Commander X16

So, the next version of the C256 Foenix was announced about a week ago.

There's a short video that shows the proposed design and goes through the features:

 

And also this longer one (2 and a half hours) where the creator talks at length about her plans, philosophy (design and otherwise) and talks through the various features.

The new one is called the "Gen X", which I at first thought was just yet another use of the notoriously cool letter X, but in the longer video she implies its a reference to Generation X - that is to say, the people who were active in computing in the 8-bit era, and probably most of the target audience for the project (as well as the X16).

Here are some of my initial thoughts on the project.

As a platform for eight bit computing:

• 
  it has a 65C816 built-in, but also a slot for expansion cards that offer other processors. This will allow people to use their favorite processor.
  


• 
  she talks about how she needs to be better at building a community, but the swappable "2nd processor" will probably fracture the potential community into cliques around the different processors
  


• 
  it has both Atari style controller ports and NES and SNES ports, all built in.  I think the idea is to make it versatile for game programming, but will all the options just fracture the community further?
  

As a tool for music creation:

• 
  The audio setup is plentiful: lots of built-in chips plus two slots for SIDs, and built-in MIDI ports.
  


• 
  Not sure how easy it is to route the MIDI data to the chips, to assign MIDI parameters to commands relevant to each sound chip, etc. Not sure if that's in the hardware, or if users are able to route things themselves via programming (read: "will have to write code to handle MIDI input themselves").
  


• 
  A fractured community won't matter if someone is using it as a tool for sound creation.  Once I output the chipsounds into my modern DAW for mastering I can export audio, and the fact that no one else has my exact setup won't matter, same as with any other synth I might use.
  


• 
  likewise, for music creation, the various swappable processors let you access the robust audio hardware with whatever your favorite flavor of assembly language is.
  

Misc:

• 
  The price means it's not just a fun toy to mess around with.  The base system is at least $500 dollars (I assume USD, but I'm not sure, as Stefany is based in Canada), plus $100 or more for each of the additional processor cards. 
  


• 
  If she's trying to do a better job of communicating, she hasn't quite mastered that yet. For example, the website still has almost no information about what the Gen X even is; you have the watch the videos to find out.  I know she's doing this all herself, but still, I'd have gotten the website in order before making the announcement.
  

 

So who's the market?  I feel like it'll be best appreciated by people who exist at the intersection of "enjoy buying expensive music gear" and "enjoy programming in assembly (in order to use that gear)".  Not sure how large a group that is.  

Then again, If I were to get one, my ability to use it for music-making won't depend on the amount of community support it has.  I'm still considering it.

Anyone else have thoughts on it?

I like the idea ... if money were no object, I'd buy one. By "money were no object" I mean both for having enough to buy the hardware and enough to pay for the space to store it and all its friends I'd buy to keep it company.

I must be living under a rock, this is sound chip madness.

I don’t have enough patience to sit through the 2+ hrs but can somebody tell me what ROM set is being used for the base and how the memory map is organized (emulating something?) or is it a free-for-all?

Is there an active dev community or is this the complete opposite of X16 (no SW, all HW)

If it’s a real thing, $500 is not terrible, especially if audio is your bag.

 

 

One of the original boards, the C256 Feonix U, is still for sale on the site for $200, but that is bare board alone. Plus probably whatever four to eight hours of my time sitting through Youtube talks to work out how to get a case that will fit the thing.

But unless the plan is to keep that in stock as an entry level, by the time I am back in the US and have a permanent home base sorted out, it will likely be sold out.

6 hours ago, EMwhite said:

I must be living under a rock, this is sound chip madness.



I don’t have enough patience to sit through the 2+ hrs but can somebody tell me what ROM set is being used for the base and how the memory map is organized (emulating something?) or is it a free-for-all?



Is there an active dev community or is this the complete opposite of X16 (no SW, all HW)



If it’s a real thing, $500 is not terrible, especially if audio is your bag.



 



 

At least some of that info is in the Wiki

https://wiki.c256foenix.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

There's a memory map and a list of Kernal functions. AFAICT, the Kernal is custom built for the platform.

I have never looked closely at the 65C816 processor, and don't really know the differences to the 6502/65C02 apart from that you have 24 bit addressing, wider/new registers, additional OP codes and so forth.

10 hours ago, BruceMcF said:

One of the original boards, the C256 Feonix U, is still for sale on the site for $200, but that is bare board alone.

