For a few months now I have been working behind the scenes with the good folks at m-e-g-a.org, exploring our mutual desire to create a physical 8-bit computer in the spirit of the C65, but that is open-source and open-hardware so far as is possible, so that the community can sustain, improve and explore it.
Basically, we agreed that we wanted to do this, and that the C65GS was the logical basis for this, and thus the MEGA65 project was born, to take the C65GS core, to work together to improve it, and plan towards creating a physical form that is strongly reminiscent of the C65 prototypes.
The introduction sheds more light on this project.
Funny thing, I was looking at Hi65 on my time off today. It’s a high level emulator of the C65 as it execute BASIC 10.0 directly instead of emulating the whole thing.
Pretty cool piece of software.
They say that this hardware is 50x faster than C64 hardware (which seems very slow to me). Is there any reason, except nostalgia) to get real hardware for this when emulators are available?
Yes, his goal is not to recreate the C65, but create a kind of C65++, i.e. something reminicent of the C65, and mostly compatible with it, but much, much more powerful in terms of computing speed and graphics.
The only thing I don’t get is why keep it 8 bits, if you’re opting for a full HD screen, 100s of MBs of memory, modern storage and 200MHz+ CPU speed. But I’m sure that’s part of the fun
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Great to hear! I hope something like this emerges for other 8-bit computers as well, such as the Atari XL.
The best of luck to you!
Are you aware of my Atari xl in fpga project? Only 4x-16x turbo so far depending on the board.
http://www.scrameta.net
I was not aware of any FPGA Atari 8-bit dedicated projects, this is good news!
As for the Mist, I’ve not looked on it’s web site in a while, sounds like there have been some updates!
As for using retro machines or clones of them in this day, well for many it is about the games, others it is about the amazing musick you can produce with the SID, Paula, and the like. And for some, we still manage to get a lot of use out of those old productivity apps, especially in regards to the Amiga. For instance, I still love using the Atari 8-Bit for word processing.
I like retro computing, but I’m not sure why anyone would bother with this. Sure, the C65 is an interesting footnote in the history of Commodore, but it was an unreleased prototype that was developed as 16 bit was rapidly replacing 8 bit computers.
I guess my point is, other than the OS/Basic 10, there wasn’t any C65 only software written by anyone. No one has any real nostalgia about the system either (remember, unreleased). So why go through the trouble except to say you’ve played with a C65-type computer?
You can already play with a C64 on the MiST FPGA.
And you can enjoy many other 8/16Bit PC/Console on the MiST.
The mist is a great board. For the C64 the Turbo Chameleon 64 is the most mature.