Commander X16

It's been awhile since I've played with those 4-pin connectors on the CD-ROM. Were they left/right audio only, or was it actual signal commands also? Just left/right line level audio and two ground pins. The drives came supplied with a lead to connect this output to an analogue input on a sound car...

Wouldn't the internet be a more ideal software distribution medium? For neo-retros? You'd have to add network connectivity to each device (which is a good idea in itself), but you'd also have to create and maintain an online infrastructure for distribution. Modern flash storage is pretty stable; da...

As a software distribution medium, CDs (or DVDs) would be pretty much ideal. 650/700 Mb should be more than sufficient to hold software written for the X16, and I guess if you really wanted to incorporate advanced graphics or FMV you could use a DVD. Unlike SD cards, optical discs aren't tiny, come ...

Speaking of bells and whistles... nobody ever seemed to make use of the 6-bit DAC, which was quite sophisticated for the time, and was there from the start with the Coco 1. You only ever seemed to hear the 1-bit square wave tone generator from any of the in-house software. But there are a few demos...

Possible? - perhaps. Probable? that is the real question. Someone recently managed to boot Linux on an Intel 4004, so anything's possible. He did it by creating a MIPS emulator for the 4004, and then booted a Linux distribution with a MIPS kernel. The 65C02 in the X16 has a 16-bit address bus which...

TomXP411 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 27, 2024 11:53 pmSince the Z80 is no longer in production, the way to do so would be a Z80 based microcontroller, which runs Z80 instructions and provides multiple I/O interfaces and GPIO connections.

The Z80 is still being made. Only the 40-pin DIP version was discontinued.

I started to poke around the net and this seems to be a good starting point - http://www.cpm.z80.de As the URL indicates, CP/M was written for the Z80 (originally the 8080) CPU. It was since ported to the 8086, but as with other operating systems that can run under different CPU architectures (Linu...

At a certain point, though, the tail is wagging the dog. An MP3 player card would be several times more powerful than the X16 itself. That's basically how computers have been designed from at least the 16-bit era and up until today. The Amiga had custom chips that performed functions much faster th...

The VERA relies heavily on register multiplexing. If you thought ADDRSEL was odd, you'll have a field day with DCSEL.

The LSB of $9F25 selects an address register, not a data port. The VERA has two data ports, each associated with a 17 bit address register + increment/decrement bits. But as you can see from the documentation, while the VERA has dedicated memory-mapped registers for the data ports ($9F23 and $9F24 r...