Commander X16

In this little vid I reveal the X16's "official" manual artwork, check out the final case & PCB, and launch a contest where you can WIN an X16 & Case for yourself (https://bit.ly/winX16). I hope you enjoy it!

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzdTMNszlpA

Awesome cover reveal, glad to see the other case concepts too!

I hope a worthy manual of the "x16 poster" can come about. The spiral manual that TFW8b did for the miniPET was very excellent, if even just as a more hardware oriented manual. I've always wondered what software and shop they used for that (it would be a shop over in Europe).



In the "spirit of reveals", now that the system has been out for a while, here is another somewhat related reveal: The original source for the "x16 tribute" video (in the DEMOS folder of the SD-card) is available here (summary of 4 years of development of the X16)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58AFay4DowI

My biggest problem with the official case design that can be divorced from the motherboard layout itself is that there is no room for full height expansion cards and no true backplane for them either. It's like somehow stuffing an Apple IIe or BBC Master motherboard into the case of a Bandai RX-78-2 or a Tomy Tutor, or an Amiga 2000 motherboard in an Amiga 500 case.

To me the official case isn't attractive, the front face look like an unhappy robot. Overall feeling is also cheap plastic box which I can understand when combined with the existing keyboard, but then the price doesn't match. I also find it odd that the case uses a very different blue than the keyboard logo, creating a mismatch between the two. It is more like IBM Aptiva purple:

Late 90s IBM Aptiva tower case

aptiva1.jpg (142.36 KiB) Viewed 2939 times

But it is great that we of course do have the option to use anything else that we get our hands on!

Continuing in the topic of disagreeing I'm also not a fan of the X ending up into the name, and I guess I have some extra negative into that after what happened to Twitter. That of course happened after the name had been decided, but the X didn't feel great to me even before that.

As a random thought I wonder if we could call the 16-bit processor upgraded machines "Super Commander 16" since then the machine would be using Super Nintendo gamepads and processor

Regardless it has been a lot of hard work by a rather small team and it is great to see things working, growing, and being available. It is easy to disagree on what things look and feel like, and very hard to get that part right. To adjust things for myself I'm considering designing an alternate logo to use.

When I get all six numbers and the Power Ball, I plan to somehow bring the Nintendo SA-1 back into production. Yes, it's a surface mounted 100 pin package chip that will in no way fit the Commander X16 CPU DIP socket, and putting it on an expansion card means crowding out something else potentially necessary, and enduring the delays of hopping between the expansion bus, the main system, and VERA, but it features an extra 8-bit and 16 bit data busses each (and the latter is full duplex), two address busses, one 19 bit (512K addressable) and the other a full de-multipliplexed linear 24 bit, and both are hardware reroutable, meaning you could map the former directly to VERA and use the latter to directly snoop the banked ROM/mapped cartridge/expansion card memory, at least intermittently.

In addition, it features hardware multiply and divide, 2K of instruction cache, and all the 65c02 instructions that didn't make it into the original 65816 spec without breaking backward compatibility with the latter, or former for that matter. The only real issue is that microarchitectural improvements mean that 8-bit instructions execute in a single cycle even without using the two-stage pipeline, which may or may not throw off the system cycle timing.

I decided to just go with an Antec VSK2000-U3_U Micro ATX case. The left card slot isn't accessible but otherwise it is perfect in size and look for my use. I don't expect to be using cartridges with the X16 mostly just a networking type card when one becomes available.

I figure if one day I need to use that slot I can figure out if I want to cut the case or replace the card slot with one that matches the others.

Spotted on pre-1975 system, can you guess which one?

HINT: It's French!