Elminster wrote:
Thanks. The L-star looks interesting. Now I am not sure whether to do l-star or rc2014. I guess I will have to build both.
I'm the designer of L-Star (and also KimStar which is really a sub-project of L-Star, and Propeddle which was the predecessor of L-Star). I found out about RC2014 a long time ago, probably in 2015, and I talked to Spencer Owen (maker of RC2014) about using it as a platform for some kind of future version of L-Star. We exchanged some emails and he liked the idea.
Back then, RC-2014 wasn't commercially available yet and I was thinking of making a 6502 version of (maybe called RC1402 or RC6502 haha) which would have used card edge connectors to keep the plugin boards cheap (they wouldn't require connectors). I would have designed a few small expansion boards with the Propeller, the 65C02, RAM, and maybe EEPROM and other peripherals such as a 6532. It would have been sort of a hybrid between the RC2014 ideas and the L-Star design. But I wanted to concentrate on some other ideas for L-Star first, and I have very little time.
Meanwhile Ben Chong (user bluesky6 on this forum) came up with a
6502 board for the RC-2014 platform so basically half of an "L-Star for RC-2014" is done, though the 6502 board is not commercially available at the time of this writing. The "other half" would be a board that has a Propeller to bitbang the 6502 bus on the RC-2014 should be easy to do (though a Propeller isn't fast enough to keep up with the 4MHz bus speed of most Z80 circuits). Or you could just use the KimStar idea of plugging an existing Propeller circuit into the bus of an existing 6502 bus.
Anyway, I like the RC-2014. I bought an RC-2014 kit myself (I don't know how Spencer can keep the price so low and make a living off it) and built it, but I have to admit I still haven't tried it out because I don't have a proper power supply (I know, it sounds silly but it's because it needs a 5V supply unless you put a 7805 voltage regulator on board and as it happens, I didn't have either of those on hand).
So yeah, basically: buy both! Have fun!
===Jac