The commander X16 is as many of you know. David Murray aka. The 8-bit guy's dream computer.
He wants to build a computer, that is made of off-the-shelves parts and is like, but not compatible with the commodore 64.
This project is very interesting. As it is meant as a learning tool for people who want to learn to program for computers.
The idea behind the project is that the computer should be simple enough for a single person to comprehend the entirety of the computer.
At the moment the computer is developed by Texelec (Boarddesign), Micheael Steil (Kernal development), Perifractic (Design and usermanual)
The Kernal is using the commodore basic which is being licensed by Cloanto but the specifications of the computer far supersedes the commodore 64.
At the moment the computer is being planned to have 40KB of "Low Ram" which is what is natively available for basic and then up to 2MB of "High Ram" which is banked in slots of 8KB.
The graphics output will be VGA and is run by the VERA module created by Frank Van Den Hoof. It has 128KB of dedicated memory.
At the moment the project is close to the first stage kickstarter, which will be a model of the computer which is very hackable. They hope to be able to launch the computer at a pricerange of 200-300 dollars.
They have released an emulator, so that people can start to create their own programs.
I have created a tic-tac-toe game for the emulator, which can be found here
https://github.com/Dansbo/tictactoe
To learn how to use sprites and such I have started to program a snakes and ladders game.
As it is a board and dice game it is really quite boring the gameplay. But a much needed step in my assembly development skills.
My brother and I will develop a game similar to 10-bullets https://www.kongregate.com/games/sushistory/10-bullets
I know this post is only scratching the surface of this computer. But I hope it has peaked your interest.
