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Re: Poll about Mockingboard h/w clone
Rubywand wrote:
...
> If including Speech seems like the way to go, someone could check for
> stocks of speech ICs from TI, OKI, etc..
These chips were not made in as large quantities as 6502's, and those
are relatively scarce. Reclaimed parts are relatively common, NOS
("New=unused" Old Stock) is pretty limited. Have you done a web search
for any 1980's speech chips? I see $50 chips, I see $300 minumum order
distributors.
>
> A2Central could sell the board and parts as a kit for $19.95 and the
> assembled board for $29.95.
In what quantity? Do you have a quote from a board maker? Doesn't take
too many $5 (or $50!) ICs and $15 boards to make a $20 kit. Not to
mention the nickel-and-dime stuff. And the time for a relatively
skilled engineer to layout the board, even if just copying an existing
board.
>
> Most current C-64 users already have the 30 games included in the
> Joystick64 and play them on a real C-64 or emulator. Had the product come
> with plugs for PC KB, disk drive, 2nd joystick, serial I/O, and VGA monitor
> plus an 8MHz speed switch, it could have sold decently at $39.95 to just
> current C-64 and emu-only C-64 users.
This seems unrealistic. I can (barely) see a market for a CD/DVD that
drops into your PC or Playstation with an emulator program. In fact,
these exist for various collections of old Atari arcade & home VCS
games. People with spare keyboards and monitors lying around, not to
mention disk drives and serial cables, are a niche market.
>
> There seem to be two kinds of retrocomputing market. One is composed of
> all the Apple II, C-64, Atari, etc. niches. An efficient producer could do
> well with relatively small runs of various products targeted at the niches.
>
> The other market is mostly untouched. It's the market for high
> performance computers which reestablish the retro idea of user control and
> relatively simple programmability. These new machines do not need to be
> compatible with Windows or the net; we have PC's for that.
And what do you do in 2005 with a computer that is not on the net?
Really?Those people who want to make little lights flash or stuff show
up on a computer screen can get an FPGA development kit for $99, plug
it into their PC parallel port and do it themselves. Or hack a Palm
Pilot or a white-box PC. Or emulate in software. I.e., be a parasite on
existing volume semiconductors & related products.
You can make a moderate-performance RISC CPU out of modern FPGAs plus
static RAMs, if that is your fancy. Computers for the masses run real
OS's that talk to the Net. These days, you use Linux. You've got
*total* control over Linux, if you want it.
There isn't an untapped honest-to-goodness-breakeven-dollars market
there waiting for a 32-bit 1 GHz Apple II-like architecture. Homebrew
computers with single-chip CPUs and discrete logic are 1970's and
1980's technology, and they just don't fit today. Might as well try to
bring back 8-track audio tapes.
2005 technology is FPGAs and other configurable logic, or embedded
processors, or mainstream CPUs with multi-layer GHz circuit boards and
dedicated highly-integrated chipsets. Or hobbyists doing their own
thing with quantity-1 or quantity-10 boards, and posting pictures on
the Web.
What you see is what you get.