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Comment by tssva | Hacker News Reader

This project has turned into a boondoggle. Many of the original goals are not going to be met, it is looking like the sound system may need to be redesigned at the last minute because no one bothered to really verify availability of a no longer made chip (one of the original goals was all modern parts), and the cost is going to be 10x that mentioned in his original video as a target for his dream system.

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As someone with no interest in oldschool computers beyond curiosity, I think this project looks like a great opportunity to see a project collapse in real time due to feature creep and bad decisions.

Buying machinery and trying to assemble THD boards at his garage? I know assembling this board would've been expensive, but there is no way that the best decision is to try doing it at home with no skills.

Also, if the sound chip was so available when he first checked, why didn't he just bought it right then? Even one thousand of them would've been cheaper then trying to redesign now. And not only that, he is now thinking of using ANOTHER not currently in production chip BECAUSE HE THINKS IT HAS ENOUGH STOCK! facepalm, just incredible bad decision making.

> no one bothered to really verify availability of a no longer made chip

They verified availability of the chip. The explanation for why this wasn't effective is one of the interesting parts of this video.

Visiting a part supplier website and going by the listed inventory is not really verifying availability. It is a well-known problem that part site inventories are not accurate for out of production parts. Verification would have involved contacting the sites and having them actually check that the part was available in the quantity needed.

I'm just curious, is that really any better than using the website? I assume until money has changed hands and the shipment has been arranged, a person on the phone might provide an "optimistic" view of available inventory, in the same way their website does.

Are there any manufacturing professionals actually involved with the project? I was under the impression that this project was mostly enthusiasts with some of them having just enough engineering chops to get some components designed. I'm not following this closely so I could be wrong... But if I'm correct I wouldn't have high expectations.

Being successful in manufacturing is more than just doing some "book learning" about how others do it. Experience counts

It was always a boondoggle. An expression of ego more than building something generally interesting.

I'm surprised he didn't offer paperclips as a "stretch goal"

David is a joke among a lot of retro computing people, and utterly loathed by many others

Now I'm curious, where is this retro computing community that dislike him? I follow him on yt but don't participate in the community.

A lot of people (not me) hate him because he destroyed a prototype IBM a few years ago trying to repair it.

the main technical side is as he has exploded on youtube he has basically became the defacto keynote speaker at most of the retro computing events. now he is quite knowledgeable in the commodore/vic/pet programming scene however a lot of his other presentations/ videos are collections of community knowledge that he has gathered . that comes part of the issue in the community freely shares tons of info for it to be greatly profited by a few. there is also many cringe at some of his videos where he is given access to rather rare items and doesn't follow 'sane' practices before applying power going as far as saying in one video he is constrained on time to release the video so with a high probability blows up a prototype pc power supply basically for purpose of providing closure to a video.

Definitely on Mastodon, was on Twitter before that.

If it's not the questionable qualifications(although he is an enthusiast, he has a limited professional background in electronics repair and software development, two things that are constantly featured on his channel), it may be because of his gun-toting libertarian leanings - some years ago he accidentally posted a video where he was proudly open-carrying on a shopping trip. Of course some people voiced outrage.

I think the guy is good at making videos - but it's with an asterisk. He doesn't have a lot of expertise to share, but he wants to be seen in control. So the videos themselves are always really polished, but then the thing he does is something he should have asked for help with.

What's this about? I shared this video, and pretty much the only controversy I imagined might manifest was people getting weird about FPGAs, since FPGAs are something people get weird about.

His retrocomputing videos seem helpful enough in the common Youtubish way.

He used a paperclip to deliberately override a short in a vintage machine's power supply, with predictable (bad) consequences, as I understand it.

not really, he used it to connect two pins together which he thought acted as a switch, but ended up causing a short. People get way too upset about it, if you've never made a major mistake like that, you've never tried to attempt a repair at that complexity at all.

It seems like his unwillingness to put the whole computer in an FPGA has significantly harmed the project, given the cost, manufacturing, and chip availability problems he's now facing.

He may have to do the sound system that way, but in my opinion using an FPGA completely defeats the point. You might as well just do emulation (which already exists; there's a Commander X16 emulator for developers and the curious). The whole fun part of retrocomputing is that it is based on real chips, not emulators or FPGAs (which amount to the same thing).

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