On 12/25/2021 at 11:23 PM, Ed Minchau said:
Look at it this way: in the 1980s, Commodore had their own chip fabrication plant. That's how they produced things like the VIC chip and VIA chips for audio and video for the VIC-20.
The VERA daughterboard is definitely something Commodore could have done in the 80s, though it would be a much bigger board. And of course we're already using 512kb RAM ICs, which for Commodore would have been an enormous PCB flooded with 2kb RAM chips. Point is, Commodore could have produced VERA, and all the rest of the Commander X16. Their only real obstacle would be the RAM, and SD storage was just a dream back then. An FPGA like VERA would have been a factory-programmed gate array rather than field programmable, or several such ICs.
The ATtiny used for Reset and power on wouldn't have been present on Commodores because of the external power box feeding a single voltage to the computer, but if they had needed something like that it would have probably been done with a special-purpose chip that they fabricated themselves as well. It isn't doing a whole bunch of 16 bit or higher math, and might have been implemented with a bunch of TTL logic gates instead. If they were putting 2Mb of banked RAM in a machine, the case would already be big and would contain lots of PCBs, so what's one more?
ok look, i can understand this, but for me the Vera Board is liek a "magic box" where things happen, and i cant really hack it, nor understand it as easely as the rest of the system. wich for me and my reason why i want to get the CX16, it is for me kinda upseting.
BUt i can understand your point, yet am trying to build a Graphics card myself.
also a thing is, the whole system is based of parts wich were avaiable in the 80s.
fpgas and AVRs werent.
i am trying to make a CPU driven GPU off a Motorola 68K. if it works it will have similar functions as the VERA board, but will be really easely hackable, and also debuggable.
will probably take up more space than the Vera board.
but i dont know if it ever gonna work, due to me not being a educated electronics engineer. im just a nerd doing dump shit, wich works some of the times...