3 hours ago, ellindsey said:
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.
I think the original goals I think are noteworthy and certainly, much like Ben Eater's 6502 work, it's nice to be able to see how some of this stuff interacts in a way that an FPGA would hide. We already have complicated computers sitting on our desks and floors (mine is all fancy and watercooled even awyiss!). Basically this starts down the path to the previous discussions about this which often ended up effectively defining a modern computer. David draw a nice line in the sand as it were when he based the design off the VIC-20 with as much as possible of it being on real chips. This is, in it of itself, a sort of "limitations breeds creativity" right from the start, even in the design of the computer.
Now that said, though lines can blur here, the C256 is a 65C816 baremetal hobby computer chock full of FPGAs. And it is a beautiful design it its own right for sure! It's very different from the X16 - sort of more Amiga-esque in a way. Could be worth a look though if you're really all in on the FPGAs.