whartung wrote:
The dearth of progress on the other projects is telling in that either the folks doing them aren't determined, or the market is shallow to not make it worth getting invested in.
Depends on what type of project you mean. My own retro style SBC is progressing nicely. I have a working PCB can run various BASICs, working on a filing system and some other nicities, but I'll do a 2nd PCB for the 6502 to test some bus IO facilities and call it quits at that then move onto the '816 (or '265) system by Easter - and by then I'll have a solid software base that will (hopefully) just run on the '816 - in 8-bit emulation mode at least, then I can work on 16-bit'ifying it.
This all started as a vanity project for me about a year ago, I put it on hold through last summer for many reasons but I'm at it now in-between some other work... But - the future? I've no idea. I do (now) have a solid road-map for it, I also have people interested in buying kits - which I didn't envisage, so what do I do? Do I make a 6502 kit for early adopters, then an '816 kit making sure it's backward compatible? It's a weird situation, but it seems there is a market for stuff like this, if somewhat a somewhat niche one.
whartung wrote:
I don't know if any of them are using "kickstarter" like funding, something I've always been basically very wary of.
I've absolutely no plans to use kickstarter, although I know people who use it to gauge interest rather than as a platform to get funding via.
whartung wrote:
The "retro" market for a incompatible device has to compete with other small computers (i.e. the Rasp Pi), for more money, and less functionality.
I don't think it does compete - the Pi is for kids, and us oldies who like to tinker, but who doesn't wan't a real 6502 on their desk? Look at the response 8-bit Dave has had so-far, but also - look at the Foenix project - it never had quite the same response and the forums are very quiet, although the board is technically superior!
whartung wrote:
Quote:
Adding memory mapped video is never easy and probably requires an FPGA to act as a memory controller and video generator, otherwise you need a much bigger PCB and a load of discrete chips as Oneironaut has shown.
Seems a lot of projects have died on this hill. I've suggested in the past (as if I have the vaguest notion of what I'm talking about) that "someone" create a programmable logic CRTC chip.
It's back to the "pixel pokers" vs. those who want tiles/sprites. Also resolution - no-one seems to want composite video these days - that was limited to about 320x240 or so - make that 4-bit colour and you need almost 40KB of RAM and without hardware assist, doing a simple screen clear takes noticable time.
I had that when I wrote my BASIC interpreter - the first thing a lot of people asked me was along the likes of "what are the pokes" - there are none on a Linux system which seemed to disappoint - why poke a number into something to set cursor position when there is a command to do it (was my reply). At the end of the day I do "pixel poke" into an SDL framebuffer. (in the C interpreter thats running the BASIC) It's fast enough to run a 10fps raycaster on a Pi from a BASIC program... But that's not something you can do with a tile/sprite type of graphics chip - unless you can tell the chip to draw a line. Trivial in reality - so my "black box" graphics idea is win-win from my point of view - it's a GPU on a 6502..
whartung wrote:
The issue with these chips, is that you inevitably "put linux" on them, and any charm they had beyond being a board that's 2x3 inches in size is lost
You don't have to though. There are some good "bare metal" frameworks for the Pi now. My own plan is to replace /sbin/init with my application that takes commands via a parallel interface and does stuff - so a command might be 5 bytes: plot + X + Y and off it goes, or 9 bytes: line + X1, Y1, X2, Y2.. then once I have the concept, I'll look at the bare metal things. I can boot a Pi into that in a couple of seconds - the PiTube direct runs in bare metal and boots in under a second as far as I could tell...
whartung wrote:
Personally, for a retro machine, I think memory mapped video is a requirement. BALL=113: POKE 32768, BALL is just fundamental to the feel. Having "raw" access to the display in contrast to making API calls across a channel. Just not the same. Otherwise, you're just using something akin to a smart terminal (IMHO).
The BBC Micro introduced the API for me - rarely did you poke the screen - if you did, you knew your code would not run over the Tube... (And did you ever try to poke characters to the Apple II screens with their somewhat interesting but completely logical memory mapping)
Anyway, enough from me for now
Cheers,
-Gordon