CommanderX16 and "What is my dream computer?"

[paulscottrobson]

14 hours ago, rje said:

A scorecard.

The CPU at 65C02 @ 8Mhz doesn't tick any of the boxes other than "6502 compatibility" I suppose. It's too old, too limited and too slow. You can solve the problems either by having a wide address space or speeding it up, but at the moment, it falls between two stools. I'd give it 4/10

The RAM may be there numerically but that's about it, at best you are squeezing a quart into a pint pot with expensive and messy bank switching. I'd give it 5/10

VERA is very good at some things and terrible at others, mostly because of the pipe access to the internal RAM. If it was on the bus directly addressable, it would be a 9 or 10, There's no point in putting a Model T engine in a Ferrari chassis.  Its a 5/10

The operating system is the same as the C64 effectively, the same as the PET, because Tramiel always wanted to spend as little as possible. It's not too bad, but loses all its points because it's still Microsoft BASIC with GOTO GOSUB 2 letter variables etc. in something which is supposed to encourage programming. Precompilers lose the immediacy. 0/10.

You've missed the one very important thing. Affordability. The original plan was to produce something for £30 ish. This is probably optimistic - it would be just about doable on a cheap mass produced Chinese FPGA board, but probably £50 would be a minimum. This is going to be nowhere near that.

[BruceMcF]

On 1/22/2021 at 6:46 PM, paulscottrobson said:

The CPU at 65C02 @ 8Mhz doesn't tick any of the boxes other than "6502 compatibility" I suppose. It's too old, too limited and too slow. You can solve the problems either by having a wide address space or speeding it up, but at the moment, it falls between two stools. I'd give it 4/10

On the question of whether it falls in line with:

QUOTE: I would want the CPU to be 6502 or compatible, such as 65816.  However, I’d be fine with the traditional 6502.  I would prefer a faster clock speed, such as 8 Mhz or better.  That way people could write code in BASIC and it would actually run fast enough to be useful.  As long as we aren’t stuck using something like Commodore’s VIC or VIC-2 chips, then this shouldn’t be a problem. UNQUOTE

... I don't see how it can be scored as less than "complies perfectly" unless they fail to get it running at 8.33MHz and have to settle for 6.25MHz.

If you are simply saying your dream 8bit computer is a 16bit computer, well, no set of feasible design goals pleases everyone.

[kktos]

@paulscottrobsonA straight to the point analysis. And a pretty darn good.



My 2cents:

I'm seeing a lot of system nowadays using a serial intf and they're pretty efficient. Therefore, I'm not about this being a prob with VERA.... just a feeling here. I may be wrong.

Also, the point is to feed the beast with data and let it deal with it. So the more functions VERA has the better

Ah... the OS or what is called OS. more a BIOS than a real OS. It has always been the poor child in the C64 realm.

But...... we are here to change that ! ? As developers, we can do whatever we want. So, please, guys, let's do something about it ?

 

ps: about the BASIC, it's far from the best version..... but then again, this is software. It could be easily changed. Some work to do, yes.

For instance, what about the EhBasic. Same background, that is MS, but with some nice features. One being the easiness to extend.

[Michael Parson]

If you want more of an "OS", maybe porting Craig Bruce's ACE to the X-16 might be possible?

[kktos]

Oooh. Indeed. Someone was busy ?

Nice piece of software. A little challenging to port to x16.... but could be worth it.

[m00dawg]

I actually rather like there isn't much of an "OS" on the x16. I think it fits the heritage and goals of the machine nicely. But GEOS will be part of the kernel so that's a potential option there (though you currently need the GEOS disk images - and I haven't tried it yet).

[kktos]

7 minutes ago, m00dawg said:

I actually rather like there isn't much of an "OS" on the x16. I think it fits the heritage and goals of the machine nicely. But GEOS will be part of the kernel so that's a potential option there (though you currently need the GEOS disk images - and I haven't tried it yet).

Hum... ok, I got what your saying. And yes, I do agree.

I'm merely thinking about Disk Operating System rather that a complete OS.... I'm a apple // fan and as far as I can remember, I always used the computer with a dos. seems to be the minimum

GEOS, on the other hand, is a tad too much :):) That's the C64 trying to mimic the Mac with UI and more..... Wrong target.

[StephenHorn]

4 hours ago, BruceMcF said:

If you are simply saying your dream 8bit computer is a 16bit computer, well, no set of feasible design goals pleases everyone.

Pretty much this. But more generally, if folks want to dunk on the X16's design goals, at least be up front about that.

I think rje's scorecard is pretty reasonable. I would probably be a little harsher about "off the shelf components", in part because of the necessary FPGA daughterboard solution for the VERA, but also because I can at least agree that the YM2151 shouldn't get full credit, as it's no longer in production. If there'd been an in-production audio chip and the VERA had been limited to only video, then I would have agreed with 9/10.

[ellindsey]

I have to admit that the engineer in me is looking at the design so far and thinking that they should just throw everything possible into a FPGA. You can put a 6502 in a FPGA fairly easily, along with the RAM and much of the glue logic, and it would make redesigning the memory banking system easier. It might even be possible to implement a 65816 core which would give you a larger memory space and eliminate the need for banking, and allow for features like direct access to the VRAM through the memory bus.

Of course, that would get even further away from the actual original goals of the X16 project, and I can understand why they're not doing it. It is something that I might look into implementing myself as a side project at some point in the future.

[paulscottrobson]

5 hours ago, BruceMcF said:

On the question of whether it falls in line with:



QUOTE: I would want the CPU to be 6502 or compatible, such as 65816.  However, I’d be fine with the traditional 6502.  I would prefer a faster clock speed, such as 8 Mhz or better.  That way people could write code in BASIC and it would actually run fast enough to be useful.  As long as we aren’t stuck using something like Commodore’s VIC or VIC-2 chips, then this shouldn’t be a problem. UNQUOTE



... I don't see how it can be scored as "complies perfectly" unless they fail to get it running at 8.33MHz and have to settle for 6.25MHz.



If you are simply saying your dream 8bit computer is a 16bit computer, well, no set of feasible design goals pleases everyone.

I actually agree with this. "BASIC could run fast enough to be useful". This BASIC can't. For example, look at the well done BASIC Boulderdash. With a faster CPU you could actually do it without the limitations put on it to make it work fast enough. It doesn't have to be much faster, just maybe 3 or 4 times faster (or you could have a 65816 which would roughly double the speed).