Posted By
MMS
on 2021-02-07
18:24:16
 |  Re: Atari people asked about the Plus4 and I gave them a lecture :)
OK, maybe it is a too wild hypothesis, but what if the newer (not classic) games with those decompressors played a role in the high death rate of 8501 CPUs? I mean the CPU is alread hot, then we force with those recrunchers into an even higher temperature. The heatsink was not typical in the past, as the early C16s had real metal EMC shiled, played a radiation surface too. but the thermal paste dried out over the time.
Initial articles in the 80s did not speak about high defect rate (as far as I can read), high defect rate of 8501s became known later.
Maybe classic games did not force the CPU so much?
Would be interesting to measure the temperatures during a longer decompression, like an older MB game, how much it increases. AFAIK the tests till now happened in a normal "BASIC" mode, not calculating with such overclocking or the extra tasks the CPUs do (we know in PCs, that even with fixed clock speed the CPU can get warmer with more tasks. Why it should be different on the 8 bits? eg. SID digi converter pushing CPU to it's limits. Initial games did now give so much tasks to the CPU)
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