Kalvan

Would you like a system that had the looks of a 1450 but the functionality of (say) a hypothetical 2080XE? Perhaps one on a fast FPGA (Like an Achronix Speedster at 1.8 Ghz) with a(n arbitrarily speeded up) 65816 softcore CPU, a 5" DSED Floppy, a 3M SuperDisk (Backward compatible with a 3.5 in Floppy, a 72-in-1 card reader, CD/DVD ROM Drive and a 30-in-1 OS ROM? I know I'd spend at least $500 to get something like that.

Wait a minute, you said that the DSP and Blitter still needed work. When you've finished with them, please let us know as soon as possible.

1. Will that board fit in a Mini-ATX case? 2: What sort of printers will be supported? 3: Was the Motorola 56000 replaced by a 96000 or a StarCore? Or was it simply reved up by the chipset FPGA to match the ColdFire CPU? 4: For FireBee II, might I suggest one of the newer varieties of FPGA for any new chipsets and features (Like say, support for PCI Express x1, x2, x4, and/or x16, upgrading the audio to a Yamaha YMF {or even an AMY}, and Blu-Ray playback with a BD-ROM Drive) with say, an Achronix Speedster (way faster speed than just 200Mhz), TierFPGA (relatively painless transition to an ASIC if volumes get high enough), or Tabula ABAX (effectively exttremely dense at standard FPGA speeds, but may have drawbacks in power consumption). 5: 12 watts may be rather higher than your original goal, but it is well within industry standard for laptop computers, and your motherboard design is remarkably compact. Would a laptop version be completely out of the question? If you could make one for less than $1,000, then baring unforseen financial emergencies, I don't think I could be able to refuse so long as it had the standard card readers, earphone jack, and at least a DVD-ROM drive.

Ports of: The actual arcade versions of Rygar and Ninja Gaiden At least the first three LucasArts SCUMM engine adventure games. Lemmings (great way to show off the sprite capabilities of MARIA compared to the NES version). Pac-Land, with two POKEY Chips and all those vibrant colors. Pac-Mania, but with more mazes. FCI's Hydide and Broderbund/Falcom's Dragon Slayer series (which America only saw in Legacy of the Wzard) Namco's Final Lap series And for original offerings: A Space Shoot-Em-Up with power-ups done better than Solaris. I think I could come up with something that opaquely stole the best aspects of the Gradius/Salamander series, R-Type, and Darius with no one the wiser. An Action-Adventure-RPG. I think I could do better than the likes of Zelda, Chrystalis, or Capcom's Willow. A full on RPG. If I can, I'll try to snag the Tunnels and Trolls or Rolemaster/MERP liscenses.

Please, Curt, not Youtube. Youporn or Tube8 on the other hand...

And where was this Chuck E. Cheese that had beer on tap? The ones I lived near only had root beer and ginger ale! (And both were formulated, not acutally brewed and fermented)

Except that NeXT was a real computer company with a real quality product, and Pixar had already come out with Toy Story, A Bug's Life, and Toy Story 2 by the time Apple brought Jobs back.

That takes a "technology is everything" point of view. It's not everything and there are a million .bombs to prove it. While I will be the first to criticize Steve Jobs and his funny use of "statistics" and his "reality distortion field", you can't argue with the man's success. Where has Woz been since 1998? First engineering new ASIC designs for a company that would later be bought out by Altera (The founder of which has now gone on to a new FPGA company using graphene based logic and memory), then working several ARM based chipset and SoaC projects that became the basis for several smartphones(not sure if that included the iPhone, but I wouldn't be surprised). Most recently (since 2007 or so) he's been the CTO for a company called Fusion I/O, which is one of only two companies so far (the other being OCZ)creating PCI Express based Solid State Drives. I'd say he's kept quite busy.

Last time I checked, Star Trek Online had roughly three million people playing and counting. At roughly $15 per mounth, that means that revenue so far is around $200,000,000. Frankly, I don't see what sort of advice Mr. Bushnell could give on the subject to Infogames.

Flashjazzcat: 1. What, if anything else, are you improving on besides RAM? 2. Will there be any NTSC versions that run on today's progressive-scan televisions? If not, will there be VGA versions so that I can hook one up to a standard LCD monitors?

It's not that I dislike ARM, it's just that Acorn won't license it for love or money beofre 1990, and for much the same reason Apple under Jobs will never liscense the Macintosh OS.

Well, if that's the case (I haven't been able to tell whether MIPS was fabless or not), they can hitch a ride on the Atari Semiconductor Group's vendor chain. Surely the folks making GTIAs, POKEYs, AMYs, JANICEs, and the like for Atari would love to help MIPS turn the R2000 into a workstation chip with a mainstream price. After all, I'm quite certain that Atari, Apple, Nintendo, NEC, and Acorn (Among many, many others) didn't get their 6502s directly from MOS after the Commodore buyout.

I said that he left Atari over it just like OTL, didn't believe in RISC. I also never mentioned ARM. As for the timeline on soc.history.what-if, that's back to the drawing board until Curt can give more details about Project GAZA (a motherboard layout would be a great starting point).

I had not meant to discuss this on this thread, but... I've been looking up all I can on the MIPS and related architectures. Even for the time, it was a remarkably small chip (less than half the transistor count of the 286, for instance), and from what I could read, it broke no new ground in terms gate, switch, or transistor design (how they were arrangeded was of course a different matter, but that's less of a consequence once it gets to the fabs). It seems like the single biggest expense MIPS had was in the design phase, not in spinning the masks or printing and cutting the chips. I highly suspect that a well placed chunk of extra Level 2 Funding fron Sunnyvale might make MIPS a little responsive to a special bulk discount if offered the production volume Atari would have in mind...

Tradwest's Slam Dunk The Data East Ghostbusters game (it was never on the NES to begin with) Pac Land Galaga '88 Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters Final Lap Sinistar (With a POKEY) Assalult/Tanx Mirai Ninja Tron Discs of Tron Vigilante (With a POKEY)