My Mega65 has arrived
epsilonsworld.com
epsilonsworld.com
The Mega65 in particular is not for me though: it's way too expensive and it's not an actual computer I owned as a kid, so the nostalgia factor is lower. It does look extremely nice, though.
8 bits is enough.
Does anyone know if the FPGA code that makes this thing work is open source? It might be a nice starting point for some other hobby project / processor architecture experiments / etc.
400MB/s for 8MB chip? Sounds enough for me.
[0] https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-AN226576_Getting_Star...
I'm tempted to buy one of these Mega65s to play around with it but at $832.50 including shipping to the US, it's a bit much. The main reason I am interested in old computers is because I used those old computers back in the day!
Really have to hand it to them on the engineering of it though - looks like an amazing machine.
https://accentual.com/vicii-kawari/
FPGA replacement for the VIC-II.
I’ve been following that project for some time but it seems to be On hold for months and counting due to chip shortage. Is it being resumed at some point soon?
The problem remains chip shortages. He had to rework the board a couple times because of lack of FPGA supply.
I've seen his latest boards and they are impressive.
Can't imagine the machine will ever have much of a community with its combination of high price, relatively low nostalgia, and a bulky/unsexy design, but it's cool that they actually managed to finish and ship the product.
I've got a bunch as well, some new in box, some completely ratty and worn out, most somewhere in between. Have you registered them with the C64 registry? (https://c64preservation.com/dp.php?pg=registry) What's your lowest serial number? I've got one with a pretty low serial, which I was lucky enough to find and purchase at the Dayton Hamvention back in the 1993 for $5.
> The main reason I am interested in old computers is because I used those old computers back in the day!
Right there with you!
Still, kudos to the team for successfully recreating the C64 in FGPA. Preserving digital heritage is important even if it's time consuming and expensive.
Are there any retro recreations of PDP machines? All I've ever been able to find are emulators.
The 8 and 11 have been made. There was a PiDP-10 in progress, but not sure what the status is on it currently.
Wonderful HN
Anyway, looks like a great project. I wasn't a C64 fanboy as a kid or anything, but I'm still tempted to look into getting one of these. OTOH, I still have an Atari 800 I bought last year that I haven't touched yet, a half-started Z80 retrocomputer project to finish, and a desire to get an Atari 1040 "one of these days". So maybe I don't need yet another retrocomputer "thing" to play with... :p
Searching the linked development blog yields this: https://c65gs.blogspot.com/2019/03/floppys-floppys-everywher...
After some searching, we found what we were after: A local supplier here in Germany who has some quantity of different models, including a large number of ALPS 3.5" 1.44MB drives.
It does lead me to wonder though: How many floppy drives would one have to commit to ordering, and how much would it cost, to get a company to manufacture a run of such devices?
[1] https://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/03/20/finding-a-db-19-ang...
Better[2] link:
[2] https://www.bigmessowires.com/2016/06/04/db-19-resurrecting-...
These are essentially hobbyist projects, I don't think there's any nails to be placed on any coffins. They get done when they get done, and are not expected to become huge commercial successes.
Well hopefully by scaling back ambitions they'll be able to get something out.
Indeed. Is there an online store that specializes in products not made in China? Or at least allows me to filter products by country of design and manufacture? I'd give anything to have that filter on Amazon. It would get rid of most of the scams and shoddy products that end up in landfills shortly after purchase.
I really don't mind paying a premium for products built elsewhere. I'd rather pay extra for quality than buy another cheap Chinese knockoff.
Also, this doesn't directly address your question, but the interim solution I've used is to build a research habit with each successive purchase for the home.
With time, it gets a lot easier and more intuitive to track down vendors. Vendors is actually a key word--typically you're looking for one of a small number of authorized importers for a given brand. Often they'll be B2B focused, e.g. buying EU power tools or USA-made N95s from industrial supply companies.
