 Welcome. This talk is about the Mega 65 project and it is a new talk. I just created three weeks ago as I had a funny idea to go to such conventions and see if this is a great thing and I can tell you I had lots of fun. Who am I? My name is Oliver Graf. I am someone who started with a Wig 20 then moved over to a C128. I had slight contacts with Apple IIs in my school doing UCSD Pascal and other funny things like manual presets on four-color needle printers or something like that. As I moved on to a PC I quickly discovered that Windows is not my thing so Linux it was and in my work life I'm a network architect and a software developer at the local little ISP in Rhineland Palatinate. With the Mega 65 project I'm associated since 2021 and I started looking back into retro computing and stumbled over projects like Commander X16 and Mega 65 and also I started with a manual board set and somehow I got sucked into the project because I discovered a problem and the reaction of the developers was hey try to fix it. Yeah so I fixed it and then I was suddenly part of the team and since 2022 I like to call myself the GitHub janitor. I look after the repositories I prepare for releases and I also actively develop on the core and on infrastructure for the PC and for the Mega 65 itself. Yeah what's the Mega 65? For that we first take a little look back into history so 1980 we had the Wig 20 as we all know 1982 the Commodore 64 followed and 1985 so short time periods we had the Commodore 128. Then around 1986-87 you all know what Commodore did they bought Amiga and brought out the first Amiga and a bit later 1991 they suddenly decided hey let's do another 8-bit platform and the names that were in fluctuation were C65 or also C64DX so the not classic design with a front loading floppy drive and a three and a half inch floppy drive which you did not see in the old Commodore computers they always had the 1541 or 1571 the 51 quarter inch disks. Yeah they developed the system they developed new ships it had a glitter like ship DMA magic ship they called it it had a new Wig ship it had the same old sit chip and it had a new CPU the 4510 and this one don't had any undefined opcodes as the 65 or 2 had. Yeah so then features got tested ROM got developed and people were set up on the task to determine how compatible the C65 which had a C64 mode is to the C64 because the C64 there is this huge software library so you want to have this software library for your new 8-bit machine and yeah the testers were not happy with the system it was not very compatible you didn't have the five and a quarter inch floppy drive directly there you had to buy another drive and those drives were very expensive because they had a whole CPU inside as we all know on and that was one of the reasons it did not both well for the testers and also those pesky not pesky pesky opcodes the undocumented or yeah the undocumented opcodes they did not work so most of the very old software that made use of them did not work and other features also did not quite sync up with the C64 software library so because of that and perhaps also of because of financial reasons they yeah terminated the project and to that time we don't know exactly around 200 systems we think we're in fluctuation with different hardware revisions and they got sold off or thrown away for little money and the development was completely halted and more Amigas were made obviously you can buy those systems I think I talked today with a few people who actually have one with one who has one and I also know people who have one if you look for eBay auctions or look on the wiki page of the C65 you can find that it is sold for prizes up to 20 30 30 000 euros because it's so rare if it is worth it I don't know but in the end this was the reason why different people decided hey the C65 would be interesting perhaps we can recreate it and one of those people was Paul Steven Gardner from Australia and the other folks were mega the non-profit club so in German Fein which I'm a member of decided yeah let's proceed look at this and let's develop a C64 in some way and the first designs in VHDL and very lock certain parts are very lock we're made on the Nexus for DDR development board which has a Arctic 7 100 t FPGA so it's a pure FPGA FPGA development board no modern CPU on it and you can see there are lots of cables connected there and the board is actually in a C65 case with the cables the original keyboard was connected yeah and then the work began to implement all those ships that were documented there were technical documentations there were diagrams of the system and from that we recreated those electronics in the FPGA after the designs looked good the first real or the first custom PCB was made with this we now had the interfaces the system should have so on the Nexus board you only have modern interfaces USB and such things and here we then added the expansion board the joystick ports VGA HGMI is not very old but we decided we need one for better yeah so that more people can use it not everyone has an old monitor we have an IEC interface and this one on the side is the floppy interface because the the drive in the C65 had its own ship for controlling the floppy drive and this was not compatible with the way Commodore did its other drives so yeah it had to be done in an extra way so this is why it's not some internal IEC bus after the first revision of the board which had about I think it was three or four PCBs were made in total