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My Mega65 has arrived

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Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#81

Post by driverdan »

technofiend wrote: post #52
300bps wrote: post #4

I have quite a number of Commodore 64s lying around by virtue of developing a hobby of learning component level repair on them. I'm tempted to buy one of these Mega65s to play around with it but at $832.50 including shipping to the US, it's a bit much. The main reason I am interested in old computers is because I used those old computers back in the day! Really have to hand it to them on the engineering of it though…

Things I'm nostalgic for are slightly older like the VT100 and PDP 11 series. There was something just amazing about the soft blip when turning on the VT100, and something very powerful about clacking away on that keyboard, writing code to do whatever you could think of. But even if someone made a brand new VT 100 with a proper CRT and embedded a PDP 11 equivalent, would I pay $832.50 for it? Nah, probably not. Still…

I have my childhood VT180 sitting here in its original box, along with all the documentation and software. Unfortunately it's not currently working but one of these days I'll dig into it and figure out what's wrong.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#82

Post by justsomehnguy »

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.

> First-generation HYPERRAM™ devices supported up to 166 MHz DDR clock frequency whereas as second- generation devices that now support a clock frequency of 200 MHz have a peak data transfer rate of 0.4 GBps. [0]

400MB/s for 8MB chip? Sounds enough for me.

[0] https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-AN226576_Getting_Star...

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#83

Post by thrtythreeforty »

timbit42 wrote: post #20
DeathArrow wrote: post #7

Since the CPU is emulated by an FPGA, FDD is emulated, then why not save all the money and just use a software emulator?

FPGA is a simulation, not an emulation. Emulation does everything serially while simulation does everything in parallel, just like the real hardware. Also, software emulation on a non-real-time OS such as Windows, macOS or Linux can result in lag when the OS is busy with other things. You never get that on FPGA simulation.

I work in silicon development, and we call software models "simulation" and FPGA models "emulation."

Both terms are a little arbitrary, but logic on an FPGA is not a simulation, for most definitions of "simulation." Perhaps more accurate than either term is "implementation," since it is an honest-to-God implementation in a digital circuit of the logic.

Think of it this way: software tells a computer what to do, gateware tells an FPGA what to be.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#84

Post by whartung »

mindcrime wrote: post #3

The first question that comes to my mind is, "where did they get the floppy drives?" Surely the original manufacturer of those drives isn't still making them??? And having a batch manufactured as a one-off seems like it would be prohibitively expensive. So I'd be really curious to know how they managed that part of the whole thing. Anyway, looks like a great project. I wasn't a C64 fanboy as a kid or anything, but I'…

The other issue is that 3.5" floppy disks are no longer made, and finding reliable ones is apparently quite difficult. Even NOS floppies can be unreliable. Sony apparently was the last manufacturer of them, and they stopped back in 2011.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#85

Post by MegaDeKay »

mindcrime wrote: post #12
dfxm12 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'd be really curious to know how they managed that part of the whole thing. Searching the linked development blog yields this: https://c65gs.blogspot.com/2019/03/floppys-floppys-everywher... After some searching, we found what we were after: A local supplier here in Germany who has some quantity of different models, including a large number of ALPS 3.5" 1.44MB drives.

Wow, so it sounds like they actually had to go with used drives. I was thinking maybe they got lucky and found some unsold NOS ones in an old warehouse or something. No such luck. But at least they found something to let them move forward with the project. It does lead me to wonder though: How many floppy drives would one have to commit to ordering, and how much would it cost, to get a company to manufacture a run of…

The article actually states that the drives are not new.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#86

Post by charles_f »

The fact that it has a manual proves that it's poor UI. Also the setup for sd card is way too complex, and it does not support Bluetooth. I doubt it will have any success.

Note that they're building this in Germany, no way they'll manage to recover their cost of manufacturing.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#87

Post by [deleted] »

charles_f wrote: post #86

The fact that it has a manual proves that it's poor UI. Also the setup for sd card is way too complex, and it does not support Bluetooth. I doubt it will have any success. Note that they're building this in Germany, no way they'll manage to recover their cost of manufacturing.

[deleted]

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#88

Post by AYoung010 »

charles_f wrote: post #86

The fact that it has a manual proves that it's poor UI. Also the setup for sd card is way too complex, and it does not support Bluetooth. I doubt it will have any success. Note that they're building this in Germany, no way they'll manage to recover their cost of manufacturing.

I believe that the point of this project is not to have a simple UI, but an authentic one. UI in the 1980s was not known for being friction-free, so I would actually argue that its "poor" UI is a design success.

Although I understand that the SD card setup is complex, but I really think the target audience won't have too much trouble with it...this isn't intended to be a raspi competitor, after all...

Was this comment a joke that just flew completely over my head?

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#89

Post by com2kid »

imiric wrote: post #75
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…

> 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.

You'll get from China factories what you order, and then verify the quality of, from Chinese factories.

Same as US factories.

Apple products are made in China. Some of the finest engineered and assembled consumer electronics ever made.

Teslas are made in the US, panel gaps and all. Lots of Italian made sports cars have utter trash quality control.

> 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.

That was 30 years ago. NYC used to be a hot bed of cheap manufacturing as well, 100 years ago.

Things change.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#90

Post by hakfoo »

mlindner wrote: post #40
forinti wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I bought a real brand new floppy drive at a shop was in 2010 and they were really cheap (about US$5). They must have been trying to get rid of old inventory already.

There's numerous types of floppy drive and disks and the Commodore ones aren't compatible with modern drives or disks.

I thought it was less the drives and more the controller. You can image them with something like a Greaseweazle and a normal "PC" drive, so it's probably less that the drive is unusual and more the whole GCR versus MFM encoding and different track layout.
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