This strategy has netted out a (simplified) distribution like this in my home:
* Home Appliances: German, French
* Food Storage: French (lunchboxes even!) or vintage US
* Whet Stones: Japanese
* Wooden Goods: Local, Canadian, or Eastern European
* Food: Local mills, garden, area farms; preserve seasonal foods
* Health & Beauty: Canadian
* Safety Gear: Canadian, US
* Garden: German, Italian, US; seeds from open-source genetics
You still have to be intentional, since plenty of foreign stores have global supply chains like the US does, so just because you're bringing it from Canada doesn't mean it's Canadian-origin, etc.
Also note: I'm absolutely cherry-picking what I listed. I still buy plenty of arbitrary things from big-box stores. In general, the research LOE scales with how important the purchase is to me, and you really need the research to become something of a hobby since you'll be spending hours on it. :)
Exactly, that's my point. In most cases I do extensive research before purchasing by looking up online reviews, forum discussions, and even company/seller background.
My problem is that as a consumer I shouldn't have to do this. I should be able to trust retailers to do this quality and safety vetting for me, so that I don't purchase something harmful, that doesn't work or will break soon after purchase.
But, as you know, it's not in e.g Amazon's interest to give consumers this assurance. Their main clients, after all, are the same dodgy vendors that sell counterfeit garbage, buy fake reviews, and change their "company" name on a whim. Amazon has no incentive to protect the consumer.
I think that a consumer protection agency on behalf of the government should step in, and force retailers to do better.
The other problem is that most consumers don't see this as an issue. They'd rather buy the first cheapest thing they can find, and don't care how well made it is, as long as they can quickly buy it again if needed.
??? Pretty sure the 128 was an 8-bit computer.
Emulation in software (and the virtual space in general), on the other hand, is close to perfect these days. In fact, material things get boring pretty fast (and tend to end up in the attic) whereas virtual reality (like games) remain a source of perpetual joy.
A replicate but with new board and new chips for buyers to solder their own hardware would be really interesting and educational.
On the other side, I already have some retro hardware collecting dust so tonight I'm going to get one out to play CD music I just bought. Only vintage laptops have CD players installed.
Extending your thought, what if the journey of building/acquiring/configuring the meatspace thing was also emulated?
It’s not harder to do in software. It’s just hard to get the timing correct, regardless of whether you are using software or hardware. There are certain cases where it’s hard to get good performance out of a software emulator, that’s really the main difference.
You will have problems running BSNES on a Raspberry Pi, though, although I've heard the RPi 4 can do it.
I'd also like to think that it's more efficient, since at least in theory it could be (cutting down on all the extremely superfluous software overhead for the task), but sadly I don't actually know how common FPGAs really perform in that specific case against reasonably efficient modern CPUs.
But if you want actually correct timings in the real world, i.e. to wall clock, a modern software environment will make it harder for you in practice. If you don't have an OS with any real-time capabilities, that's your first problem: You have no (good) guarantee when and for how long your threads are scheduled, how long allocation and system calls will take and block you, and generally whether you can reliably meet any of your deadlines.
On Linux with VICE, I would not be shocked at all if I occasionally observed VICE stuttering for a millisecond.
With baremetal (or an OS with sufficient real-time capabilities), you can make your deadlines meet with some care. You will still have some (possibly negligible) amount of jitter: Superscalar CPUs and caches are just some of the culprits.
Does the jitter, or even the lack of deadline guarantees on plain Linux with VICE, matter in practice? Maybe not. With a fast enough machine you might not notice at all. Is it easier, and to some extent more efficient, to just sidestep those issue with an FPGA implementation that is guaranteed accurate to wall clock (not just emulated clock)? Probably. Comes at the cost of having FPGAs, though. On the other hand, a real NTSC/PAL output is going to be pretty real indeed!
As said, not that simple. How hardcore you are on your wall clock accuracy requirements probably depends on how much of a "preservationist" you are.
I am disagreeing with this.
