[MalphasWats]

I feel like the CX16 lost its way about a week after the project started and it suddenly became an expensive FPGA-based blob. But at the same time, I'm not sure what other option there is for a project like that.

I always got the impression that David sort of got railroaded by the other members of the team that wanted to keep adding features and MOAR POWAH, and didn't have a huge amount of choice because those features quickly scoped out of his own areas of knowledge.

[MenhirMike]

I think so too - it must have been a great learning experience for him though, but for me, the idea of "The best C64-like computer that ever existed" died pretty quickly.

He also did run into a similar problem that I ran into when I tried something like that as well: Sound Chips. Building a system around a Yamaha FM Synthesizer is perfect, but I found as well that most of the chips out there are broken, fake, or both and that no one else makes them anymore. Which makes sense because if you want a sound chip in this day, you use an AC97 or HD Audio codec and call it a day, but that goes against that spirit.

I think that the spirit on hobby electronics is really found in FPGAs these days instead of rarer and rarer DIP parts. Which is a bit sad, but I guess that's just the passage of time. I wonder if that's how some people felt in the 70s when CPUs replaced many distinct layouts, or if they rejoiced and embraced it instead.

I've given up trying to build a system on a breadboard and think that MiSTer is the modern equivalent of that.

[dragontamer]

> I think that the spirit on hobby electronics is really found in FPGAs these days instead of rarer and rarer DIP parts. Which is a bit sad, but I guess that's just the passage of time. I wonder if that's how some people felt in the 70s when CPUs replaced many distinct layouts, or if they rejoiced and embraced it instead.

Microcontrollers have taken over. When 8kB SRAM and 20MHz microcontrollers exist below 50-cents and at miniscule 25mm^2 chip sizes drawing only 500uA of current... there's very little reason to use a collection of 30 chips to do equivalent functionality.

Except performance. If you need performance then bam, FPGA land comes in and Zynq just has too much performance at too low a cost (though not quite as low as the microcontroller gang).

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Hobby Electronics is great now. You have so many usable parts at very low costs. A lot of problems are "solved" yes, but that's a good thing. That means you can focus on solving your hobby problem rather than trying to invent a new display driver or something.

[rzzzt]

The first choice was the Gameduino, also an FPGA-based solution. I have misplaced my bookmark for the documentation covering the previous hardware revision, but current version 3X is MOAR POWAH just on its own, this seems to be a natural tendency: https://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino3/index.html#about-game...

Edit: found it! https://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/index.html

[erik]

Modern retro computer designs run into the problem of generating a video signal. Ideally you'd have a tile and sprite based rendering. And you'd like to support HDMI or at least VGA. But there are no modern parts that offer this and building the functionality out of discrete components is impractical and unwieldy.

A FPGA is really just the right tool for solving the video problem. Or some projects do it with a micro-controller. But it's sort of too bad as it kind of undercuts the spirit of the whole design. If you video processor is orders of magnitude more powerful than the rest of the computer, then one starts to ask why not just implement the entire computer inside the video processor?

[hakfoo]

You might find the Sentinel 65X interesting in that the guy behind it basically said "the X16 is big and clunky and expensive, let's cut out that stuff".

https://github.com/studio8502/Sentinel-65X

It's not yet a deliverable product but watching the developers work on it has been an entertaining part of my doomscrolling diet.