20 hours ago, cabiv said:
The question has always been a matter of feature creep and not building a perfect machine. People still write programs for the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and other vintage machines because of the limitations they have and working around them. A better basic and faster basic helps get programmers started. Perfect hardware does not lead to innovations and tricks. It will never stop you in your tracks as your try to figure out how something was done.
I keep hearing about feature creep, but I rarely hear about what features were supposed to have crept. The most recent change in the Vera reduced the bottleneck of the two data ports while cutting, not adding, a feature. That was a feature replacing the 65xx family serial interface chip, which was in turn replaced by a decision to bit bang the serial on the User port. That is, if anything, the opposite of feature creep ... feature pruning.
Maybe because the design team has a wise policy of not discussing some features at the "we'd like it but it's not clear if it's feasible" stage, and then when it's described some people imagine it the feature had never been on any internal feature target list?
20 hours ago, cabiv said:
Some expansion capability (IC2?) is needed to interface lights, motors, and sensors that are so cheaply available. People are sometimes more impressed with a servo, sensor, and leds than a high resolution photorealistic display. Not sure what the solution is.
There is already an SPI interface, for the SD card, and an SPI interface can be bussed. There are SPI to GPIO chips, SPI to serial chips, SPI to I2C bus master chips, SPI serial RAM chips, etc., so reusing the existing SPI bus seems like the likeliest to fit if the X8 doesn't have many unused logic resources to spare.