The "U" doesn't have all the sound capabilities, though -  as far as I can tell, the "bare board alone" doesn't have any sound capabilities, and an expansion card is an additional $125.

Actually, it's hard to learn what exactly the U/U+ models do and do not have because

• 
  the U and U+ pages in the 'shop' tab don't list he features,
  


• 
  it's removed entirely from the 'products' tab, and
  


• 
  the wiki (which is in sore need of expanding) has very little information as well. 
  

Again, communication is not her specialty and again, there's not enough of a community to have populated the wiki for her.

 

15 hours ago, EMwhite said:

Is there an active dev community or is this the complete opposite of X16 (no SW, all HW)

Sadly that pretty much sums it up.

 

15 hours ago, EMwhite said:

I don’t have enough patience to sit through the 2+ hrs but can somebody tell me what ROM set is being used for the base and how the memory map is organized (emulating something?) or is it a free-for-all?

I don't think this information is available in the video.  There's some discussion of whether the RAM could be shared between the base 65C816 processor and whatever processor is in the expansion card (I kind of tuned this out, not planning to buy an expansion processor, but I think the answer was 'no' and that each expansion card comes with its own exclusive 4MB.) 

As for ROM, all I know is that it comes with "Foenix BASIC816", and there a link from the wiki to a manual for that flavor of BASIC.  In the long video, someone asks her if there will be any built-in software, like maybe a tracker, and iirc all she says is 'if there is, it would only be for the 65C816' (even though her favorite Processor is apparently the 68000).

EDIT: fixed formatting error.

47 minutes ago, John Chow Seymour said:

The "U" doesn't have all the sound capabilities, though -  as far as I can tell, the "bare board alone" doesn't have any sound capabilities, and an expansion card is an additional $125.



Actually, it's hard to learn what exactly the U/U+ models do and do not have because

• 
  the U and U+ pages in the 'shop' tab don't list he features,
  


• 
  it's removed entirely from the 'products' tab, and
  


• 
  the wiki (which is in sore need of expanding) has very little information as well. 
  

Again, communication is not her specialty and again, there's not enough of a community to have populated the wiki for her.

However, the U/U+ boards DO have sound capabilities ... the expansion card adds Ethernet 10/100+ and two SID sockets, but the home page of the Wiki says:

Quote

 



All Foenix systems include a WDC 65C816 CPU @ 14.318Mhz and the following base features:



Sound

• 
  2x Gideon FPGASID
  


• 
  16-bit stereo CODEC
  


• 
  TI SN76489 (Sega, Cabinets)
  


• 
  Yamaha OPL3 (Sound Blaster)
  


• 
  3KHz piezo beeper
  

• 
   
  

What it lacks that the FMX and GenX have is the OPM, OPN, and MIDI in/out.

Evidently, from the shop page, the U/U+ are undergoing redesign to work with an FPGA that will be easier to obtain. Since it is sold as a bare board and the "Hardware Enclosures" page doesn't actually give any information on what type of standard case the FMX will fit into ... and gives zero information about enclosures for the Feonix U ... that'd be another reason for not placing an order, even if I had $220 burning a hole in my pocket right now.

There's a github for the Basic ... it seems to be in an early development state at the moment. https://github.com/pweingar/BASIC816

And in addition to an early days ports of retroforth, there is a port of open forth 816 (of816) which seems in a more workable state: https://github.com/aniou/of816/tree/C256/platforms/C256

Watched a bit more of the 'live' video.  Captured a few things but I'm not (and will not) join Discord so if somebody cares to contradict/correct, please do...

• 
  case to be aluminum strut with panels not plastic molded so I suppose as a 'kit' it's less expensive to ship and far less expensive to produce than using custom plastics.  Some talk of 3d printed for DIYers.
  


• 
  Stefany's approach looks to be, throw everything on board then worry about all of the logic/bus/switching in FPGA.  Interesting approach as it provides some amount of future proofing and the ability to negotiate relative bus speed differences without leveraging tons of DIPs 27* family or requiring a full board re-issue.  Now that I've been thinking about it, I definitely like the emulated (and supplied [example: SID]) approach for many of the sound ICs.  The very nice thing about this is that tons of SW was written to support SID and the others and if the instruction set is a superset of 6502, it will ultimately support a more broad catalog and ease of porting.
  


