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If you were to write a program to make the Atari 2600 copy its own ROM--not that A) it had the RAM and B) it ever had a need, it would very roughly take about 15-20 cycles per byte, and 15-20 more cycles per 256 bytes for looping. Heavily depends on the code used to copy it, probably less if optimized.

The 6507 is a 1Mhz cpu, and again very roughly about 64,000 microseconds to copy 4096 bytes, or twice as many to copy 8192 bytes. Under a second on the original hardware.

So even 2-3 seconds is a long time. Is the embedded OS on the 2600+ bit-banging the ROM via GPIO pins? Is it a Python script doing that from userspace (lol maybe something recycled from a ROM dumper's toolkit posted on some random forum in the early 00's)? Not bad for a script to do that in 2-3 seconds to be honest if that's what it is.






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