8 hours ago, Scott Robison said:
And until the X16 has native internet access, an app store would be limited to sneaker net anyway. I'd love to see the popularity surge enough to justify someone taking that task on (I won't be doing it myself) or someone doing it and thus causing a popularity surge. I would happily admit I was wrong. The purpose of the app store is to make download and install of applications easy. I'm not saying an app store couldn't work for X16, but it would have several strikes going against it from the get go with what is currently known about the design.
If we adopt Bruce's ideas about SPI expansions or something similar, you could produce an ultracheap wifi interface using an ESP32 (don't know the other ESP chip). All you'd have to do would be to wire the ESP32 to the SPI expansion and write a bit of code in it to connect and use it as a bridge.
I think the current Downloads with decent games and utilities and so on would help the hardware in that it would encourage more people to purchase and develop for it, especially if it is cheap. The advantage of the X8 idea, whatever else one may think, is that it's beer money almost, whereas a built X16, Mega65, Foenix256, whatever their merits as platforms, aren't. Even the backwards compatibility doesn't really help. If you actually just want to play C64 or Spectrum games, it's cheaper and easier to use an emulator, or a Mister than the Next or Mega65.
I think this was the rationale behind 8-Bit-Dave's original idea of selling it for £30. It wasn't about the money from the platform so much as widening the uptake.
People do make games for the Next that come in proper boxes (rather like PETSCII robots and so on) and people buy them. I suspect it's not a huge amount, but presumably it's enough to make it worthwhile as opposed to just releasing it as PD.