Change of product direction, good and bad news!

[pzembrod]

@The 8-Bit Guy

Hi David,

I don't have a clear opinion wrt your questions 2 and 3, but wrt question 1 I would say do release the X8 - I probably would buy one just because it's cheap and it's there.

My main interest in the project at the moment is as a platform to develop VolksForth and cc64 for, and at least the former I would likely port to the X8.

Regarding the X16 phases, I'm not sure what I would buy. I'm still attracted to self-soldering RC2014-style 65C02 machine, so I might fall into the camp that would consider buying a VERA ?

Cheers

/Philip

[Brad]

11 hours ago, BruceMcF said:

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!"

Yeah, and I think that was a mistake. He owes us nothing, yet a lot of people are emotionally invested to the point that they are overreacting to hypotheticals. "Feels" aren't going to pay for development costs, so there needs to be a concrete plan to get the X16 made. Getting bent out of shape isn't helpful, but offering genuine solutions that result in real revenue with a path to a working kit and/or system are. Most likely people are just feeling let down, so maybe everyone just needs to have a couple beers and let reality sink in.

That said, I have been following the project since it was first discussed on the Youtube video, and honestly the current X16 has an insane amount of feature creep. The X8 does seem to be more along the lines David initially talked about, albeit non-discrete chips. I'd like to see an X8 implemented discretely, to be honest.

Also, I do find it amusing that most of us had "just a toy" for a system in the past and we did all sorts of productive things on them...

[TomXP411]

9 hours ago, BruceMcF said:

Which one? It runs Basic code and is slated to work with a serial port, I can't tell for sure whether the "like a champ" is the missing bit or whether it's waiting on whether a bit banged VIA serial port will be successfully ported in case that falls to the wayside.



Maybe that's colored by being a lot more confident that there will be a serial port for my second terminal to work with in xForth than whether Basic will ever run more like a champ than it is now.

There is not yet code to run the big-banged serial port, and obviously the UART was left out, so there will be a speed limit on the serial port.

[picosecond]

1 minute ago, TomXP411 said:

There is not yet code to run the big-banged serial port, and I don’t particularly like  it banged serial, either…

Yup.  The lack of a hardware UART is galling.  The advertised workaround being the half-baked expansion bus makes it worse.

[TomXP411]

1 minute ago, picosecond said:

Yup.  The lack of a hardware UART is galling.  The advertised workaround being the half-baked expansion bus makes it worse.

What’s interesting is there does appear to be some sort of serial interface on the CX8. Apparently, the ESP32 is connected to the FPGA and allows code to be loaded through WiFi.

[picosecond]

2 minutes ago, TomXP411 said:

What’s interesting is there does appear to be some sort of serial interface on the CX8. Apparently, the ESP32 is connected to the FPGA and allows code to be loaded through WiFi.

The ice40up5k has hardware SPI and I2C units, two of each.  I imagine CX8 is using one of these.  These units do not have dedicated IO, so using them isn't free.

[BruceMcF]

23 minutes ago, TomXP411 said:

What’s interesting is there does appear to be some sort of serial interface on the CX8. Apparently, the ESP32 is connected to the FPGA and allows code to be loaded through WiFi.

Although with a bit more known than two days ago, still, without a specification list, its not clear if that would be in the actual X8 ... it might be a development board feature not included in the finished product. If not, I would hope at least there is serial device support over the USB.

There is not yet code to run the big-banged serial port, and obviously the UART was left out, so there will be a speed limit on the serial port.

I figure the odds of the bit banged serial port being left out is a lot lower than the odds of Basic being left in roughly its current state, with a O^2 garbage collector and far from running like a champ.

[Carl Gundel]

8BG's original vision resonates with me strongly.  A computer made with off the shelf parts as much as possible so that the end user can completely understand the machine and also master it to bend it to the will.  It gives the user a tool for thinking, and learning and playing.  In this way it is in my mind superior to the Raspberry Pi, and for that reason the phase 3 X16 and the X8 don't hold so strong an appeal for me.  On the other hand, to each his own. ?

[BruceMcF]

1 hour ago, Brad said:

That said, I have been following the project since it was first discussed on the Youtube video, and honestly the current X16 has an insane amount of feature creep.  ...

65816, 24bit address bus, directly addressable video RAM, system ROM in Bank 0, User ROM is Bank 1, dedicated dual serial chip, separate microcontroller to access the SD card, PSG with (a limited amount of) hardware ADSR ... there's been a substantial amount of feature pruning as well.

Even later, the Vera UART functions which had been added were stripped out to allow an increase in the addressed registers from eight to thirty-two.

And of course, features that were not pinned down could be seen as feature creep by someone who imagined something simpler and a clamp on features by someone who imagined something more ambitious.

[picosecond]

51 minutes ago, Carl Gundel said:

A computer made with off the shelf parts as much as possible so that the end user can completely understand the machine

I have never believed these are connected.  I think it is unfortunate that 8BG has been promoting this notion.

The only thing that makes off the shelf parts understandable is their documentation.  Without docs how could anyone design with them?  Even good docs stop at some level of abstraction.  For example, YM2151 docs describe nothing about its microarchitecture, which is need to really understand how it works.  I would argue that properly documented highly integrated designs can be more understandable than their off the shelf cousins.  Phase 1 X16 and Phase 3 X16 are equal complexity and equally understandable.  The packaging differences are superficial.

54 minutes ago, Carl Gundel said:

In this way it is in my mind superior to the Raspberry Pi, and for that reason the phase 3 X16 and the X8 don't hold so strong an appeal for me.

Raspberry Pi has no architectural commonalities with phase 3 X18/X8.  The only superficial thing they have in common is a high level of integration.

 

If people prefer the cool appearance of big PCBs with lots of chips, I have no argument with that.  I think they look cool too.  I just reject this idea that knowing this chip is the CPU and this chip does graphics imparts any meaningful knowledge of the computer's operation.