Commander X16

Hola!

Bay Area native here (my grandmother was born and raised in SF) -- I work on embedded systems in my dayjob but I'm hoping to take a break from professional tech work soon to focus on my writing.

I've always admired retro computers and game consoles but what really energized my current passion was discovering the YouTube community in the early days of the pandemic, and acquiring my own Atari ST. The fact I was able to take it apart, upgrade the ROM, and put it back together with just a screwdriver and some patience felt AMAZING.

I've been following the Commander X16 project for a long time, but only on the edges. I've finally taken the plunge into learning all about the system and its internals, playing around with the emulator and actually interacting with what's out there. I've already put up a merge request or two in the various GitHub repos, heh.

So, yeah. Just wanted to say hi!

Greetings. We're glad you are here to join us, and we hope you have fun.

Be careful with that 8-bit hobby... you'll soon find your walls lined with shelves, holding Atari, Apple, Commodore, Altair, and all sorts of other vintage computers. =)

Ask lots of questions. If there's one thing I can say about this community, it's we all love to talk about our favorite hobbies.

That hobby can morph and send us in unexpected directions too. I never had a C64 or other Commodore System, Though at 1 time
I really, really, really wanted an Amiga. I got interested in this project just a few months ago. 1 computer has been enough for me
for years. But getting into the X16 gave me an interest in writing a certain piece of software to play an outdated
Animation format. --> Decided I needed to be able to produce samples of that format --> Found that most of the best software for
producing and manipulating that Format was MS-DOS.. --> I never planned on anything past plugging around in BASIC on the X16
but now I've got an Early 2000's P4 Sony Viao tower. Bought it with no HDD, Its going to be a FREE-DOS system

This has cascaded into a series of purchases I didn't even consider just 2 months ago. ( THIS IS BESIDES DEV0056 Which I am the proud owner of )

Sony Viao --- No Hard Drive ---> $100.00
A New "Old Stock" IDE 360gb drive $55.00 (Just paid $38.00 for a 1 tb SSD for my main system 2 mos ago !!!)
A USB floppy for my main system $22.00
A Box of 1.44 mb floppies 50 discs $42.00 !!!!!! (I choked a bit on this one)
A stack of 100 700kb CD-R's $40.00

This just to support a program I "Might Write" on the X16... Its really all good I'm having a blast with it...

On the bright side I got a couple of excellent monitor finds at the local salvation Army for the Commander X16 and the Sony Viao.

$35 for a 16" Toshiba LCD TV with tons of input formats. 1080p native resolution (X16 Monitor and Speakers)
$24 for DELL 18" LCD which I wouldn't be afraid to plug into my Main System if necessary (1600 x 1024) Native (for the Sony VIAO).

I've been looking at AMIGA's on Ebay too. But I'm not an electronics wizard. and I'm afraid of buying something DOA.

I hope you enjoy the 8-bit nostalgia here and Welcome.