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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is a real web server. There isn't enough RAM to implement Ethernet.

Ethernet is not necessary. The webserver can talk to it's IP router with any protocol that they both implement. Just because everyone everywhere uses ethernet doesn't mean that you have to!

True.

But the cartridge claims to have IIS and Apache on it. Neither of those can run in 128 bytes.

2600 cartridges can contain any amount of extra RAM or even CPU hardware.

But this pretty well isn't real. There's no way you could drive a workable Ethernet connection just from an RF output. Also the "screenshot" is completely fake, the 2600 has nowhere near enough video objects to output all of that.

To be fair, the Atari 2600 supports sprite multiplexing.[0] And you can drive a BBC Micro's floppy drive from its screen output lines…[1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_multiplexing

[1]: https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2020/07/turning-400-...

Multiplexing on the 2600 can't go nearly as far as that screenshot shows. The 2600 has two sprites per line plus a few single-bit objects. There's a particular way to reuse sprites within the same scanline, but only at certain fixed intervals which isn't what we see here, plus strobing the positioning register that fast requires every single CPU cycle so it's impossible to also write the color and playfield registers at the same time.

Source: I know the 2600 well, I wrote and published a homebrew game: http://dos486.com/atari/

So I had the following thoughts a time ago. I wondered how feasible it would be to connect two Ataris through the Controller B port and implement some sort of dual-screen game.

Each port has something resembling 5 GPIO pins (direction UDLR and the button) and 2 analog pins that work like the IBM joystick adapter interface - reset the capacitor and wait until you get a 1 to measure the potentiometer resistance. No interrupt connection, so it's totally polled.

I wondered how effectively the 5 joystick pins could be used to implement a bit-banged RS-232 interface. The Commodore 64 KERNAL did that over the user port, speeds up to 2400 baud. From there maybe you can implement PPP but you are still talking about getting a minimal TCP/IP stack on there.

Now ... you probably can't drive the display at the same time.

And I'm sure the TCP/IP implementation would be super limited and only one TCP connection possible at once. Some caching reverse proxy would be needed. And maybe even then only fixed length responses with little or no headers. Could it be done in 4Kbytes of ROM?

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