On 10/15/2021 at 12:51 PM, Janne Sirén said:
I hope this is a suitable thread to answer in, coming from the X8 poll thread. Moving onwards from any of that debate, I guess my question/point is how/what do you perceive the unique sales proposition being for an FPGA-only X8 or X16? ...
The thing is, the "unique value proposition" of the two are different.
The "unique value proposition" of the X16e is that it is hardware that lets you run X16 software out of the box, if you like, with a complete system costing somewhere on the order of half as much as the X16c. SBCs that can run the X16 emulator are already available in the $50-$100 price range, but if people really press the limits of the hardware, there could well still be some cool demos or games that don't run correctly or at full 60fps frame rate on the emulator.
The "unique value proposition" of the X8 is a small, inexpensive board that a single person can understand down "to the hardware specification", a la the C64 or Atari 800, of particular interest to those who already understand 6502 Assembly Language (and optionally also Forth) programming.
Relative to the FPGA Speccy+, the X8 is substantially cheaper, the X16e is a 6502 core while the Speccy is a Z80 core. So the X16e vs the Speccy+ (watchamacallit) is more like horizontal product differentiation, the X8 vs the Speccy+ is more like vertical differentiation.
As far as what you can DO with the X8 ... well, I spilled likely over 1,000 words on the simple proposition that if it had a spare select line for using the existing SPI interface to access a "hat", and brought select, SCLK, MOSI and MISO out to the existing debug interface pinout, to my mind it would be able to do a lot more interesting things.
Also, the value proposition of the X16e depends much more directly on following up the X16p and X16c, which are the anchors for the development of the "interesting X16 software" that drives the X16e value proposition.