The Chloe 280SE, a New Z80 Microcomputer
vintageisthenewold.com
vintageisthenewold.com
site link:
survey link:
The thing is, it's an at-least-partially closed design, the only way to get it to subscribe to the kickstarter, and it doesn't comply with the modern enhanced-Spectrum-graphics standard ULA Plus, because some of the team had an argument with some of the ULA Plus team.
The Chloe has been around for longer, it's 100% FOSS, and it runs on the €35 ZX UNO FPGA board.
They're both interesting but IMHO the Chloe is more interesting.
BTW, I have no connection with anyone involved in either bar talking to them on Twitter & FB. E&OE, as they say.
Still, this is good news. There are already enhanced games that use it, originally for emulators and later for machines upgraded with a physical ULA Plus chip...
https://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/details/slam-ula-plus-repl...
... and now you'll be able to play them on actual hardware.
Examples of such games and how they look: https://sites.google.com/site/ulaplus/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80
Here is the TLDR:
- 24 bit processor
- backward compatible with Z80
- resets into Z80 mode
- Z80 mode has 16 bit addresses and 8 bit registers that can be used as 16 bit pairs.
- ADL mode (address and data long mode) has 8 bit registers that can be used as 16 bit pairs or as 24 bit extended pairs.
- A 8 bit MBASE register controls which bank of address space is seen by Z80 mode.
- ADL mode has two banks of registers: main B, C, D, E, H, L and alternate B', C', D', E', H', L', with some support for fast switching between them.
I've done a handful of programming on my monochrome 84+ (kiddie scripts, really) ~~and the screen isn't very good for actual games. Blur is a big issue but it's just a symptom of the fact that the 84+ uses a black-and-white LCD. None of the later versions in the series (with their "hi-res" and color[1]) have that eZ80.~~ Yes they do! Thanks souprock. Guess this point is pretty moot. An 88-key keyboard is still much better than you can get on an 84 though, the 84 seems more like a handheld game console than a real computer when actually working with it.
The Chloe 280SE would be a very sexy option for a Z80 hacker with that VGA-out, provided it's at a reasonable cost.
[1] after working with an 84+ for a year or so in my spare time, it really did seem like the +C was high resolution. I don't have one myself but a friend does and it feels like the Rolls Royce of calculators... not much power compared to regular cars, but it sure looks nice.
There is a C compiler for it. You get sizeof(int)==3 and sizeof(void*)==3 with that compiler.
They are asking $200 for the commander x16 keyboard not to mention vaporware like the Mega65 that never might be released but seem to get lots of donations and endorsement from PC magazines (endorsements are free?)
I have seen broken VIC20s and ZX81s go for $300+ on eBay. Why?
I am not saying people should not buy this stuff and if they is what their hobby is...cool. My wife cannot understand why I buy the things I like. But those prices are only going to have the choir as the customers. They should be eating the cost of that keyboards and new gear to grow new customers.
Buy if you want one. Go for a hunt in thriftstores and fleamarkets, you might get lucky
The real problem is greed.
People find these computers in basements and barns and flea markets and think they've found a treasure. They put it on fleaBay and expect to get instantly rich. When they don't, they throw the machines in the trash.
I've seen computers worth about $80 listed online for $1,000 or more. I've seen people win auctions for computers at reasonable prices only to have the seller ask for more money, then cancel the auction when the winner won't pony up another $800.
Yes, and it's getting worse. Nowadays it's quite common to see a retro computer broken up into it's respective parts (keyboard, case, mobo, psu, etc) and sold off as individual auctions because the seller knows they'll get more money that way.
And don't get me started on the sellers who rip the SID and VIC chips off of perfectly working C64 motherboards to sell them separately at inflated prices! Grrrr.
If the price for a complete system goes higher or enough people sell parts from broken machines and parts prices go down, they'll stop doing it.
Rent is expensive so generally people don't want to hang on to stuff they don't need so the price will eventually come down if supply goes up.
How do you define worth? We are talking about goods that do not have any intrinsic value here, so their value is whatever people are willing to pay for them.
If only it had anything rational to say!
Some points:
- That keyboard is not intended to be the final keyboard. It's intended for people who like mechanical keyboards and are using the current emulator.
- $200 is pretty normal for mechanical keyboards. For people who use them, they're worth the money.
- All the reviews of that keyboard are overwhelmingly positive.
If someone makes a product and the people who buy it are happy, where's the problem?
The target market for all of these things is nostalgia. No amount of loss-leading is going to grow that market.
I saw a complete C64 1541 Monitor Datasette and 100 titles on sale at Amazon for $2000 before.
The VICE emulator can emulate any 8 bit Commodore computer as long as you got a copy of the ROMs on file. But most people want the original hardware which is why it sells for $300+ broken.
The Mini64 and The C64 outsold themselves and are modern versions of the C64. A friend of mine who works at Sam's Club said they only lasted one day on the floor and sold out like the Action Replay video game consoles did.
A common fantasy trope amongst grey beards is to speculate how Commodore/Tandy/Apple/Atari/X could have beaten the IBM PC and its clones.
IMO IBM & clones had 4 big advantages:
- the IBM name
- Lotus 1-2-3
- backwards compatibility
- open architecture, the clone army
Only the first couldn't be had by others, but they had a big offsetting advantage: a huge base of existing software. But they all threw it away when coming out with their 16 or 32 bit successors to their 8 bitters.
They didn't really have a choice, there weren't any CPU's they could use. The Z8000 wasn't backwards compatible and the 65c816 didn't come out until 1983.
But what if the 65c816 (or a similar chip) came out in 1979 or the z8000 was backwards compatible, and then the big 8 bit companies came out with backwards compatible architectures which were successfully cloned like the Laser 128?
Or to put it another way, what if a IIGS like machine was available for all the 8 bit architectures, and in 1980 or so rather than 1986 after IBM had already won?
I like your post... Just a thing: the PC architecture won, but IBM lost all control of it.
They tried to take over in 1987 with the PS/2 line and its MCA bus, but the clone army was strong enough to fight, and IBM progressively got out of the PC market... until the sales of their hardware divisions: printer division (Lexmark, 1991), desktop and laptop division (Lenovo, 2005). I don't remember for the PC-based servers, but certainly gone also.
But in the end the market and community won out and pushed back into something fairly close to the original CP/M ecosystem, and we got the world of clones.
The linked page answers that. It has a 14MHz Z80 and a separate 16b coprocessor that does as yet unspecified tasks.
I'm (a) surprised it is only 14 MHz seeing that it is running on an FPGA. Secondly, I'm surprised they didn't go with a Z800 or Z280, which run legacy Z80 code and have 16b extensions and an MMU for a larger memory space.
Need those 1970s FYI things. There is newbie. We are all newbie.
But the idea of openness is great. Just not sure this particular one. Still they have a lot like VM, various social channel.
Just no door in.
So I wasted some time last year futzing around on the C256 Phoenix project -- wrote an emulator for it (or some aspect of what it looked like on paper) since I didn't have a board yet, wrote some code for it, had a falling out with the creator, a bit of a saga. In any case, what I learned in this process is that I really don't like the '816. It was a hack bolted onto the side of the 6502. Bill Mensch couldn't or wouldn't add new addressing modes and register sets to the instruction set to allow 8-bit and 16-bit to co-exist, so there's a constant awkward mode switch back and forth in terms of how the registers are viewed. Even worse, it has a 24-bit address bus but no registers can deal with 24-bit pointer values, so a constant awkward play with using indirect addressing or using multiple instructions to modify addresses or switch pages and so on. And then on top of that the physical chip doesn't break out all 24 address lines, so interfacing the thing is a pain.
The 816 is still produced 35 years later, and available in PLCC and SMT form factors. But they've had this 35 years to make a version of the chip that breaks out all the address lines instead of multiplexing it, which would make sense with the higher pin count available in SMT. But they haven't done it. Why? They went through the effort of making a microcontroller version of it that actually does break out all 24 lines, which nobody really uses. But no MPU.
In the end the 816 was a bit of a hack done especially for Apple. I understand why Mensch did it, but they could have done better.
In contrast, the Z80 has continued to evolve. You can get a brand new eZ80 etc. with large address space and higher clock speeds and excellent cycle efficiency, etc. and not have to muck around with demultiplexing the address bus, etc.
So all said I now understand why engineers at Atari and Commodore and Apple said "f it" about the 6502 and switched to the 68000. The real tragedy of the late 80s/90s era was that Motorola pissed away the excellency of 680x0 by jumping first to the 88000 (failure) and then the PowerPC (less of a failure but not a success for Motorola). Meanwhile Intel kept backwards compatibility and squeezed every ounce it could out of the existing x86, and that's one reason they did better and Wintel maintained dominance.
But our opinion as engineers doesn't really matter much. x86 beat the 68K even though the 68K is a nice chip and the 8086 ... isn't.
In retrospect Motorola's 6809 (and then the 6309) probably did the best job of adding 16-bit (and even 32-bit) support to their register set. If they had taken it further and added a 24 or 32 bit address bus, that would have been nifty.
IMHO multiplexed address isn't a problem as it's simple logic to fix but having to keep track of 64K segments is more painful
https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/SuperCPU
I hear they run Geos great.
If you want a cleaner ROM and a better BASIC, there's the Acorn Communicator: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Communi...
Not a games machine, though.
- all PC clones used the (not otherwise impressive) FAT file system, there were only a handful (SD/DD, single, double side, all soft-sector'd and in the early eighties all 5.25") floppy disk formats, while in the CP/M world every vendor used its own from 8" to 3" (yes, 3, not 3.5"). So software could much more easily be, er, "shared".
All Commodore had to do to maintain the dominance would be respeccing 1985 release of Amiga 1000 to 65c816 and embedding hardware compatibility with C64 (vic/sid on a chip, let c64 programs run embedded in workbench window). Clock for clock 65c816 (8 bit databus!) is almost as fast as 68000(16 bit databus), not to mention stomps all over both 8088 and 8086. http://westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/AN-001_ Instruction_Level_Performance_Comparisons.cfm
Wouldnt be that hard considering Amiga architecture is a big graphics unit with slave CPU glued to its ass.
