Commander X16(cx16forum.com)
cx16forum.com
Commander X16
https://cx16forum.com/default.html
3 comments
The Commander X16 is The 8-Bit Guy’s dream computer, designed to evoke the same fondness and nostalgia many of us had for 8-Bit computers, while retaining closeness to the hardware from a programming perspective, unlike the Raspberry Pi and others.
I like it a lot but the kind of compromises that had to be made to make it feel a little tragic to me.
That is, people are complaining that it is as expensive as it is, but it really it can’t compete with a Raspberry api unless it is built in the same volume and to the same level of integration as the RPi.
The video controller is really tough, I saw an ad in Byte magazine circa 1979 for a video controller made of CMOS chips, it took up both sides of a moderate sized circuit board. All those machines like the TRS-80 Color Computer and Atari 800 and C64 had ASIC video controllers and they had to settle on an FPGA to make something practical.
I like the way the interface between the CPU and video memory works, it avoids the video system from stealing half the CPU cycles which slowed down those machines terribly.
I am not so sure about the memory banking scheme. It is really practical from the viewpoint of a mostly 8-bit machine but I do have some attraction to the idea of a 24-bit micro that is like the really old 360 mainframes, I think my favorite idea for a computer like this would be to use the eZ80 which has a real 24 bit mode but banking has its charms too. In the US we don’t think about Z80 machines having color graphics though that was a pretty common thing in the UK and Japan.
That is, people are complaining that it is as expensive as it is, but it really it can’t compete with a Raspberry api unless it is built in the same volume and to the same level of integration as the RPi.
The video controller is really tough, I saw an ad in Byte magazine circa 1979 for a video controller made of CMOS chips, it took up both sides of a moderate sized circuit board. All those machines like the TRS-80 Color Computer and Atari 800 and C64 had ASIC video controllers and they had to settle on an FPGA to make something practical.
I like the way the interface between the CPU and video memory works, it avoids the video system from stealing half the CPU cycles which slowed down those machines terribly.
I am not so sure about the memory banking scheme. It is really practical from the viewpoint of a mostly 8-bit machine but I do have some attraction to the idea of a 24-bit micro that is like the really old 360 mainframes, I think my favorite idea for a computer like this would be to use the eZ80 which has a real 24 bit mode but banking has its charms too. In the US we don’t think about Z80 machines having color graphics though that was a pretty common thing in the UK and Japan.
Agon Light shows what's possible at a low price. If you're going to spend a lot on a new retro machine, I'd get a Mega65.