 Notice. New forum software under development. It's going to miss a few functions and look a bit ugly for a while, but I'm working on it full time now as the old forum was too unstable. Couple days, all good. If you notice any issues, please contact me. |
Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Mega65 preorder went live yesterday...
Page 1 of 3   |
|||||
| Author | Message | ||||
epsilon Senior Member  Joined: 30/07/2020 Location: BelgiumPosts: 255 |
...at a whopping 793.33Euros. https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/Products/MEGA65/ Mega65 is a not-for-profit organization, everything is GPL. They're just trying to earn back what they have invested themselves. Tells you a bit about the scale needed to build a reasonably priced computer. It's a beautiful machine. I'm sure that the custom injection-moulded case alone contributed to a big chunk of the price. And then there's the mechanical keyboard... What I really like about it is that it's based on a Nexys A7 FPGA. It supports other cores besides the official Mega65 core. So you can go tinkering inside the Mega65 core, or bring up a completely new core, including homebrew. So in a way, it's like the Mister FPGA, with the form factor of an actual retro computer. As a Commodore fetishist, this machine has me drooling. Maybe there'll be a cost-reduced version someday. Epsilon CMM2 projects |
||||
Mixtel90 Guru  Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7937 |
Oh, just emulate it on a CMM2. Should be a doddle if it's running Commodore BASIC. ;) I hope it comes with a matching cassette recorder at that price... :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
||||
thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4311 |
I wonder what percentage of them will end up with middle aged men with more money than time (I suspect that is what has happened to most of the CMM2s) ? And what of the remainder will be bought by scalpers ? My BBC Master was the best thing of this ilk I ever bought. Whenever I'm tempted by anything similar I go downstairs, admire it, and try to remember when I last booted it up, occasionally I give its keyboard a tickle as they are prone to seizing up if unused. This almost always cures me of the desire to by another retro computer, only the still broken NC-100 got past its baleful eye. Best wishes, Tom MMBasic for Linux, Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
||||
CaptainBoing Guru Joined: 07/09/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2170 |
<rant> All this retro revival thing must be greybeards just trying to re-live their youth. Can't see many who weren't exposed to it first time round being wowed by it. I simply cannot see any other reason for wanting the slow architecture and awful environments. Take the commander X16 beloved of the 8 bit guy, a C64 reboot complete with it's horrible basic complete with cryptic PEEKs and POKEs just to change colours; dead in the water without the soppy, misty-eyed reminiscing of 40/50 somethings. Spend 20 mins on youtube and just look at the quality of the original stuff (which will be largely games) - truly horrible in retrospect. The reason it was OK then is that it was all we had, atch, the speccy was garbage even by the standards of 1982, it was just cheap so the kids (or more importantly mum & dad) could afford it. "Rebounds Law: Never return to a lit firework" </rant> |
||||
| thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4311 |
Sounds pretty accurate. I guess part of the appeal is that the architecture of the 8-bit systems is "easier" to understand even if they were "slow and awful" and that they were often documented in fairly accessible real books that weren't 100's of pages long. Also for those writing modern games on retro systems there is enjoyment and challenge in getting as much as possible out of so little, and also the fact that there is little difference between what a development "team" of one or two people can achieve in a couple of months on such a platform c.f. what a team of 100+ can achieve, which obviously isn't true of modern systems. YMMV. Best wishes, Tom MMBasic for Linux, Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
||||
| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7937 |
At least colour, graphics & sound were available from BASIC on the speccy without needing a list of obscure POKEs. I loved the string slicing commands on it too. They were a much more elegant solution than GW-BASIC had IMHO. I had a Commodore 64 for a while. It was the only home computer that I was actually glad to get rid of. I thought it was *horrible* to program in BASIC. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
||||
| CaptainBoing Guru Joined: 07/09/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2170 |
Are you talking about =A$(3 TO 7) etc? you know what? I agree with you. I remember when I discovered how to do it (ZX81, I came from a Triton before that and TinyBASIC) it was like discovering a great secret. It is arguably much more flexible than Left, Right & Mid but the battle is lost I think (atch you can do the same thing just with Mid$). I did a Space Invaders clone (well I was trying) where the invaders were stored as strings and the missiles changed a character in the string. The compare for all dead was simply IF A$=" " etc... Being able to manipulate the string with a single, universal, line of code and a variable "indexing" into the string was really sweet. Edited 2021-10-01 22:40 by CaptainBoing |
||||
| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7937 |
Yep, that's what I was on about. LH side operations like LET a$="ABC" LET b$(3 TO 5)=a$ worked too. Very nice. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
||||
| Volhout Guru Joined: 05/03/2018 Location: NetherlandsPosts: 5089 |
I knew it.... this is soo very much "C" language.... Edited 2021-10-01 22:48 by Volhout PicomiteVGA PETSCII ROBOTS |
||||
| matherp Guru Joined: 11/12/2012 Location: United KingdomPosts: 10310 |
 Also on the CMM2 and other of my ports |
||||
| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7937 |