The planar graphics also would have been a PITA as the 816 has no bit manipulation instructions.
Floating point also an issue.
Amiga chipset on 816 with a C64 compatibility mode would have made a nice fast game and home machine but not a real competition for the PC in any kind of productivity aspect.
But I agree the Amiga should have had a C64 compatibility mode. They should at least have offered an expansion card with a C64 on it, like Apple did with the Apple II on a Macintosh. But at this time Tramiel had left Commodore along with Shiraz Shivji and other C64 engineers. So we had this weird situation where the Atari 16-bits looked more like a C64 than an Atari 8-bit and the Amiga looked more like an Atari 8-bit (same chipset designer) than a C64.
Lotus 123 was released in 1983 and was already dominating by the end of the year.
The C64 wasn't released until late 1982, a year after the IBM PC, and visicalc on a 64K machine can't compete with 123 on a 512K machine.
To "beat" the IBM PC, I'm talking about a high-mem PET-compatible computer in a Vic-20/C64 type time frame. Imagine a Commodore that has 3 models: a vic-20 comparable, a c64 comparable and a $3000 model that supports up to 1Meg of RAM. All 3 models backwards-compatible with the PET and each other. In the 1980-1982 time frame.
Commodore won the low end in the early 80's, but gave up the high end. And Moore's law ensured that the high end destroyed the low end over time.
Shiraz Shivji from both the C64 and the Commodore 900 team ended up leaving with Tramiel when he bought the corpse of Atari. He ended up being the architect of the Atari ST.
IBM clones transformed the market because the PC standard (with MS-DOS) became a commodity, which meant you could swap software and data between machines from different manufacturers and Compaq made sure could buy the hardware via a network of dealers, like a car - something Apple originally innovated, and the S100 scene experimented with, but never quite mastered.
The compatibility was a Really Big Deal at the time. It was far more important to users than the very obvious technical limitations of the hardware. Not only could you share data, but you could take your disks to a different office with different hardware from a different clone maker and still get work done.
Incidentally, Unix would never have happened in this market because the shell syntax (all of them...) is far too hostile for most users.
Well, I'd say more the middle road won here; the high end was not PCs, but (UNIX) workstations. IBM PC was after all contemporary to SGI IRIX, SUN-1 (and -2), and Apollo computers.
I "upgraded" from an Apple ][ to an IBM-PC in 1983. It was because of the IBM name but also the "build quality". A real "business" keyboard, and a better constructed case, monitor, etc.
I'd pay a fortune for living in such a parallel universe...
There's no good reason smartphones couldn't support booting generic OS images today, except that all of the manufacturers want to lock you into their platform. I feel like we're being robbed of the chance to have a "Linux for Smartphones" that just boots on everything and has drivers for all common hardware and none of the vendor added garbage. Stuff like LineageOS is kind of a start, but they're constantly fighting to get a toehold on each new smartphone generation.
That's because the SoC's themselves have almost zero standardization - and quite unlike the custom platforms of the 1980s and 1990s, they aren't even documented. They can barely run with their hacked-together 'board support packages (BSP's)' and factory-installed OS's. Cleaning up the hardware support for even a single one of these platforms so it passes the standards for mainline kernel inclusion and support is a huge amount of effort, and then only gives you long-term support for that one hardware revision. It's a lot worse of a mess than what we had in the 1990s.
Everyone that moved into laptops as their main computer are split between Windows/macOS laptops, with a negligible market size for anything else.
Timex had a factory in Portugal, so they were somehow cheaper to get hold of versus the common 48K.
Naturally most of the time the 48K compatibility cartridge was stucked in, however in 2068 standard mode the hardware already had a couple of features that only came later with the 128K models.
The same engineers who worked on the Atari 8-bit home computer architecture went on to create the Amiga, which is also visible in the design decisions (e.g. the 8-bit Atari already had a display-list co-processor similar to the Amiga's Copper).
AFAIK Atari also tried to buy the Amiga company, but Commodore beat them, so Atari had to find an alternative 16-bit design that could ideally be launched ahead of the Amiga. And ironically this 16-bit design (the Atari ST) was designed by (some of) the same people who worked previously on the C64.
As it was the ST beat the Amiga to market by almost a year, and had an initial sales lead until Commodore introduced the A500 and dropped the price a bunch. I know the A1000 wasn't even in the running for me when I bought my ST, it was ridiculously overpriced.
So in an alternate possible reality, Amiga could have been released as an Atari brand.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Amiga#Amiga_Cor...
Jack Tramiel, Commodore's ex-CEO, bought Atari. The Atari ST is very much what a Commodore still led by Tramiel would have introduced: The largest statistics for the lowest cost (ST advertisements really emphasized how little one paid for a 512KB or 1MB computer) and a rudimentary DOS. The Amiga very much reflects its Atari 8-bit heritage: Sophisticated coprocessors for everything, and emphasis on high quality components over low cost.