I'm not trying to be clever here to win an argument, I really just think that good relative timing is implied by "accuracy", and good wall-clock timing is not--that's "performance". It makes sense to me that these terms are separate, so I can say something like "I have a cycle-accurate emulator that runs at 25x realtime".
For stuff like game systems, you generally don't need a ton of wall-clock accuracy anyway. You're going to be plugged into some kind of LCD panel, and you just need to make sure that it gets fed with the correct data every 16 ms or whatever the correct update rate is. The fact that your input controller isn't getting probed at the exact right time relative to the screen update is kind of a non-issue.
As for how much wall-clock accuracy you need... Eh, as said, it depends on how much of a preservationist you are. If you plan to actually generate an NTSC or PAL signal on a low level (including actually performing the quadrature amplitude modulation), it can well become relevant, and phase noise affects color.
Otherwise maybe not, though again I'm not surprised if some standard Linux on some RPi actually shows visible glitches from time to time. Irrelevant for most users, but then again most users may also just want to play the game on a rudimentary emulator, or even a more modern version of the game. This is all either for fun or for preservation, after all.
If you do need (video signal) or want (anal retentiveness) high wall-clock accuracy, an FPGA then also has the advantage that whatever ARM core or whatever you have next to it can implement UI and control in whatever is most convenient, on any non-RT run of the mill OS, without any risk to negatively affect the rock-solid, cycle-locked emulation in the FPGA. On an overall weaker overall SoC at lower frequency, even.
An FPGA does make things easier, is my point.
Also, software emulation on a non-real-time OS such as Windows, macOS or Linux can result in lag when the OS is busy with other things. You never get that on FPGA simulation.
It’s all emulation—either in hardware or software, in parallel or in series.
I used to work on simulation software professionally. The idea that simulation is parallel while emulation is serial is completely foreign to me, and I suspect foreign to others as well.
There's no formal distinction between the two, but conventionally emulation is more faithful whereas simulation is more high-level. Still, the two are used fairly interchangeably.
Both terms are a little arbitrary, but logic on an FPGA is not a simulation, for most definitions of "simulation." Perhaps more accurate than either term is "implementation," since it is an honest-to-God implementation in a digital circuit of the logic.
Think of it this way: software tells a computer what to do, gateware tells an FPGA what to be.
As someone who has worked in consumer electronics, and worked closely with the people who were on the factory line, employees on electronics manufacturing lines are not slave labor. They are often times well paid, with pay that would make for a good living in more rural parts of the US. After having worked on a production line for a year, they are in a good bargaining position to up their pay for the next year[1], sometime I got to witness as my team had to basically pay a bonus to get people to come back to work after the spring festival.
Do some employers suck? Of course[2]. It is important for the companies placing these orders to ensure workers are treated well, I know when I was at MSFT we had guidelines in place for worker treatment, including an increase minimum age for workers vs what the local law allowed.
I also don't think a lot of people realize that for any production line in China making complicated American designed electronics, that there are likely Americans also on the factory floor helping things out! Especially at the beginning of the production run. None of the people I know who were on the factory floor would have been silent if they had seen abuses, abuses of the people they worked day in and day out with for weeks and sometimes months.
I'm not saying horrible abuses don't happen, but I am saying that it is possible, and not some insanely difficult task, to responsibly manufacture goods in China, or any other country for that matter.
BTW, everything is made in China because China has a ton of local expertise, engineering talent, and ease of sourcing parts. For complicated to make products, the labor savings really isn't the big driver.
[1] Yield rates go up significantly with experienced employees. [2] There is a lot of pressure to make release dates for consumer electronics, missing certain holidays for release means an entire product may not sell enough units to be profitable anymore. Does this mean crap tons of stress for everyone involved? Unfortunately yes, if you work in higher end consumer electronics you will see people fall apart all around you, it is a very high stress environment. It sucks that the stress is also put on the lowest paid workers in the chain, and more needs to be done to stop that from happening.
That might be the case now, but manufacturing moved to China decades ago partly because of cheap labor and as a cost saving measure for companies building elsewhere.
