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[Bullet Club]

The 8-Bit Guy is building his own 8-bit computer which will eventually go on sale. It's looking pretty cool.

Commander X16 Features & Specs (they might change)

CPU

• WDC 65x02 @ 8 Mhz
• 40-pin DIP package
• (Protoype board currently running stable at 2 Mhz. Steps are being taken to stabilize it at 8 Mhz. Worst case if all issues are not solved, the final board could be 4 mhz, but still planning for 8)

RAM

• 40K of "Low RAM"
• 512K of "High RAM" standard
• Expandable to 1 MB, 1.5 MB, or 2 MB by adding additional RAM chips to 3 empty sockets.

ROM

• 128K of Flash ROM
• Standard Commodore Kernal
• Microsoft BASIC version 2.0
• Machine Language Monitor
• Can be reflashed from the computer

Expansion

• Four expansion slots with access to CPU databus
• Each slot has its own 32-bytes of mapped RAM
• 8 general-purpose I/O lines available (user port)

Input Devices

• PS/2 Keyboard
• PS/2 Mouse
• Two NES or SNES style game ports (dev board just has pin headers)

Storage

• IEC compatible disk drive port
• Internal SD-2-IEC with SD card slot (on final board only, not dev board)

Audio

• Audio is still being determined. There are 3 designs being considered and tested at the moment including a Yamaha YM2151, a SAA1099, and a SID-like implementation in the video chip’s FPGA. Which will ultimate work best is yet to be determined.

“Vera” Video chip specifications

• 128K of internal video RAM
• 640x480 @ 60 Hz analog VGA output
• 640x240 Composite video and/or S-Video output.
• Option to disable color signal for sharper grayscale text/graphics on composite monitors.

Text Modes:

• 80x60, 40x30, and 20x15 character modes
• 8x8 pixels characters with PETSCII font
• 16-colors with independent fore/background colors for each character
• 256-color text mode with global background color.

Two Independent graphics layers, each capable of:

• pixel scaling: 1x/2x/3x/4x for width and height
• tile size: width 8/16 pixel, height 8/16 pixels
• tile map size: width 32/64/128/256 tiles, height 32/64/128/256 tiles
• tile modes:
  • 1 bpp (bits per pixel) with per-tile 16-color foreground/background color, 8 bit tile index (16 color text mode)
  • 1 bpp with per-tile 256-color foreground color, background color is always index 0 (transparent), 8 bit tile index (256-color text mode)
  • 2/4/8 bpp with per-tile h-flip, v-flip, 4-bit palette offset, 10 bit tile index
  • all these modes support smooth scrolling
• bitmap modes:
  • 1/2/4/8 bpp
  • 4-bit palette offset
  • these modes don't support scrolling to save on memory
• the 1 bpp tile modes in combination with 8x16 tile size will also allow for a standard VGA font to be used

An emulator is out for it:

GitHub - commanderx16/x16-emulator: Emulator for the Commander X16 8-bit computer

Emulator for the Commander X16 8-bit computer. Contribute to commanderx16/x16-emulator development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[PhaseJump]

Did feature creep kill this?

 

[MrA]

Did feature creep kill this?

there is already an emulator, everything seems ok right now for an ambitious homebrew project, chip shortages are also causing havok

 

[PhaseJump]

Seems like the dream computer turned into a nightmare.

 

[PhaseJump]

Still can't buy it just yet, and there are other new retro computers like this out there already.