Commander X16

23 minutes ago, StephenHorn said:

In a strictly hypothetical sense, sure. The device has more than enough memory.



In a practical sense, there are significant challenges. The current emulator depends on SDL2, so you would need to first figure out how to build SDL2 for that device, or else to build or install Linux onto the device, and from there to build or install SDL2 and then compiler the emulator. Also, in any circumstance, it is highly unlikely that you would be able to run the emulator at full speed. An RPi4 can run the emulator at a little less than half speed, and this is a less powerful device.

25 minutes ago, StephenHorn said:

Well, you could always rewrite the emulator specifically for the DE10-Nano. That's the "strictly hypothetical" case, because that's more effort than most would consider practical, because of the audio and video output, and input and controller handling, which is currently provided by SDL2 in the emulator implementation. I mean, seriously, rewriting the whole X16 for one of these. It'd be a big project, and you're unlikely to get much help from too many folks, in particular because one of the rules on this forum is "no clones machines". (It's literally rule #5 at the top of the Forums page.)



The FPGA will probably buy you some substantial wins for the CPU, YM2151, and some other components. I'm less confident that it will solve the VERA, mostly because I don't know if that's enough PLEs (and I'm not familiar enough with FPGAs in general to know where that device stands in terms of PLEs). I don't remember what FPGA the VERA is being developed on to compare directly, either.



And of course, if the DE10-Nano has enough PLEs to encompass the entirety of the 65C02, YM2151, VERA, etc., then sure, you'll have an X16 running at whatever crazy clock speed the system can manage. But if you can't swing, say, the VERA (which is a beast unto itself), then you're going to slow down very substantially as you try to make up the difference in software emulation.



So yes, it's totally possible. It's just going to be a lot of effort because you won't strongly benefit from any of the emulator's existing source code, except as an implementation reference. Nor are you likely to receive much assistance from the X16 team, they're interested in, you know, building the X16.

7 minutes ago, CX16UserSteveC said:

I'm wondering if in hindsight it would have made more sense to develop the X16 on something like the DE10-Nano instead of developing a new hardware platform. I understand there was an initial resistance to using FPGAs in the Commander X16, but that resistance was eventually abandoned for the VERA. And there 's a Commodore 64 “hardware emulation core” that could have been used as a starting point.

5 minutes ago, Fnord42 said:

Plus, I want a real 65*02 CPU.

I know that's not really rational, but I also know that I'm not alone with this. ?

3 minutes ago, TomXP411 said:

precisely because you don't need to worry about things like "I wired the video connector backward, and now I have to wait 8 weeks for the PCB manufacturer to run off a new version. of the board."