Is anyone else surprised that the Mega 65 sold out even with a $950 US price tag?

https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/303 ... t-computer

Well, I could use an old P.T. Barnum line to describe anyone who would pay that much money for a clone of a Commodore 8-bit computer, but whatever floats ones boat.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

According to the web page it is not sold out, it is simply not available yet. Note that this is the developer version, which will be a limited production run.

It is also a fairly high-end build: see-through acrylic case, Cherry MX keys, double-shot keycaps, and an Artix A7 200T FPGA.

For scale: "... more than 40x faster than a C64..." which beats a TK20 but not a Matchbox.

It's technically not sold out. It's still not yet available.

But that price! I can buy a PC that will run emulators much faster than that, as well as be a PC. And you have to build it yourself.

I wonder how many pre-orders they actually have?

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Bill

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I suspect it's vaporware at this point...uh...vapourware.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

If you don't like the product, you're not the target audience!

I was about to suggest that a modern remake of a retro machine is likely only to appeal to those who grew up with that machine, who bonded with it as a youngster.

But as it happens I did buy a Spectrum Next, despite never having bonded with it or used it for more than a few minutes back in the day. That's because it seemed like a nicely cased FPGA system with many desirable peripherals, and a sensible amount of SRAM, for a reasonable price. And it seemed like a reasonable risk given the team that were producing it. And indeed it was eventually delivered and pretty much met expectations, but a year or two later than expected.

I'm fairly sure my interest in the machine was a minority story.

We have, I think, noted previously that different people have different ideas of what they find attractive - it's not really news to hear that one person doesn't like something, or that they find something too expensive, or that they feel it's unlikely to be delivered.

The problem with these kinds of projects is that physical design is quite difficult, and all sorts of advantages of volume production just aren't there in the hobby market: injection moulding has a five-figure setup cost, and that's assuming you can get your design pretty close to correct first time.

Another problem is that the kind of enthusiasm and optimism needed to start and run such a project doesn't necessarily map to the sort of expertise and care and attention needed to make it live up to the expectations of the buyer.

It is, as ever, another case of buyer beware, and of knowing your own mind as to how important the price is to you, and how important the quality of the final experience.

Not really, no. In a world with almost eight billion people, I don't think it would be hard to find a just hundred interested in buying almost any product that costs less than a decent gaming PC.

Personally, I wouldn't buy that particular machine myself, but that's mainly due to cost/benefit analysis and the stacks of other retrocomputers distributed around my apartment that want attention. But it seems like a reasonably nice system, and it's certainly more "retro" than some of the stuff I see people in the retrocomputing community using.

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Curt J. Sampson - github.com/0cjs