On 10/14/2021 at 10:45 AM, EMwhite said:
I hear (have 'seen' vs. read and understood) so much about VERA and about what it is or isn't.
My fundamental question is... "is it?" In other words, does it exist in finished form and can it be acquired for use in other projects or was it in the midst of being developed, somehow forked to support this project and was then stricken by malaise, scarcity of supply, or some other problems? I think I remember reading that somebody thought putting it into a cartridge for a C64 was attractive but also that moving data to/from it over a SCI interface was a nonstarter (too slow).
It was a project idea, with a prototype offered when David put out the call for something that fit the desires of the project better than the FPGA based Gameduino, then developed as part of the project, it went through a couple of changes in feature set, including a UART backed by an input FIFO buffer being added and then stripped out again so the register address space could be expanded from eight to thirty two bytes ... and then the word was passed through from the team that the features were considered locked down, so people could stop posting "how about adding this to Vera!" threads.
So the module that we can see plugged into the most recent prototype boards are, as far as we can tell from the outside without a definitive declaration, finished.
The original Gameduino C64 card used for early prototyping several years ago now was bit banged SPI (not SCI), and, yes, that would be too slow.
If I was guessing, I would that Frank is going to let the Commander project be the initial release of Vera, and releases for other systems ... either the X16p subsystem, or system-specific designs (like my wish-list C64 cartridge with Vera and geoRAM compatible 512KB RAM memory expansion) ... will come after.