source, so you have to decide for yourself if you believe him or not.

Personally I find the idea he designed Atari's original Breakout video game from nothing more than an idea related to him via Steve Jobs to a working prototype in four days straight even more fantastical. This claim does have a lot of references listed in Wikipedia --

:

"Jobs noticed his friend Steve Wozniak-employee of Hewlett-Packard-was capable of producing designs with a small number of chips, and invited him to work on the hardware design with the prospect of splitting the $750 wage. Wozniak had no sketches and instead interpreted the game from its description. To save parts, he had "tricky little designs" difficult to understand for most engineers. Near the end of development, Wozniak considered moving the high score to the screen's top, but Jobs claimed Bushnell wanted it at the bottom; Wozniak was unaware of any truth to his claims. The original deadline was met after Wozniak did not sleep for four days straight. In the end 50 chips were removed from Jobs' original design. This equated to a US$5,000 bonus, which Jobs kept secret from Wozniak, instead only paying him $375.[1][2][3][4][5][6]"

Although Atari apparently wasn't as impressed:

"Atari was unable to use Steve Wozniak's design. By designing the board with as few chips as possible, he also cut down the amount of TTL (transistor-transistor logic) chips to 42. This made the design difficult to manufacture-it was too compact and complicated to be feasible with Atari's manufacturing methods. However, Wozniak claims Atari could not understand the design, and speculates "maybe some engineer there was trying to make some kind of modification to it". Atari ended up designing their own version for production, which contained about 100 TTL chips. Wozniak found the gameplay to be the same as his original creation, and could not find any differences.[2][3][4][5][7][8]"

I'd be interested to learn how, exactly, it was that cutting down the number of TTL chips made the design difficult to manufacture... weird...

---Joel

I don't know, but maybe he designed too long combinational logic without tactical latches, so gate delay time was to long, or too complicated to create a PCB from it (I guess at this time he created a prototype with a wire wrap board).

--
Frank Buss, http://www.frank-buss.de
piano and more: http://www.youtube.com/user/frankbuss

Hmm, could be. Seymour Cray, as I recall, was found of pushing combinatorial logic as far as he could so as to avoid another clock's worth of latency, and the story goes he occasionally pushed a bit far and his timing margains because, um, marginal. :-)

You're correct about the prototype -- the story goes that Woz worked his day job at HP, spent all night working on Breakout's design, and then Jobs would spend the day wirewrapping up Woz's design to be tested that evening.

---Joel

Joel Koltner expounded in news:oP3jp.781129$ snipped-for-privacy@en-nntp-11.dc.easynews.com:

Ah-ha- a self-made claim. :) At best, he may have had a more flexible concept of "working". Programmers are not immune to bragging.

..

I don't know much about that but on the surface it seems possible. I can imagine designs that have fewer parts but depend upon behavioural quirks or tricks to get the job done. Hence the "hard to understand" part.

I also suspect that you can make something appear to work on paper (or on one breadboard) but would otherwise be a production nightmare. Things like tolerances on available parts for timing etc. may make the production yield infeasable.

But that isn't my field-- only my opinion.

Warren

Like in the design of the Apple where he used TTL gate delays to generate the phase shift for the color? When there were process changes in the chip manufacture the delays were less and it no longer worked. At the end you needed certain manufactures and data codes to get it to work. I think they even applied for a patent.

Or maybe the single shot (rather than counter) timing chains that changed as components aged? He did some things I wouldn't do even in a one off hobby project. But then I'm not rich and famous.

Nope. They couldn't do it themselves or even start to write a flow chart to do it.

It was kinda funny. My father didn't have a clue what we were doing (couldn't help with homework) but knew it was important. He was an EE prof (power).

First semester was taught in 9th grade. The rest, all subjects, wasn't even at the level we had in grade school.

My wife cannot get the simplest information (left/right) off a map and is

*totally* lost without a GPS. Her father was a high school history teacher and one time president of the local NEA union (during a strike year, no less). I turned his daughter into a Republican, quite a bit to the right of me. ;-)