Miraculously, I was able to get one of the X16 Developer Boards! I’m putting a few other projects on hold, to learn and develop on the X16 a bit more. If you’re not familiar with the project, here is a brief “kickoff” video. The next batch of these should be available by the end of the year.
voidstar’s Commander X16 Developer Board celebration kickoff 2023 (warning: spoilers) - YouTube
Nice one. Here’s the link to your blog from the video description:
Lazy question: why did you swap to a CRT at one point?
Second lazy question: one of the platform games has an anti-pillarboxing widescreen infill - is that some kind of automatic feature for a 4:3 game or is that something the game had to do?
Edit: there’s a link to an in-browser emulator on the project home page
And the machine specs can be found at the FAQ - are these up to date?
Swapped for a moment just since I was testing Composite vs VGA video output, to make sure it worked OK. CRTs emit a high pitch noise that my daughter can year (15khz? I think), after a few minutes it gives her a headache. So, I don’t use the CRTs very often anymore.
Hmm, did you mean Montezuma, at around 12min? It has “darkened edges” (on left and right sides), I noticed that - but don’t have an explanation yet (on if it was intentional or an “accidental effect” on being on a widescreen).
Thanks for the extra info for context about their project!
EDIT: Yes, I believe those specs are current.
An NTSC compatible CRT TV or monitor can have a very annoying 15KHz whine that I can still hear even though I am over 60. A VGA CRT monitor doubles the horizontal frequency to 31KHz and so is ok.
About the Commander X16, the claim that there are no good video chips they could have used is a little odd. They looked at the TI 9918 and weren’t happy with its limitations but its successor, the 9938 used in MSX2 machines, is pretty close to what they ended up doing in FPGA. I will agree that their Vera is a little better, however.
I think this was one of those times when they had to choose between two competing design goals. On the one hand, no powerful modern programmable logic / microcontrollers. On the other hand, only components in current production.
I was able to get one of the Commander X16 early Development Boards (one of the last ones, #108) over the summer - and have had a lot of fun with the system!!
It’s not quite as “like the C64” as I had hoped - there are similarities, but many “old tricks” aren’t the same and the X16 UserPort also isn’t the same as on the C64 (although the IEC port is very much the same, so you can still use Commodore Printers and disk drives).
But that said - it’s not meant to be a C64 clone. It is its own distinct system. The main similarities to the C64 and the startup BASIC v2 and PETSCII character set. But beyond that, it has lots of “KERNEL” and BASIC keyword extensions to easily access a lot of the extended audio and video (and mouse!) features.
I was even able to make a fishing simulator that made use of the mouse wheel !
For development on the system:
BASLOAD is a version of BASIC that doesn’t require line numbers. It is not quite like QuickBASIC, but it does also allow symbolic GOTOs. BASLOAD combined with X16EDIT has made on-system development a lot easier and fun. (they may change the official name of BASLOAD before the final release; it is meant to be one of the pre-loaded ROM modules – they’ve also added an on-system hexeditor built into one of the ROM slots)
Prog8 is another programming environment available to the Commander X16, along with support by cc65.
And of course the VERA FX updates has shown that system is very viable for real on-system 3D effects (including shading and lighting). You can see some of those results in this video:
There is also an “unofficial” brief intro. manual here (but a more formal ~70 page spiral manual is also planned):
The X16 Discord community is active and we continue to add more PRG software free for download at the X16 Forum Download section. Check out the MegaMan demo!
The next round of X16 hardware pre-order is now up! 1000 units have been allocated for production at a Richardson, Texas facility (making it an “Assembled in USA” system!).
We’ll be shoring up documentation and sample programs between now and when the pre-orders are scheduled to begin delivery next February!
The pre-order link is here: