Bill Mounce's Blog

I'm just going to promote another blog today.

https://www.billmounce.com/blogs

Always great information here. I highly recommend. That's all, carry on :)

More information concerning the CX-Stick

This just came out, a diagram of the new CX-Stick for the Atari THE400 mini.

What is powering "THE400"?

What is powering "The400" mini? Atari's website (https://atari.com/products/atari-400-mini-1) has the new Atari "The400" mini computer having an "Allwinner H3" CPU. This is something I don't think most are familiar with.

Allwinner H3 is actually an ARM platform that features an ARM Quad-Core Cortex-A7 CPU and an ARM Mali400 MP2 GPU.

Lets break that down:

CPU
-  ARM Cortex-A7 Quad-Core that runs at 1.296 GHz
   Has a 64-bit load-store path
   Also has 128-bit AMBA 4 AXI buses

-  512KB L2-Cache (shared between four cores)
   This Integrated L2 cache is designed for low power
   32 KB (Instruction) / 32KiB (Data) L1-Cache per core
 
-  Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE) 1TB


GPU
  ARM Mali400 MP2 600 Mhz
  Featuring 1 vertex shader (GP) and 2 fragment shaders (PP).
  Complies with OpenGL ES 2.0

What this makes me wonder is how powerful is this setup and will someone be able to hack this to also run software Atari ST computers. What about running Linux? What all can this little box do?

The new USB CXstick

Here is the configuration of all the buttons that are on the new joystick for the Atari The400 mini computer. This comes with the computer and can be purchased seperately on Atari.com or Amazon.

That looks to me like 8 buttons total on one joystick. When I do recieve the hardware, I will try and test serveral non atari and very different USB contolers on the 400 mini.