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Preface

Preface by the designer of the new freezer (2012)

TURBO FREEZER

2005 was a big success. It was very well received in the Atari

community and we got lots of positive feedback and ideas for new features. The decision

to use a ﬂash ROM instead of an EPROM proved being particularly helpful. It enabled

users to enjoy software updates and new features as the ﬂash ROM could be updated from

the Atari.

In particular the debugger has been extended considerably since the ﬁrst release 2005.

An online help, commands for moving and comparing memory blocks, a memory usage

map and an OS vector overview, the possibility to log the screen output of debugging

sessions to printer in parallel and many additional things have been added. Special thanks

go to Erhard P

utz and Carsten Strotmann for many good ideas.

The initial run sold out fairly quickly and requests for more kept coming. In 2010

things became more concrete. Together with Wolfram Fischer, who also participated in

the ﬁrst run, I started planning a new production run. Meanwhile the Lattice M4A5

CPLD had become relatively hard to get and was clearly more expensive than comparable

chips. We also wanted to use a slightly “larger” chip in order to implement some new

ideas and features. So we decided to use a Xilinx XC95144XL as the basis for the new

freezer. Having about the same price it oﬀered more than twice the power (I/O pins and

space for logic) than the Lattice CPLD. This way we had the possibility of implementing

long-awaited features – for example the RAM extension which had been there in the very

ﬁrst freezer from 1987.

By the end of 2010 Wolfram had created the ﬁrst prototype of the new hardware. This

was the basis for starting the development of the new logic and software at the begin of

2011. I realized quickly that the best way would be to develop the logic from scratch

and to separate the functional blocks (freezer, cartridge emulation, etc.). This simpliﬁed

extensions in each functional block.

The logic of the cartridge emulation was completely redone; the freezer logic has

intentionally been kept compatible with old

TURBO FREEZER

2005 logic. I wanted to

keep the changes to the freezer software at a minimum, so it can also be used with the

“old” freezer. This way the users of the old freezer may also beneﬁt from further updates.

In summer 2011, after several new hardware revisions and many changes to the software

and the logic, the new freezer was completed! Unfortunately the start of the mass

production, which had been planned for end of 2011, had to be postponed by almost one

year. Wolfram had to move to a new residence and was busy at his job – hence we both had

almost no time left for our hobby. Thanks to the support from the ABBUC the production

ﬁnally started in autumn 2012! Many thanks to Wolfgang Burger for the support. Also

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