My MEGA65 is finally here

I love this project.

I've been feeling lately that as computers have become more advanced and software has become more inscrutable, our relationship with our computers has changed, for the worse. This essay hit home for me: https://explaining.software/archive/transparent-like-frosted...

These old-school computers viewed their users as creators, as developers. Modern computers (read: smartphones) _are_ the users, and the "used" are just ad-watching revenue cows. I passionately hate this arrangement.

When I have children, I want them to know what computing should feel like---empowering, creative and stimulating, not controlled, consumptive, compulsive and mindless. I want to give them a computer that builds up their spirit, rather than grinding it down.

I think this computer should have several qualities:

0. The computer should be about _creation_ and not consumption.

1. The computer should be _local_, not global. Intranet should be prioritized over Internet.

1.5 A corollary, the computer should be _personal_. It should encourage and reward in-person interaction, physical sharing of information and programs, and short-range connection between computers.

2. The computer should be _limited_. Because the medium is the message, we have to restrict the capabilities of our media to better promote the messages we value.

2.5. A corollary, the computer should be _text-oriented_. Graphics shouldn't be impossible, but text should be primary. The computer should cultivate a typographic mind, not a graphic mind (in Marshall McLuhan's terminology).

3. The computer should be _focused_. It should never distract you from what you want to work on.

4. The computer should be _reactive_, not proactive. It should never give you a notification. You should be in charge of retrieving all information yourself, like a library, not a call center.

5. The computer should be _physical_. It should be oriented around physical media.

6. The computer should be _modifiable_. It should encourage and reward inspection into its internals, and be easy to change.

7. The computer should be _simple_, understandable by a single person in its entirety with time and study.

The Mega65 is amazing and checks these boxes, but unfortunately it's a tad expensive for me. What other machines are out there like this?

That box design is giving me huge nostalgia waves.

A program most nerds (including me) used to run on every computer we came across in department stores back in the 80’s. The salesmen must have been sick to death of kids doing this all day every day – some of the messages weren’t always so polite either!

As a diehard Amiga fan, I would always stop at the Macs on display at office supply stores and switch the color setting from "thousands of colors" to grayscale. Just doing my part.

In programming class at school, we'd be taught for a bit, then go to the computers to practice what we'd learned in BASIC. When class was over, we'd write programs to loop for maybe 15 minutes, then emit an obnoxious sound to interrupt the next class. Ideally, the chosen frequency would be high enough that the teacher couldn't hear it, but the class could. Truly madlads.

My favorite modern retrocomputer these days is https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/AgonLight2/o... which is orders of magnitude more powerful than the computers it is modeled on but affordable.

You have to have played with Commodore BASIC's PETSCII graphics abilities "back in the day" to really appreciate them. With no starting skill you could do animations, rudimentary video games and what have you, all in BASIC with just character graphics.

The reason it worked so well was the cursor control characters. Just by printing a string, for example, you could draw an outline box with text in it, or a little man, or whatever, in an instant.

The speed of BASIC was still an issue. I animated a train driving across the screen, about 10 characters high, and it worked fairly well but you could see a bit of a ripple. I don't remember how exactly, but, for example, each 1-character wide "slice" of the train could be a string, then you just print your 40 "slice" strings in a row and there's your train; pick your starting offset in a larger array to draw it in different phases of motion.

A faster CPU totally solves this. Now you have a machine where non-programmers can do really cool graphic stuff and smoothly too, without ever leaving BASIC.

The next step, generally, was about reprogramming the character set. Now your BASIC, character cell based graphics could have custom pixels, not just the preformed PETSCII characters.

I once saw a cute little character based platform jumper game on someone's VIC20 and went home and implemented it, from scratch, on the C64 in an afternoon. In BASIC, with a few custom characters.

But what may be missing in this retro scene is being able to show off your creations to everyone else who has the same computer. Without that, kids may not get interested.

I am mildly impressed that the floppy drive is not a supply chain liability nowadays.

This reminds me of the Foenix series of computers by Stephany Allaire, the F256K2 which is much like what a Commodore 256/512 might have been like as a successor of the Commodore 128.

They are available in 8, 16, 24 and 32-bit systems with a variety of CPUs such as the 65c02, 6809, 65816, 68000, or 68040.

Main website: https://c256foenix.com/

Wiki: https://wiki.c256foenix.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Retrocomputing enthusiasts in search of a cheap platform to tinker on may find interesting the VGA32, also ESP32 based, which employs the FabGL library.

https://www.lilygo.cc/products/fabgl-vga32

http://www.fabglib.org/

According to other sources on the internet that 12 pin header by the removable access cover connects to GPIO pins on the FPGA.

https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/media/pdf/ca/ca/31/Mega65-P...

Didn't one-byte man do a good review on this product?

A fully assembled computer? Get out of here with your fancy X2 safety caps and shock proof solder joints.

Now where’d I leave those Galaksija resistors…

I've been following this project pretty closely and even though it is based on the prototype Commodore 65, I kind of wish they had just gone with the superior aesthetics of the classic c64 for the outer shell even if that would have been less accurate. And the extra long spacebar, just ugh.

Thats pretty cool, expensive but nice features and so expandable. Looks like a large community too.

Doesn't that name risks to be confused with Atmel Mega CPUs used in Arduinos?

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/atmega64

Great job! Anyone knows of similar projects but for the Amiga?