The 8-Bit Guy
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2023
20:37 · 3M views · Feb 19, 2019
The 8-Bit Guy proposes building his dream retro computer, an expandable C64-like machine using sourceable parts and modern I/O, which became the Commander X16 project.
HN points to it as the original proposal that explains the vision behind the Commander X16.
3 comments from Hacker News
His original proposal video[0] explains it well: it's not supposed to be powerful; he is aware of the Raspberry Pi but doesn't see it fitting his vision. It's supposed to be something like the C64 and other computers of the era where you could understand how all the various chips interacted and worked. Things like DDR memory abstract all that stuff away. Computers today don't "put an address on the bus and read the data" like parallel SRAM/DRAM; they send a command packet to the memory chips and wait for the data packet to come back. Audio interfaces, especially over PCIe, aren't as simple anymore either. You can't write direct to the screen anymore like you could with VGA cards on old IBM PCs. All these abstractions have helped computers become so complex that one person can't possibly understand it all at once. [0]: this video
David Murray (The 8-bit Guy) and others are building an expandable, C64ish computer with sourceable parts and modern I/O connectivity (eg. VGA). They're calling it Commander X16. It's very early, but it looks promising as a retro gaming/educational platform. Due to hardware limitations (eg 6502-based CPU), it will probably be fairly limited to Basic and assembly programming and w/o networking capability. But, it will be expandable, so who knows. I think they will eventually have a Kickstarter. Should be a lot of fun! this video
I really can't wait for that to happen. I'm going to be throwing money at that project like crazy. There's already an emulator for the OS [1]. I had never done any C64 programming, but I was able to do some BASIC tutorials using it with the exception of any video stuff, since that will be different on the X16. He did some videos about the project [2] [3]. I absolutely hate that he formed the group on Facebook. I'll be missing so much. [1] [LINK] [2] this video [3] [LINK]