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My Mega65 has arrived

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Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#51

Post by the_af »

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 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.

Agreed the included Basic was horrible, but I also started my programming journey with it. One upside, unlike with current computers, is that the C64 had an "instant on" appliance feel to it -- you plugged it in, and it booted up almost instantly, greeting you with the READY prompt, ready to go at your command. Turning it off was likewise instant.

You could also write assembly with it.

The C64 had a vast library of games, many very good, and the SID music from those games was simply amazing. It still is. I still listen to C64 music from time to time, and I love it.

The demoscene around the C64 was amazing and -- get this -- it still exists!

Finally, though less importantly, the C64 was a massive success and sold lots of units, and helped kickstart an era in computing, so it has great historical importance.

Hopefully this helped you understand the widespread love for the C64.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#52

Post by technofiend »

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, kudos to the team for successfully recreating the C64 in FGPA. Preserving digital heritage is important even if it's time consuming and expensive.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#53

Post by bpye »

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.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#54

Post by glonq »

the_af wrote: post #50
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.

By stumbling I mean 'founders and influencers abandoning the project'.

Well hopefully by scaling back ambitions they'll be able to get something out.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#55

Post by layer8 »

kloch wrote: post #2

I love that the box and form factor are retro 80's but the keyboard is fully modern. Very good design decisions.

It’s based on the C65 prototypes (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_65) from 1990/1991. Not sure about “modern”, the modern keyboard layout was arguably established by the IBM Enhanced Keyboard (https://deskthority.net/wiki/IBM_Enhanced_Keyboard) introduced in 1985/1986, so roughly at the same time the now-retro C128 and the Amiga were introduced (who had vaguely similar keyboards).

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#56

Post by dansanderson »

the_af wrote: post #51
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 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…

I would add that the popularity of the original machine and the vast library of games built off of each other, and the result is a large community with love and nostalgia for the C64. That in turn perpetuates modern projects, newcomers to the scene, and new generations of community here for their own reasons.

"Retro" exists independently of "nostalgia:" it's a broad cultural category that encompasses fashion, technology, and new reasons to appreciate old things. I would recommend Commodore-adjacent stuff—VICE, TheC64, Ultimate 64 in a new case, MEGA65, refurbished machines with new accessories and adapters—to people with a variety of interests that have never seen an original Commodore.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#57

Post by klodolph »

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…

It used to take a beefy system to emulate the SNES at full speed. Emulator performance has improved, CPU performance has improved, and nowadays, an outdated and low-spec x86 laptop will run BSNES.

You will have problems running BSNES on a Raspberry Pi, though, although I've heard the RPi 4 can do it.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#58

Post by bluescrn »

glonq wrote: post #27
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…

If they had a no-floppy option and an assemble-it-yourself option, I wonder how much the cost might come down? Heck, some people might even want to DIY the case and keyboard.

Most of the cost seems likely to come from the costs of producing a very small run of a large presumably-injection-molded case and a custom keyboard.

Can't imagine the machine will ever have much of a community with its combination of high price, relatively low nostalgia, and a bulky/unsexy design, but it's cool that they actually managed to finish and ship the product.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#59

Post by everslick »

hedora wrote: post #45
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 / e…

It's on GitHub.

Re: My Mega65 has arrived

#60

Post by com2kid »

> 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 production line for a year, they are in a good bargaining position to up their pay for the next year[1], sometime I got to witness as my team had to basically pay a bonus to get people to come back to work after the spring festival.

Do some employers suck? Of course[2]. It is important for the companies placing these orders to ensure workers are treated well, I know when I was at MSFT we had guidelines in place for worker treatment, including an increase minimum age for workers vs what the local law allowed.

I also don't think a lot of people realize that for any production line in China making complicated American designed electronics, that there are likely Americans also on the factory floor helping things out! Especially at the beginning of the production run. None of the people I know who were on the factory floor would have been silent if they had seen abuses, abuses of the people they worked day in and day out with for weeks and sometimes months.

I'm not saying horrible abuses don't happen, but I am saying that it is possible, and not some insanely difficult task, to responsibly manufacture goods in China, or any other country for that matter.

BTW, everything is made in China because China has a ton of local expertise, engineering talent, and ease of sourcing parts. For complicated to make products, the labor savings really isn't the big driver.

[1] Yield rates go up significantly with experienced employees. [2] There is a lot of pressure to make release dates for consumer electronics, missing certain holidays for release means an entire product may not sell enough units to be profitable anymore. Does this mean crap tons of stress for everyone involved? Unfortunately yes, if you work in higher end consumer electronics you will see people fall apart all around you, it is a very high stress environment. It sucks that the stress is also put on the lowest paid workers in the chain, and more needs to be done to stop that from happening.

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