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Comment by retrocryptid | Hacker News Reader

This sorta reminds me... whenever I have a bit of free time and I'm tired of commenting on HN, I daydream about what the next generation of Atari or Commodore 8-bit machines would be like (not STs or Amigas, but something still mostly 8 bit.)

I was thinking you might get a windowing system where each window held a "Virtual 800XL" so you could run multiple apps simultaneously, and an OS that shared peripheral access to real devices. Definitely a faster SIO port. Maybe something like FujiNet to communicate between virtual XLs (and other, real XLs.) If I made such a beast today, it would definitely have a built-in SD Card reader. Maybe a built-in trac-ball and no mouse buttons since you could use the select and start buttons.

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I built this! It's amazing! It's a 16-core Z80 running at 140 MHz: http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-zedripper-part-1/

This is absolutely crazy! (And that's the best compliment I know.)

You could have spent your time studying for the CISSP exam, but instead you did something that made the world a more beautiful place.

That’s. Insane! I love it!

You might have wound up with something a lot like the Apple II GS.

(At least one Atari engineer I know worked on the IIGS. Personally I thought it was crazy to work on 16-bit machines when 32-bit architectures like the 68000 were just coming into the marketplace).

Yes and no. The 6502 die size was tiny compared to most 16 bit and all 32 bit cpus. It was ALWAYS going to be cheaper. For quite some time (maybe even still) WDC had a great business selling 6502 family cores matched with semi-custom IO on the same die as device controllers.

But the IIgs was a crazy machine. My mom brought one home for a couple months when the school district she worked at adopted them. It was surprisingly usable, though the screen resolution was a bit low.

Fun fact: The Macintosh II (68020) had two 6502 processors on its motherboard, somewhere in the I/O system. Originally intended to do some kind of I/O acceleration, they were never used by MacOS. I heard they just ran Mandlebrot-generation test code.

The IIfx, Quadra 900 & Quadra 950 each have two 6502 processors. They offload ADB processing (keyboard and mouse), the floppy disk and serial ports. MacOS uses all of them, NetBSD can use ADB offload.

Oh, cool! I thought that only A/UX had made use of them.

I dunno. The 6502 looks pretty large with this version.

https://monster6502.com/

I'm sure there's a die-shrink coming soon

Or one of the Foenix systems, like:

https://c256foenix.com/16bits-new-retro-computers/?v=7516fd4...

You mean like the super xe? https://forums.atariage.com/topic/287546-super-xe-game-machi... Scoped in 1988 with Ricoh.

Add a gui and you have an interesting machine https://youtu.be/T14dL9MeMHE

However, in the light of the 16bit ascendence I can see why this was canned.

Very cool!

The Commander X16 [1]?

[1]: https://www.commanderx16.com/

Or Mega65 which is already out (and great) https://mega65.org/

Yeah, haven't seen much about it but it looks and seems really cool! Buy why oh WHY doesn't the fscking landing page have the tech specs? I spent way too long trying to navigate their maze of documentation without finding a basic listing of the raw specs (and whether or not it's FPGA based, since that sometimes matters for retro computing). No dice.

Checked for a Wikipedia entry, but found only the "real" Commodore 65 that the Mega65 is based on, and it does not seem to have been 40X faster than a C64.

Finally found a German retailer's page, with some actual specs, yay [1]! So it is FPGA-based, in fact there's three of them if I understand correctly. Cool.

[1]: https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TE0765-03-S001-MEGA65-hi...

Yeah. That's pretty cool. I lived in Dallas for half my life and am surprised I never ran into the 8-bit guy at 1st Saturday or various users group meetings. I think we're about the same age. Love his channel, didn't know he was doing this. Thx for the pointer.

from 2018 - Atari 8-bit emulator app, Xformer 10, has tiled mode (not sure about the hardware/inter-XL communication)

The text mentions running hundreds of Atari 8-bit apps simultaneously.

see http://www.emulators.com/xformer.htm#XFORMER10

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