https://worldofspectrum.org/ZXBasicManual/zxmanchap8.html for those who like this kind of stuff. :) Yep - I was extremely happy to see that, Peter. :) Edited 2021-10-01 23:20 by Mixtel90 Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
||||
| epsilon Senior Member Joined: 30/07/2020 Location: BelgiumPosts: 255 |
Well said. Platforms like the C=64 provide a level playing field, which is encouraging for hobbyists. Even today people are still finding ways to do new, impossible things, on those machines: https://youtu.be/zprSxCMlECA Also, the simplicity of these systems makes them very deterministic. You can sync your program loop to the screen refresh for instance, down to the last cycle. That makes 'racing the beam' techniques possible: the software loop keeps up with the raster beam and at critical points tweaks certain registers, which (again due to machine simplicity) take effect right away. That allows you to trick the graphics chip into doing things it wasn't meant to do, like squeeze higher color density out of it, or fast scrolling without copying etc. Being able to discover and take advantage of such things is great, great fun. Modern systems on the other hand have become so complex, you can't hold the whole system in your head anymore. I used to work for a big semiconductor company. Post 2010, system validation became a nightmare. There was just nobody left that could keep enough of the system in his head to come up with the critical use cases that needed validation. 'Oh, if we're in battery saving mode, and the USB is in device mode doing a transfer, and the H264 encode is active, due to the lower clock rate that part of the bus fabric becomes so saturated that if at that point the application processor issues a power-down request to the GPU to save more power, there's a 0.01% that the transaction doesn't complete due to a fifo overflow at the CDC crossing and the system locks up'. SoC development became shoot-from-the-hip system integration. 'Slap stuff together, we'll find out if/how it all works later'. That was a huge turn-off for me. Epsilon CMM2 projects |
||||
| CaptainBoing Guru Joined: 07/09/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2170 |
I did this for other flavours of 'mite missing MID$ as a statement http://www.fruitoftheshed.com/MMBasic.Midd-Function-to-replace-a-section-of-a-string-works-like-VB-statement-Mid.ashx |
||||
| thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4311 |
Very nice, I didn't know about MID$() as a command instead of a function. Added "pinching it" to the TODO list for MMB4L alpha 2, speaking of which Peter are you sure I can't add your (c) to the startup banner I feel really quite guilty given how much of your code is contained therein. Best wishes, Tom MMBasic for Linux, Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
||||
| mclout999 Guru Joined: 05/07/2020 Location: United StatesPosts: 490 |
I just went and got a Mister FPGA and if I get a whim to putz about in retro PC I can choose from a vast array of them. I like writing a little code in one and then try to port it to as many of the others that I can. There are some rather rare systems I can't even find documentation for. It cost a bit to get it fully loaded but now when something like the mega65 comes around you are likely to see a core for it as well (Very active development). There are discussions on the forum about a CommanderX16 and a Mega65 core. They already have a very compatible ZX Spectrum Next core. The retro gaming side of this is impressive as well. They are now working on a PS1 core that is showing a lot of promise and progress. I think the Mister FPGA is a considerable bang for your buck. |
||||
| epsilon Senior Member Joined: 30/07/2020 Location: BelgiumPosts: 255 |
Yup, I think that one's a winner for the more sensible retro computing/game enthusiast. Mister FPGA will probably have a Commander X16 up and running before any actual Commander X16 gets out the door :-) Epsilon CMM2 projects |
||||
Lodovik Regular Member  Joined: 17/05/2021 Location: CanadaPosts: 41 |
My first computer was a C64 and the Mega65 project interested me greatly. But at this price, there's no way I would ever think of buying one. There's also the fact that I bought a CMM2 and I currently enjoy greatly my return to BASIC programming on it. So much so that I'm no longer interested in the Mega65 or the Commander X16. The speed and convenience of the CMM2 made me a fan of this little machine. What is impressing me with the CMM2 is the hardware accelerated commands at my disposal. The blitter, in particular, is so useful for creating animations and polishing the interface of the programs without taking a hit on performance. How could I go back to a slower computer after that? Also the very well featured BASIC is easy and quite powerful. The speed of it is still surprising me, even after a couple of months of using it. The C64 was a great computer at the time but I don't want to relive its limitations and its very limited BASIC now that I've tasted the programming environment of the CMM2. |
||||
| toml_12953 Guru Joined: 13/02/2015 Location: United StatesPosts: 442 |
The ANSI and ISO committees agree with you - partially. Instead of the second parameter being the length of the substring, it's the number of the last character to be chosen. Example: 10 LET a$="123456" 20 LET a$(3:5)="aaa" 30 PRINT a$ 40 END In this case, you want to replace the 3rd through the 5th character of a$ |
||||
Poppy Guru Joined: 25/07/2019 Location: GermanyPosts: 486 |
Exactly!   Andre ... such a GURU? | ||||
| karjo238 Regular Member Joined: 12/10/2018 Location: New ZealandPosts: 60 |
I'm going to purchase one because 1) it can do all the emulation I've been wanting to do for years in a nice case with a fantastic keyboard, and 2) Given that it is a Commodore 65, with improved everything over the C64, I'm really excited to see what people will do with the extra capabilities. Is it worth NZ 1500 (approx)? If I took a deep breath - probably not, but I love the idea and potential of this thing, and that seals the deal for me. That's my 2 cents, anyway... |
||||
| Page 1 of 3 |
|||||
 Print this page |
 |
The Back Shed's forum code is written, and hosted, in Australia. | © JAQ Software 2025 |
