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My Mega65 has arrived

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Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#71

Post by imiric »

> So nice to see electronics made somewhere other than China. Hope we can see this done more often.

Indeed. Is there an online store that specializes in products not made in China? Or at least allows me to filter products by country of design and manufacture? I'd give anything to have that filter on Amazon. It would get rid of most of the scams and shoddy products that end up in landfills shortly after purchase.

I really don't mind paying a premium for products built elsewhere. I'd rather pay extra for quality than buy another cheap Chinese knockoff.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#72

Post by the_af »

jansan wrote: post #67
the_af wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Happy to help you understand: Like a lot of people, I owned a C64 and not an Amiga, which was very expensive and uncommon in my country…

Just the other day I ran into this video of a recent C64 demo. It just blew my mind (5:02 is my favorite part). THere were demos at the time I played on the C64, but this is just pushing the limits so far, it is pure art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q56-23D7omY

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#73

Post by ffhhj »

imiric wrote: post #71

> So nice to see electronics made somewhere other than China. Hope we can see this done more often. Indeed. Is there an online store that specializes in products not made in China? Or at least allows me to filter products by country of design and manufacture? I'd give anything to have that filter on Amazon. It would get rid of most of the scams and shoddy products that end up in landfills shortly after purchase. I re…

Which store!?

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#74

Post by [deleted] »

imiric wrote: post #71

> So nice to see electronics made somewhere other than China. Hope we can see this done more often. Indeed. Is there an online store that specializes in products not made in China? Or at least allows me to filter products by country of design and manufacture? I'd give anything to have that filter on Amazon. It would get rid of most of the scams and shoddy products that end up in landfills shortly after purchase. I re…

[deleted]

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#75

Post by imiric »

com2kid wrote: post #60

> In my view the ongoing race to the bottom of slave labour to make cheaper systems is not sustainable. As someone who has worked in consumer electronics, and worked closely with the people who were on the factory line, employees on electronics manufacturing lines are not slave labor. They are often times well paid, with pay that would make for a good living in more rural parts of the US. After having worked on a pro…

> They are often times well paid, with pay that would make for a good living in more rural parts of the US.

That might be the case now, but manufacturing moved to China decades ago partly because of cheap labor and as a cost saving measure for companies building elsewhere.

> BTW, everything is made in China because China has a ton of local expertise, engineering talent, and ease of sourcing parts.

Everything is made in China because everything else is made in China. I.e. the momentum is already built for everything to be cheaply made there, so no external manufacturing can compete on prices or equipment.

The issue is that in the race to the bottom to build everything cheaply, quickly and in large quantities, is that you get a ton of low quality products that become junk soon after purchase. And given the total disregard for intellectual property, any company sharing any manufacturing details with Chinese manufacturers must either have strong on-site control and oversight of the process, or deal with the fact that the market will soon be flooded with counterfeit products of their design.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#76

Post by anyfoo »

klodolph wrote: post #25
bebop wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware emulation can make the timings between multiple chips more accurate as processes actually can be done in parallel and in sync with a shared clock. This is harder to get perfect with software emulation. In theory.

Hardware emulation cannot actually make the emulation more accurate than software emulation. That doesn’t make any logical sense. If you know what the correct timing is, you can emulate it in hardware or software. It’s not harder to do in software. It’s just hard to get the timing correct, regardless of whether you are using software or hardware. There are certain cases where it’s hard to get good performance out of…

It's not that simple. Yes, from the point of view of the emulated system, it does not matter if the emulation is software or "hardware" (i.e. an FPGA), as it will always observe correct relative timings.

But if you want actually correct timings in the real world, i.e. to wall clock, a modern software environment will make it harder for you in practice. If you don't have an OS with any real-time capabilities, that's your first problem: You have no (good) guarantee when and for how long your threads are scheduled, how long allocation and system calls will take and block you, and generally whether you can reliably meet any of your deadlines.

On Linux with VICE, I would not be shocked at all if I occasionally observed VICE stuttering for a millisecond.

With baremetal (or an OS with sufficient real-time capabilities), you can make your deadlines meet with some care. You will still have some (possibly negligible) amount of jitter: Superscalar CPUs and caches are just some of the culprits.

Does the jitter, or even the lack of deadline guarantees on plain Linux with VICE, matter in practice? Maybe not. With a fast enough machine you might not notice at all. Is it easier, and to some extent more efficient, to just sidestep those issue with an FPGA implementation that is guaranteed accurate to wall clock (not just emulated clock)? Probably. Comes at the cost of having FPGAs, though. On the other hand, a real NTSC/PAL output is going to be pretty real indeed!

