And
@Michael Steil also left a sizeable update today on FB:
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I have not gone missing. I am still here.
Also, for the record, I can't see how I would be responsible of any feature creep.
About PS/2: I originally thought we could make PS/2 keyboards (and mice) work by just bit-banging it from a 6502. I was wrong; some keyboard are too quirky, so even the second attempt of hooking them up to NMI wasn't successful. The next idea was to use a microcontroller to speak the low-level protocol, but given that Christian left the project and there was very little progress overall, I didn't exactly jump at this next work item.
About FAT32 and the SD card: First, this is a very complex yet mature piece of the software stack. And it is way better than an external sd2iec, e.g. it's 50x faster, but also way less limited, more generic, and still very much in the style of Commodore hardware (no D64 images, but direct access to up to 2 TB of storage, with subdirs etc). Sure there are bugs, as in any software. I could dedicate some time to fix them, but again, with the project overall making little progress, I'd rather dedicate it once I know there will actually be a project at the end.
All in all, I built a hugely improved version of the Commodore KERNAL, with lots of additional functionality (optional ISO/ASCII encoding, different screen modes, F-keys, mouse driver, compression API, graphics drawing API, floating point API, ...) and a very Commodore-like FAT32 SD solution (based on Frank's FAT32 code), which is in a very good state. It's open source and very well documented and commented. It runs in my emulator, which has lots of great debugging features.
So even though I am not working on the KERNAL at this moment, there is nothing that prevents someone else from working on it, fixing the SD card bugs or adding a new PS/2 driver infrastructure. It's just code, and I specifically designed it so that others can contribute or take over.
As for the PS/2 driver in particular, yes, this is a hardware feature that is trickier to develop than a software-only feature, but it's possible, and I've done it before, with the original bringup, the SD card, and the two previous PS/2 solutions: They were brought up by adding the feature to the emulator, then writing the 6502 code to interface with it, then trying it out on real hardware. This can be done here as well. It's just work. I can do it, but the project is not blocked on me.
That said, if I have the impression that the project is on track again, I may be able to dedicate some time to it.
P.S.: I find the idea of tossing all of SD/FAT32 out because nobody wants to fix a few remaining bugs in open source code a bit insulting, to be honest.
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