Mega 65- Enhanced Commodore 65, fpga etc.

[daveshah]

Without wanting to hijack this project thread - obviously it's a very different thing to the 65 - I can recommend the ULX3S for anyone looking for an easy and relatively cheap introduction to FPGAs particularly with stable open source toolchain support and several retro computers ported already.

 

[ClockworkCoder]

Let's face it, nobody uses floppies, and I'd be surprised if anyone still actually made them.

You might be surprised:

US military will no longer use floppy disks to coordinate nuke launches

As we alarmingly learned in 2014, the US military has been using 8-inch floppy disks in an antiquated '70s computer to receive nuclear launch orders from the President. Now, the US strategic command has announced that it has replaced the drives with a "highly-secure solid state digital storage...

www.engadget.com

 

[pmprog]

I can recommend the ULX3S for anyone looking for an easy and relatively cheap introduction to FPGAs particularly with stable open source toolchain

To me, the appeal to the mega65 is a fully cased computer with keyboard.

That said, part of me thinks "but if the keyboard breaks, what do you do with the machine? Where a board with a nice case and some usb ports would probably be better from a sustainability prospect.

Also, it's got retro joystick ports, and half my joysticks are a bit broken, so i do wonder if it's worth it...

Thanks for linking the board though, i also like the myStorm board (which uses lattice chips too)

 

[levi]

Without wanting to hijack this project thread - obviously it's a very different thing to the 65 - I can recommend the ULX3S for anyone looking for an easy and relatively cheap introduction to FPGAs particularly with stable open source toolchain support and several retro computers ported already.

Do you know what the LUTs do in this context? I assume they're a kind of lookup table, perhaps involved in the actual programming of the FPGA, but I can't find how many entries there are in each of these LUTs, or indeed how many gates there are in that FPGA (which I guess I could have looked up before posting this). Presumably it's important because it's worth $40 on crowdsupply, but it doesn't seem to say why, and I don't know enough about FPGAs to guess.

 

[daveshah]

A LUT is the basic combinational logic element in an FPGA. In the case of the ECP5, each LUT has 4 inputs and one output, and can therefore implement any 4-input logic function, and combined for more complex logic.

An FPGA with 3x the LUTs can therefore be considered to be able to implement 3x the logic, particularly as in general other components (flipflops, block RAM, etc) also scale in number proportionally to LUTs within the same FPGA family.

However, the smallest ECP5 will already go quite a long way, pretty much the only retro core that needs the 85k ECP5 is the SNES - but that is more because of constraints on internal RAM than logic.

 

[levi]

Ah that does make sense now you say it. The LUTs are thus named because each LUT inside the FPGA implements a look-up table defining the digital inputs and outputs. They're not quite potential gates, because as you say they have four inputs, so you could theoretically implement up to three two-input logic gates chained togther in there with free not gates. So these boards have different FPGAs on them then.

 

[rSl]

Learn all about the MEGA65 – Exclusive interview with the head of the project, Paul Gardner-Stephen - Vintage is The New Old

For the past few days, we've talked a lot about the MEGA65 here and on Twitter. The reason is the start of the pre-sale for the machine Dev kits. When you read this article, the first 100 units will be likely sold out, but the interested in the project sky-rocketed and more people want to know...

vintageisthenewold.com

 

[rSl]

 

[pmprog]

heh. beat me too it

Edit: It surprises me that they need to move to C64 mode to run a MOD player... something I would expect you utilise "M65" functionality.
Also, with the lack of native C65 software, it still feels a bit odd that this is the primary focus, rather than an extended C64

 

[levi]

I at first assumed those things over the air inlet were heatpipes connected to fans, which would have been a shame for an 8-bit recreations, but not entirely unexpected when it comes to FPGAs. So it was a positive surprise that they were in fact speakers. and while the stereo separation won't be great, it's still better than whiny fans.

 

[rSl]

 

[gunrock]

@EvilDragon 's slightly more grizzled Uncle?

 

[crazyhorse]

 

[pmprog]

Unboxing stream of a devkit here, now

https://www.twitch.tv/shallan50k

 

[pmprog]

In case anybody missed the stream:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/815657347

 

[spud42]

 

[pmprog]

Discovering Mega65 - First Steps

 

[pmprog]

Shallan is live again with some MEGA65 dev

https://www.twitch.tv/shallan50k

 

[rSl]

MEGA65 Preorder live - Forum64

As most of you have noticed, the MEGA65 preorder is live !There are still enough MEGA65 available at the Trenz webshop.https://shop.trenz-electronic.…ible-8-bit-computer?c=564- Please disregard the message, that there is 0 in stock. there are still…

www.forum64.de

 

[FBnil]

I'm put off by the price having too many 6 in it. They could have gone for 6502 euro... but nooooo...