11 hours ago, Snickers11001001 said:
If that's the case, they should tweak the FAQ again. The language in the sound section (changed just this year when they settled on deleting the SA1099) has a decidedly less than "set in stone" tone, referring to the VERA and YM2151 and saying that "one or both" will remain. That, to me, ( especially as it was updated just last month) is what led to my speculation the YM2151 might be on the chopping block. Personally, having once had a Shinobi arcade machine in my living room (ah the days of being a bachelor) I'm personally fond of the sound from that chip so I'd be pleased if it stayed in the design.
Well, set in stone unless there is a show stopper problem. I would indeed expect a wave of FAQ updates after the Kernel gets updated to the "Rev kind of 3.0" board.
17 hours ago, Snickers11001001 said:
[1] I applaud you guys for debating/discussing this with restraint and trying to keep things cordial.
[2] From the cheap seats (which is to say, from the perspective only of someone who signed up to this forum because I followed the project with an interest in seeing about buying an X16 eventually) I tend to think the need for an FPGA for video was obvious, but the question of sticking sound in the VERA, and then mass storage, etc., begins to treat that FPGA subsystem as a sort of cargo cult for further feature wish fulfilment.
[1] You get to the point where it is "arguing over taste". And if my recollection is accurate about what was said by one or another team member in Facebook discussion, it's not really possible to fault anybody for not seeing it, since searching Facebook comments is pretty useless ... and Facebook likes it that way, they don't want to be an archive of old conversations, they want an endless supply of new chatter.
[2] For me, the start of the snowball rolling on sound was when they dropped the AY3's. AFAIU, the AY3's are not new-old stock or pulls, they are clones (used in dirt cheap toys, etc., because at a certain volume using an existing design is cheaper than redesign). If 98%-99% of the pulls test good and there is good experience with the pulls that test out, but that applies at random to both the YM2151 and the watchamacallit SAA1099's, then that's 96%-98% of pairs of chips that test good. I reckon a combination of an AY3' and a YM2151's would have had a better shot at withstanding the siren call of the video chip contributor who wants it to be (AFAIR hearing recounted) a video & audio chip.
For the SD card, If Commodore 8bit era system designers were in some weird time machine scenario targeting SD cards, I reckon they'd do the same thing ... make a dedicated SD mode 0 SPI circuit, and put it in the chip with the fastest internal clock, which would have been the dot clock in the video chip. Building the correct 8bit single shot serial shift register with overflow to support the exact mode of SPI you need is just easier than a general purpose SPI master, and working off the dot clock beats working off Phi2 with a stick. I therefore have about as much trouble getting upset about accessing the SD card with an SPI circuit on Vera as I do about using an ATtiny84 in the power regulation / NMI front panel switch selection circuit.