2 hours ago, Wonderdog said:
I wonder if the spec of the X8 (before all the scope creep, supply chain realities and development challenges of the X16) was pitched in 2019, whether people would be complaining about the percieved spec compromises vs the x16. The stated X8 spec (other than a lack of expansion connectivitiy) seems to be right on the money for anyone interested in a more modern, better documented and less quirky implementation of the capabilities and compromises inherent to the the golden ages of development in the 8 bit era.
Also - I often wonder if Dave would have been better off all along reversing the original development and rollout plan, i.e. by starting with the launch of a cheap, easy to produce FPGA based core product with enough capability to encourage community buzz, tooling development and initial games built on the the core VERA and 65C02 functionality (and the added benefit of being able to correct or append any glaring logical hardware or Kernel code issues easily after devices were in the wild), and then offering the physical version (with a real 65C02, RAM etc) for those who wanted to tinker with hardware hacking and expandability afterward once the big bugs had been ironed out on the FPGA based devices. ...
Though the thing is, hindsight tends to be sharper than foresight (maybe that's why in Chinese, "the past" is what you see when you look ahead and "the future" is what you see when you look behind you) ... made with off the shelf ASIC parts seemed to be a compelling part of the vision for a lot of the people David was talking to, and there is no doubt that starting with Yet Another FPGA simulator, and this one for a retro system that did not, in fact, exist, would have been the path that made the real chips version of the board less likely to happen than the path that has been traveled.
Perhaps the experience, such as it was, would have been smoother, but it would have been smoother because of the different hardware constraints, and the various hangups that have been experienced getting the X16p to the "almost ready to crowdfund" point it is at now would have been even harder to fix if all of the software base was assuming something that turned out to be easier to implement in FPGA than with discrete chips.
The path has been harder largely because they tackled the harder challenge first.
Once they have all the kinks worked out, the only real hangups for the X16c and X16e would be market questions ... would there be enough demand to justify a cased X16c ... would there be enough market demand for an X16e when it is above RPi price points and up in the next tier of SBC's.
The smoother ride to doing the X16e first would likely also have meant an even bumpier ride to getting an X16p done, and it's all too likely that they would have ended up painting themselves into a corner, simulating a discrete chips 65c02 based SBC that they couldn't then actually make to work.
1 hour ago, Wonderdog said:
Exactly. Low risk, predictable margin device to get Commander hardware of some form in peoples hands to raise awareness, confidence, start tooling development/refinement and of course, raise funds for further development of the more niche / fancy fully custom product.
All of this "raise funds for further development" keeps confusing me. Why do people forget that crowdfunding exists? Crowdfunding raises funds for the product you are trying to build with the fact that there are people out there who want you to build it so they can buy it.
I made that very point in another thread. I suspect the main hesitancy along this line is the fact that there's a major design decision in flux right now regarding the PS/2 interface. Personally, as long as the board is flashable without special hardware/cables, then I don't see any reason why it couldn't get "firmware updates" to go along with emulator updates. Anyway, I also suspect that the particulars of the "phase 3" design aren't as close to being done as the X8 which is probably why Dave's leaning towards releasing the X8.
Setting aside my whinging about wanting an X8 that doesn't exist ... one with more I/O options than just working out how to reuse the debug UART port as a regular UART port ... when David says he has a prototype and it just works, I think that means that there's no software challenge, just open the crowdfund to fund production of the board and it would be prototype the version on the finished board rather than the development board, test that it works as expected, fix any mistakes (never assume there are no mistakes to fix just because there "shouldn't" be), then put them into production.
IOW, the alpha prototype worked out like it was the beta test.
Meanwhile, while the X16p DIY
may be a month or two away from being ready to crowdfund even for a very conservative approach to crowdfunding ... there's been various times already when a month or two has ballooned to six months, and there's perhaps some well justified nervousness about when the X16 side is going to turn cash-flow positive.
