Jed Margolin is an ex-Atari hardware engineer that wrote an excellent tutorial on how the vector graphics systems worked on classic Atari arcade titles. http:/

Jed Margolin is an ex-Atari hardware engineer that wrote an excellent tutorial on how the vector graphics systems worked on classic Atari arcade titles. http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm The Vector State Machine mentioned in OP's article was essentially a custom processor designed out of TTL latches and DACs to draw the vectors faster than the 6502 main CPU ever could. It's a great piece of engineering and a close cousin to Apple's Disk ][ Controller that Wozniak designed out of a handful of TTLs and an EPROM.