Commander X16

On 6/27/2022 at 5:07 AM, Johan Kårlin said:

While years are passing and we all wait and hope to see a finished product to a reasonable cost, what if it would be possible to optimize the emulator

Based on the comments made by people familiar with the code, it's unlikely to work on a Pi at 8MHz. I have also compiled it on the Raspberry Pi, and it does run, but it gives me about 4MHz effective. This is consistent with the kind of performance we see on other emulators running on the Pi. VICE can handle about 400% speed, and in fact, even VICE can't run at 1MHz with the high accuracy emulator and high quality audio enabled.

 

On 6/27/2022 at 8:07 AM, Johan Kårlin said:

While years are passing and we all wait and hope to see a finished product to a reasonable cost, what if it would be possible to optimize the emulator and see if it could be included with RetroPie? Together with a Raspberry Pi case with some cool X16 stickers and the already finished official keyboard this would at least be a solitary product. ...

The "Pi version of the Commander X16" is an emulator combined with a Vera hat.

But of course, being able to bring a RPi Vera hat to market implies that the Vera FPGA is available, which implies that the big chip bottlenecks are at least eased, if not totally overcome. Indeed, the "Pi version of the Commander X16" becomes more interesting if there is an actual Commander X16 that it is emulating than if it is an emulator of a ghost system.

On 6/29/2022 at 1:38 AM, BruceMcF said:

Indeed, the "Pi version of the Commander X16" becomes more interesting if there is an actual Commander X16 that it is emulating than if it is an emulator of a ghost system.

Exactly. Add a fact that despite there are few physical X16 prototypes in the world, even emulating those is not a thing, because none of them is a finished product yet. Minor changes still could be made.

On 6/28/2022 at 3:38 PM, BruceMcF said:

The "Pi version of the Commander X16" is an emulator combined with a Vera hat.



But of course, being able to bring a RPi Vera hat to market implies that the Vera FPGA is available, which implies that the big chip bottlenecks are at least eased, if not totally overcome. Indeed, the "Pi version of the Commander X16" becomes more interesting if there is an actual Commander X16 that it is emulating than if it is an emulator of a ghost system.

I probably didn't communicate so well in my previous post. The stock emulator builds and runs on a Raspberry Pi as if it were a normal Linux desktop computer. It just runs as if it were a desktop computer with the horsepower of a Raspberry Pi. I took that running emulator code and added code to fork all VERA writes out to an I2C GPIO expander. This allowed me to see both the emulated VERA and the real VERA side by side.

On 6/29/2022 at 7:07 PM, Wavicle said:

I probably didn't communicate so well in my previous post. The stock emulator builds and runs on a Raspberry Pi as if it were a normal Linux desktop computer. It just runs as if it were a desktop computer with the horsepower of a Raspberry Pi. I took that running emulator code and added code to fork all VERA writes out to an I2C GPIO expander. This allowed me to see both the emulated VERA and the real VERA side by side.

Yes, I followed along, even if due to the press of 12 hour shifts, mostly Monday to Saturday, I haven't commented on it much.

Even if the finished version speed ended up being the Foenix256 Jr 6.29MHz (the ~25MHz Vera clock divided by 4), "just put a stock emulator on a Pi" isn't fast enough, even for a Pi4, while it would seem that with VGA output on a Vera Pi Hat, a modified emulator that uses the Vera Pi hat would run fine even on a lower end Pi. Plus it's merely an emulator, on a system with a sea of emulators to choose from: I reckon the option of using the Pi to actually run a piece of hardware is more worthy of notice in the Pi ecosystem.

So I am saying the product that would merit being a "Commander on a Pi" would be a Vera Pi hat, plus an emulator specifically built to work with the hat.