Turaco's latest schematic is still waiting for peer review -- right now, that is the single most valuable contribution anyone could make. Pointing out errors in the schematic at this point will save time and money and effort down the road. This design can't be made from PTH parts for prototyping, it has to go right to SMD in-factory population (except for people really comfy with SMD work!), so the better the shot at working first time, the happier we'll all be.
@mos_8502 Just stumbled across your project. Sounds like a really cool idea. FYI I'm planning to buy a #CX16 once they are more available. I like the design and capabilities of the VERA as well as the choice to use SNES controllers. I think using both of these in your design should make it way easier to port games between the two platforms.
I'm a retrocomputing newbie so I can't really help now, but I will be following your progress and will perhaps pick up a finished board.
@leimon @swetland I designed the schematic, the default system font, the default colour palette, eventually I'll design the default case design (printable STL to be released freely), and I will be doing at least most of the BIOS, BDOS, and command shell, piecing blobs of others' code together with mine to make something usable. No NIH syndrome allowed here.
@mos_8502 @swetland I do agree with you. I didn't grow up using a C64, so I'm not familiar with this old variant of M$ BASIC. Also, I'm not super keen on the archaic DOS commands that have to be used to navigate the filesystem. That being said, having a well-defined modern retro system with capabilities approximating the SNES is a truly awesome thing.
IMHO writing a game for one of these systems is good enough to check the "Wrote a NES game off the bucket list".
@leimon @mos_8502 I did grow up with a C64, and feel like modern systems miss the simplicity and "one person can easily understand the whole system" nature of early personal computers, but definitely don't think there's a need to reproduce the all the rough edges of those systems in a modern reimagined version of that era of machines.
Strong agreement that a SNES style tile-and-sprites display engine is the best-of-breed of that era and very accessible to hobby/indie development.
@leimon Happy to have you. I got no real beef with the CX16 community, just technical criticisms of the design and manufacturing choices. The VERA is a really good design, though -- and it's MIT licensed, and universal enough to adapt to almost any memory bus. Z80 port I/O was trivial to work out, with only very minor changes to the Verilog (changes I didn't do, that was @swetland being an absolute legend as usual!)