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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

There’s now quite a few of these ‘new retro’ projects around, but right now you can’t actually buy any of them from stock (Foenix, Commander X16, Mega65, ZX Spectum Next)

These projects often seem to get bogged down in the costs and practicalities of creating the plastic parts rather than the electronics/software. Large injection-molded enclosures aren’t cheap (for lowing-volume products) and custom keyboards/key caps are even harder to do. (Still waiting on Amiga key caps from a Kickstarter about 4 years ago… apparently it’s still happening eventually…)

That can lead to long delays and high prices.

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I have pissed and moaned at length about the ZX Spectrum Next so I'm not about to recapitulate all of that here.

OTOH David Murray (The 8-bit Guy on YouTue), who is leading the Commander X16 project, does have a strong history of executing well and shipping.

I haven't been that interested in other "new retro" computers, apart from the ZX Spectrum Next (which at least retains 100% compatibility, and for which I have significant nostalgia), but I'm interested in the Commander X16 simply because I tend to enjoy David's work in general.

His previous work has been software games, which make up a fair share of his income along with YouTube ads. He quit his real job to be a YouTube personality and sell software on the side.

The design goal of the X16 was to try to make a 8bit computer out of modern stock for close to $100. The concept was to have an easily fixable computer with no bespoke parts.

That goal got blown out of the water due to the realities of custom system design. The costs shot up in order to fulfill other requirements like the graphics and sound. Originally, David didn't want any FPGAs at all, but had to do that to get a viable graphics port.

From what I remember others says, even the 2MB RAM might get knocked down to 1MB or less.

The entire project itself is the nostalgia of a 8bit home computer, but the need to have it connected to modern parts like mice, keyboard, and displays.

Sure, but it's not like it's trivial to build games of the quality he has: if you have any doubts about that just look at the quantity of really terrible games available for 8-bit platforms.

Nobody said that what he's trying to do with the X16 is easy: however, I do trust him to deliver.

(My own personal wishlist here would be something like an Amiga 1200 but with two Paulas, controllable panning, and two SID chips, along with sprite rotation and scaling hardware. Ain't gonna happen, of course.)

That's exactly why X16 uses PC parts for that. The case is a micro-ATX case, the keyboard is a PC keyboard.

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