Well in my opinion you’re allowed as many as you want. It’s an artistic decision about whether you want to be writing more towards the “hard SF” side or the fantasy side of the spectrum. But that should not be used as an excuse to shut down conversations about how this kind of thing might play out in reality.
And again, let me emphasize I’m not trying to tell him how to write his story; I’m merely trying to explore the space of ideas he’s opened up. If that needs to be split out into a separate thread, fair enough, but let’s not shut it down.
One major issue there is the programming tools, which was why I was careful to mention them in my previous post. Existing large programmable devices, if they’ve not had their lock fuses blown at maufacture, may still not be programmable for you unless you have access to and the platforms on which to run the tools necessary to program them. But that aside, yeah, that kind of scavenging is already going on in full force; it seems that a lot (perhaps almost all) of the older chips you buy off of AliExpress are pulled from old devices (and often re-marked as something else, as several threads on forum.6502.org have shown.)
Yup. That’s an area of great interest to me, although it now seems that Isaac’s story background is headed in a different (although also interesting) direction, more involving re-use of already existing older software and hardware platforms, rather than components.
Most of the Atari ST enthusiast community does indeed use emulation on compromised platforms. And there are presumably some people who use refurbed antiques and true replicas. But then there are some weirdos who do full custom hardware that replicates functionality at a low level, but with more modern hardware. Sure, the major governments don’t like it, but then there are always folks who get away with breaking the rules, and there are usually countries where relevant laws are lax and/or not really enforced.
And then there’s the fact that enforcement and strictness of laws waxes and wanes with time.
Although I’ll admit I’d expect this to be more likely with the Commodore 64 platform than, say, the Atari ST. There’s just something about the SID sound which enthusiasts are just crazy for, but there’s a limited supply of SID chips. Sooner or later, I think folks are going to have enough demand to create true SID chip replicas, and possibly VIC2 even. I don’t see the same level of enthusiasm I see for the C64, for any other vintage computing platform.
Acorn’s BBC Micro failed to cross the pond, or indeed to cross the Channel, but there’s a lot of enthusiasm for it, and many recent projects taking it in some interesting directions. As you may know, it was architected to support second processors, and back in the day it did have 8, 16 and even 32 bit second processors. But while the original 6502-based machine is very much ROM based, the second processors had only a small boot ROM, so the whole topic doesn’t quite match this thread…
(I say failed: I mean in big numbers. It crossed both bodies of water in a small way.)
Edit: of course I agree that the C64 was a much bigger phenomenon, in far more countries, and does retain a very lively and enthusiastic scene.
Right. If I understand you correctly, we’re saying the same thing.
And we have pretty much exactly this situation with the Apple 1 right now. So I tend to divide the standalone-hardware-based systems into three groups:
Original hardware and “replicas,” which use the original parts or ones that are substantially the same even if they are of modern manufacture. So folks building these might make their own PCB, but it would be one in which you could still use all the parts from an original Apple 1. They might use a WD65C02 and 74HC parts but, though built on newer processes, they are still very similiar to the original parts and need minimal or no changes to the original hardware design.
“Clones,” that hew to the original system design (if not necesarily implementation), particularly in terms of exact or almost-exact software compatibility. This is mainly about replacing things that are overly complex or, more often, just really hard to get with modern substitutes done in an entirely different way. Many people call these “replicas,” as you can even see in the name of my example, but I use “clone” to distinguish them from the other type of replica above. (I’m open to changing this terminology, so long as we can avoid using the same word for these two different things.) Examples include:
My RC6502 Apple 1 Replica SBC is an example of that: the video/keyboard circuit from the CPU’s point of view is exactly the same (talk to an M6821 PIA, even an original chip in this case) but the other side of that is entirely replaced by a modern microcontroller that does I/O to a serial port rather than the original NTSC video output and ASCII-encoded keyboard input.
The C64 Direct-to-TV, which uses an ASIC to implement the entire circuitry of the C64.
Systems that take a lot of ideas from the designs above, but are improved, possibly not fully compatible, and have software that takes advantages of these improvements that won’t run in the same way on the original hardware or replicas. This covers things like:
An RC6502 system with any of the various expansion boards that add a UART, video output, joystick, PSG, etc.
My RC6502 SBC above expanded with the SD card interface I’ve been working on, the in-system EEPROM programming extension I’ve yet to build, a fast UART to replace the slow 6821 “video/keyboard” interface, etc. (Once this kind of stuff is debugged, it may well turn into a custom SBC fairly different from the RC6502 SBC.)
Drogon’s Ruby-6502, with not only ideas taken from the BBC Micro but also anot insubstantial amount of software ported from it. It serves as a platform for development of new 6502 software to run on both it and other 6502 systems.
As well as many original C64s being around (option 1 above) and various replicas (as mentioned in option 2), C64 fans have already gone full-bore on option 3: the Commander X16. (There’s a decent video intro here. Ironically, in light of your WIP, the folks who started this project elected to post most of their discussion and specs in Facebook groups that require you to join Facebook to see them.)
Especially if retro-like systems are being used to run modern rather than contemporary software, and run it for serious use rather than just playing about, I see use of option 3 soon far outgrowing the use of replicas and clones, simply because when software is under active development, hardware tends to develop along with it. People using IBM PCs and its clones steadily added hard drive controllers, better video systems, improved sound and music generators, mice, network interfaces and so on (even including improved CPUs) until these became so standard that pretty much all motherboards included these on-board. The same is already happening today with systems based on retro designs.