Commander X16

On 10/19/2022 at 3:14 PM, Winston said:

Is Gen 1 on an ATX form factor PCB thereby allowing the use of cases designed for ATX motherboards?

Micro ATX, 9.6 in. x 9.6 in, the mounting holes are specified to be compatible with cases designed for ATX (9.6 in x 12 in) motherboards.

Gen2 would be Mini-ITX (6.7 in x 6.7 in). Mini-ITX has a good shot of fitting an ATX case, since it's four mounting holes match up with four mount points on the ATX standard, but some "ATX" cases don't comply 100% and only provide mount points for three of those, so YMMV.

On 10/19/2022 at 1:43 PM, BruceMcF said:

Micro ATX, 9.6 in. x 9.6 in.

Excellent!  Once these get out of the prototype stage, I'll be putting one in a small, horizontal desktop case with an LCD monitor on top of it.  Is there any kind of proposed dimensional standard for expansion slot cards?

@Kevin Williams has a form factor specification. I believe he'll also sell you a bare, perforated PCB for wire-wrapping prototype cards. I think the slot spec is done now.

On 10/20/2022 at 11:49 AM, kelli217 said:

@Kevin Williams has a form factor specification. I believe he'll also sell you a bare, perforated PCB for wire-wrapping prototype cards. I think the slot spec is done now.

Yes, the Prototype #2 had both long and short prototype, which made a handy default for space required for cards -- I know that they changed the specific slot specification to avoid confusion with Apple2 boards, but I assume that the physical dimensions will be similar.

On 10/12/2022 at 3:58 AM, Kalvan said:

Mr. Murray mentioned a hypotheical maximum of 256 sprites, or double the specification published in the FAQ.



Was this a faux pas, or does the specification there need to be updated beyond the deletion of one of the VIAs?

i think it was when the graphics we're created by the gameduino which was discarded you can see david talk about it in his video about his dream computer

On 10/21/2022 at 8:15 AM, DragonGaulois said:

i think it was when the graphics we're created by the gameduino which was discarded you can see david talk about it in his video about his dream computer

Quite ... on the Gameduino 1.0, there were no bitmaps, as it was a pure tile and sprite display engine in 32K Block RAM ... but it had 256 16x16 256-color sprites, with 16KB of Block RAM space allocated for 64 sprite pixel maps. Vera has 128 [8,16,32,64]x[8,16,32,64], at several color depths, and of course has much more space to hold sprite pixel maps.

I wonder if it will come with an IO shield...



I want a gen 1 board. But I guess I will have to wait, as I'm not a developer yet.

On 10/21/2022 at 6:27 PM, Robinkle said:

I wonder if it will come with an IO shield...



I want a gen 1 board. But I guess I will have to wait, as I'm not a developer yet.

What is "an IO shield" in the context of a retro 8bit computer?

The thing that fits in the port opening, little piece of sheet metal cut to fit all the ports and fill the area out to the edges of the opening.

On 10/21/2022 at 8:00 PM, kelli217 said:

The thing that fits in the port opening, little piece of sheet metal cut to fit all the ports and fill the area out to the edges of the opening.

I haven't heard of an announcement of that.