> BTW, everything is made in China because China has a ton of local expertise, engineering talent, and ease of sourcing parts.
Everything is made in China because everything else is made in China. I.e. the momentum is already built for everything to be cheaply made there, so no external manufacturing can compete on prices or equipment.
The issue is that in the race to the bottom to build everything cheaply, quickly and in large quantities, is that you get a ton of low quality products that become junk soon after purchase. And given the total disregard for intellectual property, any company sharing any manufacturing details with Chinese manufacturers must either have strong on-site control and oversight of the process, or deal with the fact that the market will soon be flooded with counterfeit products of their design.
You'll get from China factories what you order, and then verify the quality of, from Chinese factories.
Same as US factories.
Apple products are made in China. Some of the finest engineered and assembled consumer electronics ever made.
Teslas are made in the US, panel gaps and all. Lots of Italian made sports cars have utter trash quality control.
> That might be the case now, but manufacturing moved to China decades ago partly because of cheap labor and as a cost saving measure for companies building elsewhere.
That was 30 years ago. NYC used to be a hot bed of cheap manufacturing as well, 100 years ago.
Things change.
Agreed. I mentioned that in my last point about IP, which you conveniently ignored.
Apple is an outlier. For every such company, there are thousands of others abroad and local to China that are making absolute trash that only serves to scam consumers and/or end up in landfills shortly after purchase.
I can't count how many Chinese-made things I've bought that ended up in the trash a few days/weeks/months after purchase. I also own a lot of poorly made Chinese electronics that have survived for years, so technically they pass QA, but are cheap feeling and annoying to use despite being expensive. Lenovo laptops come to mind.
Have you seen how rampant this is on Amazon, Wish.com, et al, let alone on Chinese owned retailers? There are entire product categories where you can't avoid buying a shoddy product simply because no alternative exists. I spend hours scouring Amazon to find brand names and sellers I can trust in an attempt to avoid this, dodging page after page of knockoff garbage. It's absolutely exhausting, and often impossible to avoid. A lot of people have given up entirely on purchasing from Amazon, but the convenience is a big factor for me.
So, yes, there are some products made in China with strict quality control that are worthwhile owning. But most are just quick waste making some shady CEOs rich. In either case, they'll most likely be copied and eventually made as cheaply as possible.[1][2]
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/tech/gear/article/3035376/chinese-facto...
[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-fake-chinese-apple-st...
Apologizes, you did indeed mention it, I was on mobile and skimmed past it.
> I can't count how many Chinese-made things I've bought that ended up in the trash a few days/weeks/months after purchase. I also own a lot of poorly made Chinese electronics that have survived for years, so technically they pass QA, but are cheap feeling and annoying to use despite being expensive. Lenovo laptops come to mind.
Having been to China multiple times, they have perfectly good electronics for sale domestically. Heck for some product categories, the electronics over there are better than what you can get in the United States.
> Have you seen how rampant this is on Amazon, Wish.com, et al, let alone on Chinese owned retailers?
Wish.com's entire business model is cheap crap. They are the online equivalent of a dollar store.
The problem on Amazon is real, although I sometimes encounter some really good Chinese made products, not electronic but I recently purchased a shoe rack from a Chinese retailer on Amazon and it is worlds better than any of the shoe racks American brands are selling.
I also remember a4tech back in the day, they had some absolutely amazing mice! I still miss my duel scroll wheel optical mouse, I loved that thing.
> It's absolutely exhausting, and often impossible to avoid. A lot of people have given up entirely on purchasing from Amazon, but the convenience is a big factor for me.
My issue is that American brands are also making crap products. You have companies like DJI making products so good that they put American competitors right out of business.
But you also have a strange lack of quality smart watches out of China, figure someone who cares would make a smartwatch with quality firmware. I am genuinely confused as to why this hasn't happened yet.
Note that they're building this in Germany, no way they'll manage to recover their cost of manufacturing.
Although I understand that the SD card setup is complex, but I really think the target audience won't have too much trouble with it...this isn't intended to be a raspi competitor, after all...