a better design was made more parts were added that we found out we needed for a full system we have some connect extra connectors crew connectors we have extra breakouts for the FPGA this board had around 25 produce units and they are still in use for desk hits we lend out to developers who are interested in developing for the mega 65 so to push the software development of yeah real mega 65 software and not have to yeah use C65 software because there was not really C65 software in the past the system was not released so we needed to create some software we can use the third revision of the board this is the one that actually got produced in big numbers we had development kit with this board and also the produced units that are now in the field are also with this board the board has a much better digital audio output it has very many small corrections we found out the R2 R2 board was yeah bad in some way and we opted for raising the size of the flash ship that is on the board so as this is a pure FPGA board we need some place where the bit stream so so to say the configuration of the FPGA where the logic that is put into the ship is described this needs to be in some flash ship the FPGA will scan automatically and this we made bigger because we thought it would be nice to have more place for putting in more cores because we thought hey perhaps people might make other cores than the mega 65 in some time yeah we did not have the case yet because the case you can see at the booth is injection molded case and such an injection molded case is very pricey to produce because you need to build a tooling to make this injection mold and it's it was around 70 000 euros and for being able to create this as a non-profit organization we did searching for English words spend donations yeah thank you we made a donation drive for the tooling and it went faster than we thought actually because yeah people donated crazy amounts so but we had not we did not have the case yet we only had test cases so the first 100 death kits we called them had a plexiglass acrylic case with the real keyboard and all the real electronics and a floppy drive in this case the floppy drive goes out to the side some people ask for that very much yeah but the real case is the real thing so it goes out to the front we had produced 100 of those and they had a very high high price point of 999 euros and they were also meant to get in developers yeah perhaps we should not have written limited edition on it so a lot of them are in yeah displays and not used at all we know that for the future yeah but as I said the donation drive went well it's gathered around 30 000 euros in the first two months and got slower and slower and slower and people got worried oh it will take till 2030 but then one guy donated 40 000 euros and we were over the limit so many thanks to him he really wanted the case yeah but we were we also wanted the case and it's a very beautiful you have to look at it and touch it in reality it also has a very nice keyboard which is a sherry mx mechanical keyboard made by gmk of the case is made by hirschsteiner in österreich sorry and electronics inside are made by trans electronics which is also german company so all the parts are made in germany okay ships are imported for sure but that's also a bit of yeah we didn't want to make it in china we wanted to make it in european countries and we didn't want to use kickstarter we wanted a normal ordering process and no confusion about do i get what i pay for or don't i get it yeah um what can i point out yeah the whole platform i like to call it consists of many parts one part we see which is the case the keyboard and the fpga mainboard then we have the fpga core of the mega 65 with which it implements the the chips the electronics inside the fpga and then we have another part which is the rom the rom is also based on the original rom komodoro developed for the c65 we based it on the original sources and developed it so that it got to production level um and the the thing is you can exchange parts so you you can it's an fpga you can run other different cores on the system you can also use different roms you don't need to use the original rom there's an open rom the open rom also runs on the mega 65 open rom also runs i think on c64 i'm not sure um um the the problem with the sources of the original rom is chloranto has the rights for the rom at least they told us so and um because of this we can't give uh put out the roms for anyone we only can put out patches for the rom um and only users that have a mega 65 get the key so that they can download the full roms and that they can access our github repositories of the rom which brings me to the next point um which is github because the whole mega 65 project is open source all parts of it are on github with the exception of the closed rom because we need to do so chloranto told us um the diffs of the rom are based on a rom chloranto provides for free with the c64 forever package so in the c64 forever package look in the roms folder you will find some c65 roms there and yeah with that we are in the clear with the patches um there are many parts of the project um all those i explained we have the core which is the fpga configuration recreating the electronics we have the mega 65 tools which are tools for your pc we um support all major three platforms um to um communicate with your mega 65 and we have the user guide which is um a manual for the mega 65 and it is uh in the