Re:STOP THINKING INTEL! (Score 1)

While I don't recall the specs of ANTIC, I do know that you can do some pretty interesting things with it. Simple and short FMV's can be easily done on a machine with more than the standard 64K RAM. A stock 130XE was the first thing I expieremented around with this on. Load the data into memory and use page flipping to draw each frame (for those that don't know, you can "flip pages" of RAM sort of like pages of a book. All you have to do is change the values of two locations to point ANTIC at a new area of RAM and it will draw what's stored there. THe only thing the 6502 has to do to is change those 2 values, the rest is up to ANTIC). If you use a VBI driven routine to do this, you can get up to 60 FPS (50 w/ PAL) with almost NO load on the 6502 at all. But with so little RAM, you run out of frames really quickly. Enter the 130XE with it's extended memory. Add a bank switcher to your VBI and you can have as much video as your RAM will allow. I've seen up to 4 meg memory upgrades for the Atari.