As said, not that simple. How hardcore you are on your wall clock accuracy requirements probably depends on how much of a "preservationist" you are.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#77

Post by anyfoo »

bitwize wrote: post #30
klodolph wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware emulation cannot actually make the emulation more accurate than software emulation. That doesn’t make any logical sense. If you know what the correct timing is, you can emulate it in hardware or software. It’s not harder to do in software. It’s just hard to get the timing correct, regardless of whether you are using software or hardware. There are certain cases where it’s hard to get good performance out of…

It should be easier to do in software. What's hard is, modelling the hardware accurately, getting the timing correct, AND getting everything performant enough to run at the original hardware speeds. It takes a beefy system to accurately emulate even SNES hardware at full speed. An FPGA can be programmed with accurate hardware models and run them all in parallel at the same speeds the original hardware ran at (up to a…

Moreover, it can actually be at least "more straightforward" to reach accurate wall clock timings with an FPGA, than by trying to meet deadlines in a common OS environment, as the FPGA is "just" loaded with a bitstream that will it do more or less exactly what the original chip did and nothing else, spoken strictly in the digital domain.

I'd also like to think that it's more efficient, since at least in theory it could be (cutting down on all the extremely superfluous software overhead for the task), but sadly I don't actually know how common FPGAs really perform in that specific case against reasonably efficient modern CPUs.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#78

Post by ckz »

imiric wrote: post #71

> So nice to see electronics made somewhere other than China. Hope we can see this done more often. Indeed. Is there an online store that specializes in products not made in China? Or at least allows me to filter products by country of design and manufacture? I'd give anything to have that filter on Amazon. It would get rid of most of the scams and shoddy products that end up in landfills shortly after purchase. I re…

For some countries (Japan comes to mind), there -are- dedicated stores to a degree. Usually for luxury goods though where it's tough to gauge real-world quality/value vs aesthetic strengths.

Also, this doesn't directly address your question, but the interim solution I've used is to build a research habit with each successive purchase for the home.

With time, it gets a lot easier and more intuitive to track down vendors. Vendors is actually a key word--typically you're looking for one of a small number of authorized importers for a given brand. Often they'll be B2B focused, e.g. buying EU power tools or USA-made N95s from industrial supply companies.

This strategy has netted out a (simplified) distribution like this in my home:

* Home Appliances: German, French

* Food Storage: French (lunchboxes even!) or vintage US

* Whet Stones: Japanese

* Wooden Goods: Local, Canadian, or Eastern European

* Food: Local mills, garden, area farms; preserve seasonal foods

* Health & Beauty: Canadian

* Safety Gear: Canadian, US

* Garden: German, Italian, US; seeds from open-source genetics

You still have to be intentional, since plenty of foreign stores have global supply chains like the US does, so just because you're bringing it from Canada doesn't mean it's Canadian-origin, etc.

Also note: I'm absolutely cherry-picking what I listed. I still buy plenty of arbitrary things from big-box stores. In general, the research LOE scales with how important the purchase is to me, and you really need the research to become something of a hobby since you'll be spending hours on it. :)

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#79

Post by markus_zhang »

Koshkin wrote: post #69
markus_zhang wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe holding some real hardware gives much joy? I'm thinking about maybe emulating it using a Pi and buy some peripherals such as external floppy. Not sure if it's doable though.

The real real hardware - sure, but emulated on a FPGA… not so much. But that’s just me. Emulation in software (and the virtual space in general), on the other hand, is close to perfect these days. In fact, material things get boring pretty fast (and tend to end up in the attic) whereas virtual reality (like games) remain a source of perpetual joy.

After some thoughts I believe I agree with you on both points.

A replicate but with new board and new chips for buyers to solder their own hardware would be really interesting and educational.

On the other side, I already have some retro hardware collecting dust so tonight I'm going to get one out to play CD music I just bought. Only vintage laptops have CD players installed.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#80

Post by thrtythreeforty »

bpye wrote: post #53
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.

Is a high performance HyperRAM controller really simpler than a normal DRAM controller? It's serial rather than parallel so you need higher frequency signals for the same bandwidth.

Yes, significantly so. However you saturate the bus with less effort (lower frequency, less wires), so perhaps the simplicity is due to a lower theoretical performance.
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