package you get when you buy a mega 65 240 pages ring bound manual as in the old days you can lay it flat on your table you have all the basic commands explained okay one so about the manual is from 2021 and uh it is uh yeah it it's changed in the past but we need to print new manual so the next batch part of it will get new manuals um but the whole manual is uh not 240 pages the whole manual is around 1300 1400 pages you have the whole documentation you have the the cpu modes documented the all the registers of the ships and there's a lot and it's not done yet so we still are working on this we have volunteers that do spell checking or replacing all occurrences with of kernel with kernel or kernel with kernel it shifts sometimes what's the right word and um yeah there are many parts we also welcome contribution so if you are happy to help and there's also an emulator of the mega 65 you don't need actually hardware then um there is a lot to do um yeah and everything is community-based so the hardware is done by real companies that do this for living but the software that runs on the system is done by the open source project and another part that the project attracted somehow is this um uh two developers began exploring the platform they also had the development system and um they started porting mr course mr is a different uh fpga-based platform it's a bit different than the mega 65 because the mr not only has a fpga it also has an arm dual core cpu on it so the mega 65 don't have any cpu uh except if you put a cpu in the fpga um and it uses the the the arm cpu for stuff like on-screen display and and sd card access and usb devices so it's not so easy to take the cpu implementations of some system that is made for the mr and plug it into the mr the mega 65 so over the course of three different cores which was a gameboy colore uh satyx you know which is a satyx spectrum core and the c64 core of the mr project they developed a mr to mega 65 framework which i call a hell for a hardware abstraction layer and this framework provides um uh abstraction of the hardware of the mega 65 so all the ports you have and it provides a 16 bit q nice cpu which is a yeah cpu that somebody developed i can't remember the name and this uh does the menus and on screen displays you normally have on the mr and with this it was possible to um accelerate the development of course you can use um the framework to develop more new cores to have all the um peripherals um already done in vhdl and can concentrate on the cpus and graphic ships you need and you can rapidly rapidly port mr cores to the mega 65 so currently um this happens uh mostly with arcada cores it's not so the thing i really like to see but it's nice to have um as a proof of concept essentially um so a galaga core was essentially ported in a few weeks and then you could play galaga on the mega 65 and for me that was a indicator that the framework is well designed and can be easily used by someone who's knowledge of vhdl and electronic design yeah about software there are already software releases for the mega 65 okay and not the big library of the c64 um but we have a arcada shooter like game and um uh infocom adventure hibernated which are um released as real boxed games by polyplay and there's a new game in development you can play it at my booth um it's not quite done but it displays some of the graphical features we put in the week for graphics chip and yeah there are development tools you can use to communicate with the mega 65 um you have ways to um directly put software from your pc if you cross develop on the mega 65 and you can also develop software directly on the mega 65 there's for example one project that is called 11 it is a eda ide for the um mega 65 a basic ide a basic but the mega 65 from already has basic yeah but it is a basic that don't have line numbers but labels and it can use long variable names and it has some preprocessing stuff going on and um the the way it works is if you compile the program it does not create some pcode or assembly it creates a basic 65 program from the source and while you're doing that and testing your program you can always jump back into the development environment on your mega 65 you can do the whole development there so there are both ways available on the pc side um llvm moss uh was recently um expanded with um support for the mega 65 cpu opcodes so now you can use rust to develop for the mega 65 natively which is interesting i'm not sort of a rust fan um yeah and we don't uh stop where we wear them we develop on and uh this is the future this is the next board this is an r4 board there's the small four but it's all already old um i hope in a few weeks we have the r5 board so why do we have a new board revision um i could say commodore also put out new board revisions every year so why shouldn't we um that's uh in the style of commodore now the the board had some problems we found out and users found out for example the hdmi port of the r3 board had a hdmi back power problem we are in good company there i think the spectrum next first revision also had hdmi back power problems so essentially more power from the monitor flows into the fpga and does weird stuff with it with it sometimes um so on the new board there's protection for that then we have new um hardware for the digital audio again um there are some nice est cages on some ships but we only need one of them um we have huge we had huge problems with our rtc or real-time clock in the r3 boards there we got uh during the ship crisis we got a bad batch of rtcs and there was no way of finding this out before creating the board making the boards and uh yeah about 20 percent of them just don't click tick um there's a workaround with external clock through and um there's also a program where you can request external clock from us if you have a broken rtc so on this new board we decided to go full way and put on a swiss rtc so this should really tick i think and there's a supercap which holds power for the rtc if you decide to change the battery and uh we are not associated with edeka i just bought the power cell there um what is also changed on the r5 board the r5 board has on the expansion port and on the joystick ports we have pins that are not bi-directional and they were bi-directional on orange cell c64 so um this is a thing we also fixed in this revision and the last big thing is the old boards all had eight megabytes of hyper-rum which is serially connected sounds a lot but yeah the the system has memory in the fpga this memory is very fast because it's directly in the fpga the hyper-rum is with one serial line or two lines essentially connected or are it four very not not many lines and it is slow and it has lots of latency and the developers of the mr2 mega 65 framework told us they can't do the big cause with that setup they made experiments they worked with buffering and all of it did not really had the results they hoped for so we couldn't know that before and we didn't plan for we may we need 64 megabytes of ram for what we only want to make a c65 yeah but they um um wanted more memories so we heard that call and we um added 64 megabytes of sd-rum which is parallely connected to the fpga and which is really fast uh so we already could test this on the r4 board um the r5 board has a few minor revisions to that and every unit will which will chip out from now will have this new board as soon as we have finalized it so first we need to get it we need to make a core for it and then we tell trends which does the boards you know now you can do the huge numbers we hope the next batch is also around 500 units we will see yeah that's it already questions what's the price okay um so the price is 666 euro 66 without that uh texas it's texas right yeah so um if you buy it in germany it's 740 or something like that yeah and it's as i said it's no kickstarter trends is a company which works business to business uh so they produce fpga pcbs for uh industrial stuff and normally they don't do uh stuff for consumers uh this is a special relationship we have with them they are also commodore fans and they like the project so that is why we are working with them and yeah they are really a great help they provide lots of knowledge about pcb design they also did a great work connecting all those lines from the sd ram yeah more questions when will the next batch actually be delivered everybody wants to know i voted waited for that one so currently as i said i have five port is i i i looked at the males last evening they are finalizing the last changes something about buffers and i don't know i don't know all this electronic stuff so then if that is finished and it should be next week then next week new boards test boards 10 10 pieces will be ordered it will take about five weeks until we get them then we need to test them they should this should um go be finished quite fast because we already have to our forecore and our five port is only fixes and slight changes so we should be able to test its functionality directly and then we can give the go to trends to order the full batch of boards i think it's 500 and then you need to add another five weeks and then they have the pcb stand they need to put on the parts so it's next year definitely it's it won't be christmas i don't think so so christmas was somehow a wish of many people and some people wanted to step the extra step of checking the r5 board but i think that would have been a bad decision we need to make sure that the new board works as it should and yeah we can't afford to just order 500 pieces and then throw them into the garbage that's yeah does not work there's not enough money to do that there are not big margins we can work with yeah more questions so it's the first time i heard about this project and this computer and um do you have any idea why komodora tried to make successor for the c64 in 1991 so it looks really weird for me yeah i had also had discussions today with a few people about this there could be many ideas also one idea is the huge software library of the c64 then there was also the um what was this apple 2 gs which came out around the same time someone mentioned to me and this was also expanded apple 2 so perhaps this was a driver at komodora someone saw it and thought oh they bring out another 8 bit perhaps we should too i don't know it's also all uh yeah wild guessing for me um yeah i don't know the software library i guess that's the huge thing but because it's at the start of the amiga time there were not well was not much stuff to software for it i think and perhaps someone thought yeah let's do it and make another machine that can use it but they failed in that more questions okay um then um if you want to take a look um touch the keys type in some basic come over to um booth 21 it's uh way through at the desk at the entrance desk uh behind the entrance test that that was what i wanted to say and yeah thank you very much for listening