exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

A friend of mine just did this - which I think is great motivation and support for exxos' reST project as well

http://wordpress.hertell.nu/?p=587

Been a few interesting projects pop up, there's also an Amiga 4000 replica board too which a chap was posting about in the Commodore Amiga fb group.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Amiga-4000-Rep ... 663.l10137

Definitely interesting times for all of this. There is most certainly the desire there for an Atari ST Next amongst several of us, the equivalent of the ZX Spectrum Next but for the Atari ST. Something able to keep it's original cycle accurate behaviours/specs & compatibility but also able to access the new video modes, accelerated Mhz CPU, DSP sound or dual YM2149 board add-on, more RAM etc. for writing STOS games too. Yes please!

There's a Amiga 1000 board too with some upgrades :

http://www.illuwatar.se/project_pages/g ... ba1000.htm

And a ZX Spectrum board :

https://www.specnext.com/about/

This looks good Spectrum clone with no ULA :

https://www.bytedelight.com/

Now and again another clone of something else pops up Acorns, Amstrads and obscure systems no one's ever heard of.

Then there's all the system on a chip clones and FPGA things are they really clones where does the line cross?

Is that the chucky terrible fire sometimes mentions?

Why don't people create the schematics and do a new board ? A lot easier to make circuit changes and mods then. If I copied the STE, id copy DMA issues along with it.. I'm all for starting over.

I went to the Specrtrum birthday party at the at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/), and aside from being a good day out, and selling one of my QLs, the guy from ByteDelight was there. It's quite amazing what can be done now that things, such as PCB design and production, are no longer just restricted to large companies, because it's opened up quite the cottage industry in new retro computers.

I take my hat off to everybody who is able to do this, and I'm really lucky to be a part of the STFM remake, it's awesome.

There does seem to be a fair few "remake" projects about in recent years I think as prices have dropped with PCBs in recent times, its opening up new possibilities for things. Of course now we can do custom logic chips for like £5, we can build in all the mods we always wanted

Of course, with the FPGA based systems you're not necessarily restricted to a single processor core, though you'd need a very large FPGA for multiple M68K processors I imagine. But you could, in theory, create a universal Atari compatible, backwards compatible but looking forward.

Something possibly in a TT/Mega STE style case with built-in ethernet, 68000 and 68030 cores, full USB 2 High-Speed capability, HDMI output and able to run in ST(e)/TT and Falcon modes as well as its own.

However, the design work would be huge and I very much doubt you could get enough people to work upon it or order enough to make it viable financially or operationally.

The ZX Spectrum Next project is far less ambitious and builds upon previous designs and yet it's taken two years by a team of, I think, four and a big crowd funding campaign to get where it is today, and it's still not shipped (the final product) almost a year late, though a lot of this is due to the case.

I think the key lesson to learn is never under estimate the amount of work involved. Make a pessimistic estimate and double it.

exxos wrote: ↑Sat Aug 18, 2018 11:57 pm Is that the chucky terrible fire sometimes mentions?

Why don't people create the schematics and do a new board ? A lot easier to make circuit changes and mods then. If I copied the STE, id copy DMA issues along with it.. I'm all for starting over.

would be cool to have a new STE motherboard which fits in short 520 ST case

Cyprian wrote: ↑Sun Aug 19, 2018 1:15 pm would be cool to have a new STE motherboard which fits in short 520 ST case

Once the ST remake is done, stuff like jag ports and DMA sound can be added easy enough, pretty much will be a STE by the time its done. But needs to be large to have room for the addon ports.

An Amiga 3000 motherboard would have been great. There are few 100% working motherboards because of the battery leakage.