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My Mega65 has arrived

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Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#41

Post by yakz »

mlindner wrote: post #37

I really don't understand the love people have for the commodore 64. It wasn't especially advanced for it's time nor was it especially good. Finally it basically required the use of a horrible language like Basic to use. There's like zero reason to re-create it as a retro computer. Then you compare it to things like the Amiga which was incredibly advanced for it's time with amazing graphics and sound that even today…

My family couldn’t afford an Amiga when I was a kid, but we could afford a C64 so that’s what we had.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#42

Post by [deleted] »

mlindner wrote: post #37

I really don't understand the love people have for the commodore 64. It wasn't especially advanced for it's time nor was it especially good. Finally it basically required the use of a horrible language like Basic to use. There's like zero reason to re-create it as a retro computer. Then you compare it to things like the Amiga which was incredibly advanced for it's time with amazing graphics and sound that even today…

[deleted]

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#43

Post by pvg »

mlindner wrote: post #37

I really don't understand the love people have for the commodore 64. It wasn't especially advanced for it's time nor was it especially good. Finally it basically required the use of a horrible language like Basic to use. There's like zero reason to re-create it as a retro computer. Then you compare it to things like the Amiga which was incredibly advanced for it's time with amazing graphics and sound that even today…

It's heartwarming to see some people still enjoy the old breadbox and others still enjoy telling everyone everything was better on the Amiga.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#45

Post by hedora »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #35

My only interest in this is as an FPGA dev kit. It was surprisingly hard to find details on the actual hardware but it appears to be a Xilinx™ Artix A7 200T according to https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TE0765-03-S001-MEGA65-hi... That page curiously doesn't specify the amount of external DRAM, but various hints suggests it might be 8 MiB of HyperRAM (that's DRAM with a simpler protocol). Cute.

I was wondering the same thing. I wonder if they could produce a "lite" version without some of the physical components (like the floppy disk and "expansion port"), and maybe some of the retro stuff swapped for cheap modern bits, like USB.

Does anyone know if the FPGA code that makes this thing work is open source? It might be a nice starting point for some other hobby project / processor architecture experiments / etc.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#46

Post by tenebrisalietum »

mlindner wrote: post #37

I really don't understand the love people have for the commodore 64. It wasn't especially advanced for it's time nor was it especially good. Finally it basically required the use of a horrible language like Basic to use. There's like zero reason to re-create it as a retro computer. Then you compare it to things like the Amiga which was incredibly advanced for it's time with amazing graphics and sound that even today…

The SID chip in the c64 is very unique, it's specifically designed for music versus the PSG-like square wave generators in other systems at the time. (I will say the Atari POKEY is magical though.)

Comparing c64 to Amiga isn't fair, the Amiga was a generation later. What the c64 should be compared with is the Atari 8-bit systems (400, 800, 65XE, 130XE), Apple II, Colecovision.

Having the 64k RAM, plus sprites, plus a sound chip that implemented ADSR and different waveforms other than square did introduce a lot of possibilities and excitement in 1982 though, even if you tried your best to use them from the absolutely shitty BASIC and/or had to wait minutes for things to load from disk or cassette.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#47

Post by mrandish »

mlindner wrote: post #37

I really don't understand the love people have for the commodore 64. It wasn't especially advanced for it's time nor was it especially good. Finally it basically required the use of a horrible language like Basic to use. There's like zero reason to re-create it as a retro computer. Then you compare it to things like the Amiga which was incredibly advanced for it's time with amazing graphics and sound that even today…

I'm not going to judge other people's retro-crushes but as an old-timer who used several of these 80s computers in the 80s, you're correct about the Amiga being especially notable from an historical perspective.

I would even say that the Amiga, at the time it shipped, was the single largest step-up in capabilities of any widely available computer that's ever occurred. Compared to all the other computers available to consumers at the time, the Amiga's graphics, sound, operating system and processing were best of breed. From today's perspective it's hard to appreciate just how stunning the Amiga was versus status quo. It literally drew crowds of people at local computer stores just to watch someone run through all the demos.

While today's PCs are many orders of magnitude more powerful and capable, I can't recall any single increment over the decades being nearly as significant across so many different dimensions (visuals, sound, speed, OS, UX, I/O, etc).

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#48

Post by egypturnash »

mlindner wrote: post #37

I really don't understand the love people have for the commodore 64. It wasn't especially advanced for it's time nor was it especially good. Finally it basically required the use of a horrible language like Basic to use. There's like zero reason to re-create it as a retro computer. Then you compare it to things like the Amiga which was incredibly advanced for it's time with amazing graphics and sound that even today…

The c64 was cheap, easily available, and dominated the market. The Amiga was not cheap, was not made in anything like the quantities of the c64, and was fighting with the ST for third place behind the Mac and IBM PCs.

The Amiga 1000 was a decade ahead of it’s time, but Commodore sat on its ass for longer than that, with very little investment in upgrading the thing.

I say this as someone who went from a c64 in her teens to the Amiga in her twenties, and held on to the Amiga well past the time when it was obviously dead in terms of technological prowess and software availability.

The c64 was also a lot of people’s first taste of programming in a time when C compilers cost hundreds of dollars.

And if you don’t understand c64 nostalgia, I bet you must be even more befuddled by Spectrum nostalgia. Which was even cheaper and shittier than the c64, but completely ruled the UK for a while.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#49

Post by ZetaZero »

mlindner wrote: post #37

I really don't understand the love people have for the commodore 64. It wasn't especially advanced for it's time nor was it especially good. Finally it basically required the use of a horrible language like Basic to use. There's like zero reason to re-create it as a retro computer. Then you compare it to things like the Amiga which was incredibly advanced for it's time with amazing graphics and sound that even today…

The Amiga launched at $1300, while the C64 was going for $200. By the time I could afford an Amiga, I got a PC instead.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#50

Post by the_af »

glonq wrote: post #26

Does the mega65 shipping put a nail in the coffin of the commander x16, which seems to be stumbling?

How is it stumbling? Do you mean "slow going"? Because according to Wikipedia, the MEGA65 project was started in 2015, so Mega itself was slow.

These are essentially hobbyist projects, I don't think there's any nails to be placed on any coffins. They get done when they get done, and are not expected to become huge commercial successes.

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