On 8/27/2020 at 6:40 AM, martinot said:
You could make more use of the FPGA, and make the X16 cheaper by having less discrete components and move more logic to the FPGA (including the CPU).
Thing is, whether a kit is ever provided, the through hole kit buildable system is the system reference design.
Tinkering with and tweaking the hardware can easily become a slippery slope, which leaves people scattered all along the slope depending on where they personally dug in their heels, and no sustainable community developing for the platforms because every system is incompatible in some way with every other system.
The challenge of getting a board made of mostly ASIC through hole parts including a real 8bit microprocessor is what keeps the temptation to endless hardware tweaking in check. Now, that is "to the extent that that is practical", and with no suitable VGA tile/sprite chip, an FPGA equivalent had to be created. But "to the extent practical" still disciplines the system reference design, and then the system reference design gives the implementation target for the systems that rely on a larger FPGA or additional CPLD (as the case may be).
Then, hypothetically, people who huy a Vera and are able to organize a clean room ROM alike that doesn't use CX16 originated or licensed code might be ready to go ... except good luck finding enthusiastic 65C02 programmers who haven't had a look at either C64 ROMs or the CX16 code, and without those enthusiastic but provably "never seen that code" set of people, you don't have a clean room and really should be working on something else. Of course, the way the original PC BIOS clone clean rooms were populated was by finding competent minicomputer programmers who had never worked on x86 chips before and PAYING THEM to learn how to program 8086s and then write the clean room code. So unless some nostalgic high tech millionaire wanted to fund the whole thing, that specific strategy is not available.