General Comments

[ZeroByte]

I found out about this project through the 8-Bit Guy, and I've been following his CommanderX16 project.

While I am a child of the 8-bit era, and a fan of the Commodore64, my heart is in the 16-bit era. To me, those were the pinnacle of gaming both in the arcade and on home systems. I was excited about the CX16 being a 16-bit system, but because David really prefers the 8-bit stuff (naturally, given the name of his channel), it's become apparent to me that the CX16 is going to stay very close to 8-bit specs as far as graphics and sound are concerned. That's fine, and it's his dream computer, not mine, I've come to realize that the C256 Foenix is much more my dream computer than the CX16 is shaping up to be.

So I decided to come jump into the community over here and follow along with the progress of the Foenix. I hope that the project is a success and that a vibrant community gets established around the machine so that we can have lots of fun stuff to do with this computer.

This forum seems kind of quiet right now, so hopefully some discussion gets started to liven things up a bit.

[stef]

Hey Guys,

Any general comments please post here!

S

[grenouye]

I have to say that as an early adopter, the machine has a lot of potential. Great graphics and awesome sound capabilities are the first thing you'll notice in the specs.

We're busy developing an Integrated Development Environment (Foenix IDE), the Basic language, an OPL2 tracker, floppy disk and SDRAM commands and many other "secret" things.

Stay tuned!

[techristian]

Good that I'm able to post a reply here. I wasn't able to START a topic though ?


Dan

[bzuidgeest]

many other "secret" things

Well grenouye certainly knows how to make people wonder about what is to come...

As zerobyte already said de forum is quiet now but everything needs to start at some point. I really don't believe in the 8-Bit Guy's CX16. His you-tube videos are mostly nice to watch but every time he get close to a soldering iron it gets cringe worthy. At the moment I'm convinced he's in way over his head. He really made a point about no fpga's. Then he did some research and now they are adapting a gameduino??? They still seem to have made no choice on audio chips... Well he's free to try off course but at least stef has a complete vision and it has working hardware (more or less). My guess is that a some point he will wake up and discover the foenix is what he should have build.

@grenouye You say early adaptor? Do you already have actual hardware? Or doing simulation or somthing?

[stef]

many other "secret" things

Well grenouye certainly knows how to make people wonder about what is to come...

As zerobyte already said de forum is quiet now but everything needs to start at some point. I really don't believe in the 8-Bit Guy's CX16. His you-tube videos are mostly nice to watch but every time he get close to a soldering iron it gets cringe worthy. At the moment I'm convinced he's in way over his head. He really made a point about no fpga's. Then he did some research and now they are adapting a gameduino??? They still seem to have made no choice on audio chips... Well he's free to try off course but at least stef has a complete vision and it has working hardware (more or less). My guess is that a some point he will wake up and discover the foenix is what he should have build.

@grenouye You say early adaptor? Do you already have actual hardware? Or doing simulation or somthing?

Grenouye is part of a tiny group of dev that are working on Phase I of the project.

Yes, they do have hardware right now and we also have a development software called the FoenixIDE that is an emulator/Debugger tool.

This is the development unit that the Foenix have and working on right now

ForumPicture_50.jpg (405.52 KiB) Viewed 4557 times

S

[bzuidgeest]

That picture does make things "real". I like it, wish I was capable of building something like that.

Did you hand solder the first boards? Or do you have access to some prototyping service (at least for fpga en fine pitched smd components)?

[stef]

That picture does make things "real". I like it, wish I was capable of building something like that.

Did you hand solder the first boards? Or do you have access to some prototyping service (at least for fpga en fine pitched smd components)?

bzuidgeest,

They all have been hand assembled (components installed one by one by hand) But then I used low-melting Temperature Solder Paste and used a toaster oven to reflow... So you have the professional finish without spending money. The side effect is that to build one single board, it takes around 4 Hours + an extra hour to do the hand soldering of all the through holes component.

So, I have built for this batch 6 so far, so 30 hours of assembly.

S

[techristian]

I'm glad to see this off and running !
Hopefully ,I'll have some free time next year to get into this.

Dan

[bzuidgeest]

I see the shop is online for rev C. Great, time to buy in.

I'm doubting about the floppy drive. Personally I do not see any use for it as we have the SDCard reader. Can somebody give me a reason to have the floppy drive?