How about an AMEGA1985!

Last edited by DiscreetFX on 25-Feb-2020 at 10:05 AM.

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Intriguing... Could we see a MiST dressed up as an A500?

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You mean like this?

https://www.retrosummit.com/2020/02/16/unamiga-a500-header-compatible-with-a500-and-checkmate-1500-cases/

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Little brother of the Amiga 1000? This has Ethernet and HDMI. And doesn't it feature a 256 colour palette? Not to mention being based on actual Commodore hardware. Things which the A1000 didn't have. Unless they are comparing with a new FPGA A1000 in the making.

Interesting news.

The "Commodore 65" was never finished however. AFAIK, no fully working prototypes were made, they were all at various unfinished stages with their respective bugs in both HW and SW.

What is the policy regarding this, on this project? I mean, will the product be shipped with flaws/bugs preserved (the real Commodore design preserved, as far as it ever got) or has there been development beyond Commodore's? Or are there two branches, i.e. one preserved branch and one developed to go beyond?

Seeing that it has stereo 16-bit audio beyond the dual "soft SID" suggests that this is in fact something different than the C65? So maybe this should be looked at as some general FPGA-computer in a custom case with some "C65" (or C64 or Amiga) thrown in for curiosity?

@Hypex

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Little brother of the Amiga 1000?

Well, it was developed more than half a decade later than Amiga 1000 went for sale.

Feature wise, most people would say that the C65 was somewhere in between the C64 and Amiga, but I think it was more a continuation of the C64 than it was anything Amiga.

• It had a much weaker 8-bit CPU (with some improved 16-bit functionality) clocked at half the speed of the Amiga 68000.

• It had half the RAM, and half the ROM compared to the A1000. Most certainly very much slower.

• It had no Paula, it had two SID's. Huge difference.

• It had no Denise, instead it used the "VIC-III" as a base with all "VIC-II" modes preserved. The default was the normal textmode with 80 × 25 characters for C65 mode (40 × 25 characters when booted into C64 mode), nothing like the Amiga.

• It didn't use a disk-based OS like the Amiga, on power-on you went into the Basic environment just like PET/Vic20/C64/C128, but with "Basic 10.0"

So again, I don't think it's anywhere near comparable to Amiga, more like a continuation to the C64.

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This has Ethernet and HDMI

The Commodore 65 never did, neither in HW nor in SW. So this is different; "it has Ethernet and HDMI" in the same sense like Win-UAE has it. I wonder if the Ethernet is even visible/accessible from the C65/C64, and if so, how...?

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And doesn't it feature a 256 colour palette?

The Amiga 1000 OCS (NTSC) could do 640×200 (640×400 with interlace) resolution with 32 colors out of 4096.

At that resolution, the C65 could only show 16 colors out of 4096, in other words half of the Amiga 1000.

To be able to show 256 colors graphics (still out of 4096, nothing like the AGA's 16.7 million), the resolution had to be halved to 320×200. And remember that it's also planar graphics we are talking about. Slow! I take it that it's a unified memory architecture. There seems to be some blitting functionality in the VIC-III, but there was AFAIK no copper functionality like Agnus had, and no Fast-RAM. The RAM in the machine was probably also clocked very low. The 8-bit CPU of the C65 is clocked at half the clock of a stock A1000, but had it been clocked at 7MHz it would still be very slow in comparison because of its inferior design and many limitations compared to the 68000.

So an educated guess is that the "256 color" thing is kind of useless in practice, and that probably also for the lower bitplane modes. Not at all like the Amiga, with its faster memory design, faster CPU and its custom chips to offload the CPU.

In this video they load and display high color images on a C65. Look at the speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL4iX_iuBO8

Indeed the speed is affected by loading speed from the disk drive, but I honestly don't think you'd see games in these graphic modes. On the Amiga you would, but on the C65 these modes are probably more similar to some very time consuming HAM, a curiosity thing, rather than something usable. For games and stuff you'd probably still be using the traditional VIC modes.

So I'd hardly consider the C65 to be a big brother of Amiga 1000...

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The Amiga 1000 OCS (NTSC) could do 640×200 (640×400 with interlace) resolution with 32 colors out of 4096.

Are you sure about this? It's been 20 years, but I seem to recall that 640-modes were only 16 colors.

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@TRIPOS
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@Hypex Quote: Little brother of the Amiga 1000? snip So I'd hardly consider the C65 to be a big brother of Amiga 1000...

@TRIPOS

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Well, it was developed more than half a decade later than Amiga 1000 went for sale.

Which doesn't make sense given they needed AGA by then.

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Feature wise, most people would say that the C65 was somewhere in between the C64 and Amiga, but I think it was more a continuation of the C64 than it was anything Amiga.

It should be a continuation of the C64. Except for the odd model number.

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? It had no Paula, it had two SID's. Huge difference.

Technically, this could be seen as superior. Being able to play real chip tunes. Since it was a six channel synthesizer. With PCM also added. Against the Amiga simple four channel PCM. With AM/FM features rarely used, taking a track away.

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? It had no Denise, instead it used the "VIC-III" as a base with all "VIC-II" modes preserved. The default was the normal textmode with 80 × 25 characters for C65 mode (40 × 25 characters when booted into C64 mode), nothing like the Amiga.

Yes, a text mode, just like every real Commodore had. And every common 8-bit home computer.

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The Amiga 1000 OCS (NTSC) could do 640×200 (640×400 with interlace) resolution with 32 colors out of 4096.

As stated, in hi res it was limited to 16 colours. Unless the NTSC model had a special feature.

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To be able to show 256 colors graphics (still out of 4096, nothing like the AGA's 16.7 million), the resolution had to be halved to 320×200. And remember that it's also planar graphics we are talking about. Slow!

Well, it is compared against an A1000 , not an A1200. So it''s still more than an A1000 could do, which had a 32 colour entries.

The use of bitplanes is unusual, as that's an Amiga thing and not a C64 thing. A single bitplane forrming one bitmap is universal. as both the C64 and Amiga had similar bitmap modes, with sequencial pixel bits mapped in bytes. But in multicolor mode the C64 used a packed or chunky format, even if it halved resolution. And in all C64 modes character based colour selection.Though I read the bitplanes are orgsanised into character blocks just like on the C64.

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There seems to be some blitting functionality in the VIC-III, but there was AFAIK no copper functionality like Agnus had, and no Fast-RAM.

It doesn't need a copper to reset the screen. And that is an Amiga thing. It would have raster interrupts. But, I doubt it would allow the control the Amiga had, being able to specify RGB. Since a C64 had a set palette.

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On the Amiga you would, but on the C65 these modes are probably more similar to some very time consuming HAM, a curiosity thing, rather than something usable.

Well, unlike HAM, they would be straight forward with up to 256 colours. More like AGA 8-bitplane mode. But where the bytes are organised into 8x8 pixel character blocks instead. Provided it's like that and not using a colour byte map like a C64, which would make sense, given it's built on a character matrix.