Change of product direction, good and bad news!

[John Federico]

First off, thank you for the update.  My preference would be to make the priority to deliver the Phase 1 kit as soon as reasonably possible and finish the kernel.  Worry about the rest later.  -J

[Shauny]

It's a pity as there would have been a market for a computer like this but in kit form you are ruling out 4/5ths of the market. I don't see why you would be getting a computer like that assembled in China anyway, did you even look into the cost of getting it done closer to home like in Mexico. It may take you a day to assemble one computer yourself but in a factory it would cost less and be faster. I'd be surprised if you couldn't get a price of less than $50 per computer to have them assembled and tested.

To be honest the project looks like it's dead in the water now.  As a kit computer it would have very limited appeal, you'll probably sell enough to get rid of the keyboards but you'd be doing well to see over half the kits assembled. 

The 8bit fpga board seems like an Idea but in reality you are competing with the likes of the Raspberry pi400 at that stage, and that blows both X16 and X8 out of the water

 

[rje]

Ecosystem is in tension with hackability. 

• 
  Let's say Dave can move 1 kit a week and still have time to do everything he normally does. 
  


• 
  Say half are pre-assembled at a premium.
  


• 
  That's 50 kits a year.
  

 

Phase 2 and 3 are for filling out the rest of the ecosystem, whatever that is.

• 
  The whole point of Phase 2 appears (to me) to be the expansion slot.
  


• 
  Phase 3 is essentially no different than emulation.
  

 

 

[VincentF]

17 minutes ago, Shauny said:

in kit form you are ruling out 4/5ths of the market

To bounce off this idea, If there is an already assembled version I would go for that one. I'm terrible at soldering and would get my X16 in a pretty bad shape after a week of working on it (even if it works).

I won't refuse the challenge of assembling a kit, whatever time I may take to make it, but yeah honestly I'm more likely to buy a pre-assembled kit, even if I had to pay an extra 200$.

I assume that unlike me a majority (silent majority) will just avoid the kit version due to the fact that it's not assembled.

[x16tial]

Going to point out that, David and Kevin, you don't need to be the only ones assembling kits, if people don't want to/can't do it themselves.

What's wrong with the idea of someone buying kits from you (at a volume discount even?) and running a side business assembling and even casing the X16.  They would of course have to warranty their own work, but I see nothing wrong with this idea, you don't have to do it all.

Have a section on this website where people could advertise this service.

You're either gonna have to be all in on creating "Commander Inc." or you're going to have to open things as much as possible to the userbase to figure out and do.  I don't get the feeling that you want to be CEO of Commander Inc, so crowd sourcing is the play, I think.

 

[johalun]

I would really love an X16 phase 2 or 3 system in a Raspberry Pi 400 format. Personally I'd be happy with an X8 but I think it's best to focus on a single product line. I don't mind getting kb and mobo as parts and 3D print the (RPi400 format) case myself.

[Scott Robison]

Here is the problem with polls. Everyone has an opinion. One is of what they want personally. That one is authoritative, but still missing details and context. No one will buy any phase if it costs $1,000,000 (not that it ever would). Everyone would want one if it was $0.01. "No one" and "everyone" are used figuratively, not in absolute terms of course. Maybe some billionaire would buy one at $1M, and plenty wouldn't be interested at 1c, but you get my meaning.

Then everyone has an opinion on what will / won't help or hurt the ecosystem, if they even care about ecosystem and "mass" adoption.

Phase 1: Important to get people who are excited to have / use it and possibly write code for it.

Phase 2: Important to get people who don't care about the through hole style boards and all discrete components but still want to have some expandability (either for their own tinkering or to be able to buy third party hardware offerings).

Phase 3: Important to get people who don't care about the other two but still want a way into the environment so they can acquire and run software. We know there are plenty of people who are willing to buy "non-programmable" mini / retro machines based on Atari / Nintendo / etc mini releases. The fact is there are people who would buy phase 3 just to run software. The fact that they might eventually try writing software on it is just a bonus.

All three phases add to the population of X16 compatible hardware and support one another. To discount any one of them is a risk to viability of the platform over all. They attract different audiences, and none of those audiences is unimportant just because it doesn't include "you" (whoever you are).

Now, I haven't personally invested five or even four figures of my own cash in this, so I don't mean to suggest that any particular phase is sufficiently important that David should continue indefinitely to guarantee all phases come to fruition. That is a call only he can make. I could be overestimating the value of any particular level, too. I'm just a guy with an opinion and a microphone ... wait, I'm not on air. I'm just a guy with an opinion and a keyboard.

As for the whole X8 vs X16. It would be ideal if X8 had the same interface to VERA as X16 has, but I don't think that's a show stopper. I've not seen it, but 38 years of programming experience leads me to believe a couple kernal routines can paper over the difference between accessing the two interfaces, or a couple routines in the program if not available in the kernal, or even conditional compilation and assembly for maximum speed. It means either a little overhead (JSR to a routine that will LDA STA to VERA) or releasing two versions of a program (one for X8 and one for X16), but these machines are virtually identical. It is not like there is some massive porting effort to get a program that works on X8 to work on X16. The reverse is only problematic if one tries to use > 64K of VERA memory. It's not like a AAA title that has to be completely customized for XBox and Playstation and Switch and Steam and Windows and Linux and etc.

How many of us are "Patreons" of David already? Spoiler alert: I am not. I intend to rectify that today. Maybe I am alone and everyone else has been contributing, but I suspect that's not the case. If you are interested in seeing the X16 come to fruition in more than just a kit (which feels pretty much assured at this point given all the work that's already gone into it) and not supporting David financially, now seems like a good time for us to help out a little in defraying the expense he's already poured into it. Not everyone can, and I get that. Just an observation.

[Scott Robison]

1 hour ago, rje said:

• 
  Phase 3 is essentially no different than emulation.
  

In the case of the X8, the big difference is that "the hardware is the HDL". If there is a bug in the HDL so that it doesn't work the way originally intended, it is a "feature" (just like VIC-II tricks discovered over the years used in demos; they weren't intended features, they just fell out of the design). A software emulator is going to be constantly chasing 100% compatibility.

It is all but inevitable that someone is going to create a bare metal emulator at some point. The license of the emulator itself virtually guarantees it. ROMs are another story, though that doesn't keep emulation enthusiasts from ignoring copyright law. I'm not advocating this, just stating truths.

For a lot of people, emulation will be more than adequate for their wants. I live with my bare metal commodore emulators because I simply refuse to spend hundreds of dollars on 27+ year old hardware that may or may not work and certainly has no expectation of longevity at this point.

The one point having to do with emulation though, especially today, is that few have an emotional reason to emulate the X16. This is not the machine they remember from their childhood and there isn't a critical mass of software that only works on an X16 compatible platform. We live with the emulator today because we want to use something like this, but we're in the minority of the total population.

[Chris Grillo]

Is nobody talking abut pricing? Will the X16 price itself out of what is a hobby market with limited sales? 



1. Hold back the X8 (say $40)

2. Continue on the X16 (say $300)

3. Realize you just simply will not drop 300 bucks on the X16

4. Be left with nothing.

 

[Davish47]

May I suggest the name

"LIEUTENANT" X8?

Thoughts?