15 hours ago, BruceMcF said:
One thing about the CX16 project is what appears to be a real prospect of a healthy ecosystem of ongoing hobbyist development for the system.
A healthy ecosystem requires tools and libraries that allow you to easily create a healthy ecosystem. It requires a way in - a more modern BASIC fast enough to program (say) Pacman without 6502 assembler for those who are learners ; they can't start on the godawful MS Basic. There are things like PROG8 and CC65 that sort of work, but no-one has yet solved the basic problem that if you do 16 bit arithmetic on a 6502 it eats up memory and if you have a Sweet16 type design it eats up CPU time. I actually quite enjoy trying to fix it - my language (based on HPs RPL more than anything, though I didn't know this until afterwards) does fix a chunk of it but it's not very newbie friendly.
It has to be affordable, the big thing lost from the original design. David's $30 (?) price point was never going to happen but a $60 price point was doable (e.g. the ZX-Uno is about that). I'm not short of cash, but laying out £500 for a virtual machine is non trivial. (so, yes, I'd buy the FPGA version), especially when almost nobody is going to develop on one.
In answer to Stephen what I find frustrating is all this is doable and often present but in serious danger of being lost in absurd design decisions. No. 1 here is, as you might have guessed, the desire for authenticity when the majority of the stuff that designs system is already on the FPGA. You have an add on card for the C64 (which some may remember was the initial design)