Was this comment a joke that just flew completely over my head?
Then you compare it to things like the Amiga which was incredibly advanced for it's time with amazing graphics and sound that even today are very playable modern-feeling experiences. For an example of what I'm talking about here's two clips (the whole video is good): https://youtu.be/kjapiUQOi2s?t=834 https://youtu.be/kjapiUQOi2s?t=1502
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
Comparing c64 to Amiga isn't fair, the Amiga was a generation later. What the c64 should be compared with is the Atari 8-bit systems (400, 800, 65XE, 130XE), Apple II, Colecovision.
Having the 64k RAM, plus sprites, plus a sound chip that implemented ADSR and different waveforms other than square did introduce a lot of possibilities and excitement in 1982 though, even if you tried your best to use them from the absolutely shitty BASIC and/or had to wait minutes for things to load from disk or cassette.
I would even say that the Amiga, at the time it shipped, was the single largest step-up in capabilities of any widely available computer that's ever occurred. Compared to all the other computers available to consumers at the time, the Amiga's graphics, sound, operating system and processing were best of breed. From today's perspective it's hard to appreciate just how stunning the Amiga was versus status quo. It literally drew crowds of people at local computer stores just to watch someone run through all the demos.
While today's PCs are many orders of magnitude more powerful and capable, I can't recall any single increment over the decades being nearly as significant across so many different dimensions (visuals, sound, speed, OS, UX, I/O, etc).
The Amiga 1000 was a decade ahead of it’s time, but Commodore sat on its ass for longer than that, with very little investment in upgrading the thing.
I say this as someone who went from a c64 in her teens to the Amiga in her twenties, and held on to the Amiga well past the time when it was obviously dead in terms of technological prowess and software availability.
The c64 was also a lot of people’s first taste of programming in a time when C compilers cost hundreds of dollars.
And if you don’t understand c64 nostalgia, I bet you must be even more befuddled by Spectrum nostalgia. Which was even cheaper and shittier than the c64, but completely ruled the UK for a while.
Happy to help you understand:
Like a lot of people, I owned a C64 and not an Amiga, which was very expensive and uncommon in my country.
Agreed the included Basic was horrible, but I also started my programming journey with it. One upside, unlike with current computers, is that the C64 had an "instant on" appliance feel to it -- you plugged it in, and it booted up almost instantly, greeting you with the READY prompt, ready to go at your command. Turning it off was likewise instant.
You could also write assembly with it.
The C64 had a vast library of games, many very good, and the SID music from those games was simply amazing. It still is. I still listen to C64 music from time to time, and I love it.
The demoscene around the C64 was amazing and -- get this -- it still exists!
Finally, though less importantly, the C64 was a massive success and sold lots of units, and helped kickstart an era in computing, so it has great historical importance.
Hopefully this helped you understand the widespread love for the C64.
"Retro" exists independently of "nostalgia:" it's a broad cultural category that encompasses fashion, technology, and new reasons to appreciate old things. I would recommend Commodore-adjacent stuff—VICE, TheC64, Ultimate 64 in a new case, MEGA65, refurbished machines with new accessories and adapters—to people with a variety of interests that have never seen an original Commodore.
That's true of all the 1980s 8-bit home computers. Oric-1, BBC Micro, Enterprise 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, whatever. Turn on; beep or click; ready to go.
But with an Oric or a Spectrum or a CPC or other cheap home micros, you could do sounds and graphics in BASIC. Not on a C64.
> You could also write assembly with it.
Also not really fair or accurate.
All mainstream computers can be programmed in assembly. The C64 did nothing to help. It didn't have a machine-code monitor (like the Sharp MZ-80K did, say). It didn't have inline assembly in the BASIC (like the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron did, say).
Now, we run npm and have barely any idea of how any of it works. That makes sense in a way, things get bigger and more complex. For me at least, it's not fun in the way coding on a 8 or 16 bit computer is.