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Comment by Tuna-Fish | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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/

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