Commander X16

Hey, guys. A thing happened yesterday. 

Frank van den Hoef, the maker of VERA, has opened the VERA Github archive to the public at https://github.com/fvdhoef/vera-module.

However, Frank has not yet placed an open source license on it, this means we can use the source code and designs for our own personal use, but we cannot sell or otherwise distribute products made using Frank's design files or source code. Feel free to discuss the design of VERA here on the forums, but there are some things that we still can't do (unless Frank posts a license):

1. 
   You can legally use VERA in your personal project. Are you making a homebrew computer or a Commodore 64 cartridge? You can legally use his designs and FPGA code to build such a unit. 
   


2. 
   You cannot can make VERA modules to sell or give away. (Including "group buys".) This includes manufacturing the physical board or programming FPGA chips. 
   


3. 
   You can discuss VERA's design here, both the FPGA and the circuit board.
   

We encourage people to talk about their homebrew computers, and feel free to talk about your homebrew computer designs in the Maker forum. However, we still ask that you respect the "no clones" rule and not build a VERA or CX16 clone for sale or distribution. 

UPDATE: VERA is now MIT. You can now distribute and/or modify Frank's designs for your own use. 

On 3/12/2022 at 5:38 PM, TomXP411 said:

A thing happened yesterday

Hopefully more things happen soon ?

Thanks for the update - I'm sure some will be looking at code quite soon.

Update: 



Frank has added an MIT license to VERA. So this changes the situation significantly. With a proper license, you can now legally make and distribute VERA modules, both Frank's design and your own derivatives. 

As such, we will be relaxing the "no clones" rule with regards to VERA. You can discuss your own VERA modules for both homebrew and existing retrocomputing systems. 

Some examples that have been discussed here and on the Discord community:

• 
  Commodore 64/128 VERA cartridge. (The original prototype was meant to be tested on a C64 cartridge board.)
  


• 
  VERA expansion card for RC2014 
  


• 
  Your own homebrew computer with a VERA display.
  

Feel free to discuss your VERA designs in the "Maker Projects" forum.

 

 

So ..... why ?

On 3/14/2022 at 1:17 PM, paulscottrobson said:

So ..... why ?

Why did Frank open it? Only he can answer that.

On 3/14/2022 at 12:17 PM, paulscottrobson said:

So ..... why ?

We haven't had a chance to talk with Frank about it, and anything we can suggest would be speculation. Rather than look a gift horse in the mouth, I'm going to just say "Thank you," to Frank for his gift to the community, and see what we can do with it. 

 

I couldn’t help noticing Frank’s “ice-dip” repository.  Is this leading to the possibility of a nice DIP40 packaged VERA “chip” for all of our retro projects (and for breadboard experimenters)?

This really would be an exciting development for all 8-bit microprocessor enthusiasts and makers, everywhere!

Apologies if this is already a “thing”, but I am a bit out of touch on VERA progress. I was just pulled back in by the exciting “VERA design made public news” 

Frank van den Hoef

I have not gone missing. I am still here.

As the people on the X16 team know I just don’t have much time at the moment since I am renovating my new house. I can only spent my time once. Also there are some serious communication issues within the team. If people don’t respond to my questions or only respond in a way like ‘do whatever you think is best’ then I can’t really find much motivation to move forward. Also we never had group meetings within the team to decide on features and stop feature creep from happening.

I won’t have time to work on the project at least until summer. Also since many people have requested access to the VERA design I recently made that publicly available. It would be a shame if all those hours and money I put in the design would go to waste. So hopefully someone will find it useful.

Via Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommanderX16/posts/1128759767875116?comment_id=1128823364535423

And @Michael Steil also left a sizeable update today on FB:



---

I have not gone missing. I am still here.

Also, for the record, I can't see how I would be responsible of any feature creep.

About PS/2: I originally thought we could make PS/2 keyboards (and mice) work by just bit-banging it from a 6502. I was wrong; some keyboard are too quirky, so even the second attempt of hooking them up to NMI wasn't successful. The next idea was to use a microcontroller to speak the low-level protocol, but given that Christian left the project and there was very little progress overall, I didn't exactly jump at this next work item.

About FAT32 and the SD card: First, this is a very complex yet mature piece of the software stack. And it is way better than an external sd2iec, e.g. it's 50x faster, but also way less limited, more generic, and still very much in the style of Commodore hardware (no D64 images, but direct access to up to 2 TB of storage, with subdirs etc). Sure there are bugs, as in any software. I could dedicate some time to fix them, but again, with the project overall making little progress, I'd rather dedicate it once I know there will actually be a project at the end.

All in all, I built a hugely improved version of the Commodore KERNAL, with lots of additional functionality (optional ISO/ASCII encoding, different screen modes, F-keys, mouse driver, compression API, graphics drawing API, floating point API, ...) and a very Commodore-like FAT32 SD solution (based on Frank's FAT32 code), which is in a very good state. It's open source and very well documented and commented. It runs in my emulator, which has lots of great debugging features.

So even though I am not working on the KERNAL at this moment, there is nothing that prevents someone else from working on it, fixing the SD card bugs or adding a new PS/2 driver infrastructure. It's just code, and I specifically designed it so that others can contribute or take over.

As for the PS/2 driver in particular, yes, this is a hardware feature that is trickier to develop than a software-only feature, but it's possible, and I've done it before, with the original bringup, the SD card, and the two previous PS/2 solutions: They were brought up by adding the feature to the emulator, then writing the 6502 code to interface with it, then trying it out on real hardware. This can be done here as well. It's just work. I can do it, but the project is not blocked on me.

That said, if I have the impression that the project is on track again, I may be able to dedicate some time to it.

P.S.: I find the idea of tossing all of SD/FAT32 out because nobody wants to fix a few remaining bugs in open source code a bit insulting, to be honest.

---

 

@Frank van den Hoef, I want to sincerely thank you for opening up the Vera code. 

I am building my own X16 compatible machine, but took a few other different design choices for myself. In my free time over the past few months I have been working on my own 'Vera' and only got as far as a scrolling text console with Bitmap layer under. It's a lot of work and still not totally satisfied with my results. I am currently taking the liberty of porting your work over to an Artix 7 that is currently driving my HDMI directly. Once I have the video working I'll likely move on tto some of your other features. 

I hope others make use of your work, but just know I will be and have my own fully functional machine.