• 
  similar to 'David', she mentions her love of the classic monolithic CPU and wanting to limit custom ASICs or FPGA everything; in the conversation she compares it to Apple with chips that do who-knows-what; also, similar to X16, it's PS/2 only and not bothering w/USB.
  


• 
  unlike X16, she is going to include a hard disk and maybe even floppy interface in addition to SD.  Also, unlike X16, she is going to have a serial port onboard.  That will play well with my vintage 9600 baud serial protocol home network. : )
  


• 
  I'm not familiar with the CPU but it looks like a superset of the 6502;  One of the collaborators has a few YouTube vids posted and most of the opcodes look familiar.  Also, regarding '+1' CPU, her affection for the 68K may bring some 520ST code sooner than later.  She cited some ST music SW that may be useful to port and her admiration of the early SGI interface as well.  Getting up off the ground in a windowed but primarily text interface is appealing; I remember my days visiting HP (I was doing benchmarking in Palo Alto at the time; early 90s), we had a windowed terminal that was effective and led to a great multi window text based dev environment that allowed copy/paste between text terms.
  


• 
  she is not interested in dealing with duty/tax, reselling parts that will only add to the markup, and does not want anybody to try and port Microsoft Windows to the 486/66 variant of the add-on CPU board (LOL to the last bit).
  

Whether or not either of the projects deliver, I think the biggest difference in approach is that David (here) had a vision, spoke to some people, established relationships (some of which he already had), then took a step back.  THIS website (and I think a Facebook group) is very organized and is leading to a lot of conversation, a community, and software with boundaries that is reinforcing the likelihood of success; all we need is HW.

On the other hand, FOENIX is a 24 x 7, primarily one-person, highly opinionated HW-first effort and much of it is informed by "I'd like it to be able to run this but not that / do this but not necessarily that".  And it's much more ambitious, but due to lack of an organized community, is more likely to stay a science project or not be widely adopted (my opinion of course).  Because I'm fortunate enough to have some amount of disposable income, I'll be signing up to buy both as soon as it's proven to not be vaporware.  If it were kickstarter based, I'd sign up now but the Patreon presence is nowhere, web site a bit of a mess, marketing poor, and considering a planned availability near October, I have a hard time believing just yet.

 

Note that several versions of the first design and a batch of the FMX have already shipped. The October dates for the U and GenX boards seem likely to be informed by the experience of building and shipping the first two designs.

The C256 for me is a bit like triple chocolate brownie batter ice cream haha. There's just SOOOO much to it where I think I might like less over more sometimes. Which is why I like the X16 a bit more, though I'm warming up to the C256 (in part because it does exist as real hardware and she's very frequent with updates, at least on the Discord).  Stephanie has now released two versions of this thing to buy in hardware and at a decent price largely by herself. It's a marvel!

Sometimes I get a little frustrated with the X16 team over lack of updates because they have SUCH A GIFT with the exposure the X16 has whereas Stephanie has had to do it the hard way and she's a brilliant engineer but is perhaps in need of a marketer (which kinda sucks I have a distaste for marketing but if people don't know about your product....). I do feel, and I know it's a sensitive subject on the team, but the very sparse updates on the X16 - well I'll put it this way it tends to crush my momentum with my Command Tracker when I haven't heard much in a while. Doesn't need to be a lot, just a minor update. Peri's latest keyboard update being a fine example though that was a month ago. But even something smaller than that would be ok, even if it's delays (like inevitably supply chain issues). Just the feeling of progress. The X16 team seems to prefer a different philosphy and that's ok but caveat is I think it kills the momentum of the ecosystem.

It bums me out whenever David rocks a video and doesn't mention a single sentence about the X16. I know he's on some big limitations due to the flooding (I'm in Texas and yep I get it) but just a quick update at the end would go A LONG WAY.

Thing is, a lot of us I feel are pouring considerable effort and time to build the ecosystem and it can just be frustrating when we don't see don't really see anything from the team side. I write Command Tracker because it's fun, but I don't want to write it for a dead platform. It'd be nice to know the team has the project at heart and the easiest way to do that is to just say something, even if it's small.

Compare that to the C256, which is available today (and of note, has a working music tracker, albeit only for the FM chips I think) - the smaller model isn't even far from David's price point. But she doesn't have the visibility and reach the X16 has. I just don't want the team to waste that.