28 minutes ago, TomXP411 said:
Yeah, I'm kind of wishing they had gone with the open ROMs and used a FOSS 6502 BASIC. There are a couple out there.
Or if there isn't a suitable one, the community could probably have built an interpreter by now. Add the text editor and assembly environment written by other folks here on the forum, and we'd already be done with the firmware - without paying Cloanto a red cent.
Hindsight has a lot stronger optics than my actual physical eyeballs. The timeline they were imagining isn't the timeline that happened.
But by the same token, if the community could have done that by now without a Cloanto license, it could have done that anyway with the license. There could be a FOSS 6502 Basic and a FOSS implementation of the Kernel. If the already open source parts of the firmware are using the Kernel through its published API, it's a much less challenging task than the effort to get a compatible open source C64 KERNAL written.
It may be that in order to have a large enough ongoing open source community for that project, the hardware has to be out in the world. But you can't get the board out into the world without a BIOS ... and for a board that doesn't bootload an OS, an interactive control language ... which makes it a classical chicken and the egg question.
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2 hours ago, Brad said:
Im betting that had the X8 been released months ago and called a “working prototype with reduced feature-set” 99% of this discussion wouldn’t exist. I’m being as nice as I possibly can with my post here, but some of you guys are just whiny. There seem to be plenty of people complaining that they’ll only code for the X16 and won’t code at all if the X8 even exists. So, where’s your contributions to the X16 library? The emulator works. Again, that just sounds like whining.
On the other hand, David did ask everyone on the Facebook group to come here and say how they felt.
Its a hobbyist board. People who develop on it are going to be developing on it for pleasure. If imagining developing for a single stable development target that more than a small handful of people were using was part of the fun, and having the target split in two reduces the fun ... what should they do, not say how they feel?
There's a bit of an internal contradiction between "It's Just a Toy!" and "Don't get hung up about what makes it fun for you!"