silverdr wrote: >> Yeah, having their own fab was a huge business advantage for Commodore >> back then! > How did f.e. Atari build their POKEYs and Co. then? As far as I can tell, the POKEY was manufactured by AMI (American Megatrends?) on behalf of Atari. If that is correct, more manufacturers may have taken the same route, to design a custom chip and then have another company manufacture it for them. Probably more expensive than Commodore owning MOS/CSG so they could use "vertical integration" and sell chips to themselves at cost instead of profit. The UK company Ferranti comes to mind too, manufacturing ULA chips for Sinclair Spectrum. The Oric ULA is marked HCS, not sure which company it stands for. I thought those also were Ferranti but perhaps not. I seem to recall to have found other Ferranti chips in e.g. the Dams IEEE-488 interface for the VIC-20. So just like Segher wrote, I suppose having their own fab made it more convenient to develop, test and manufacture custom chips but not a requirement thankfully in order to make computers with other chips than off the shelf ones. Best regards Anders Carlsson Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing listReceived on 2016-07-29 13:01:48
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