The Secret Life of Vector Generators (Atari)
Summary
Jed Margolin provides a detailed historical and technical overview of Atari's vector generators used in classic XY games. The piece blends circuit-level explanations with historical anecdotes, including discussions of DACs, BRMs, state machines, gate arrays, and the evolution to DSPs. It offers valuable context for hardware design, retro computing, and the engineering tradeoffs behind early vector graphics.