Just reviewed by Adrian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bak-MePFsJ0

Retro-YouTuber Adrian Black did a video on the VIC-II-Kwawari just this weekend: https://youtu.be/bak-MePFsJ0. TL;DW: works well, kinda awesome.

In addition to providing VGA and DVI output, this optionally adds a blitter and hardware multiplier and divider to the c64.

And configurable color palette, and some video modes, including a pet-compatible 80 column one.

Impressive! Is that a C64 any more???

Good question. However, the original hardware is approaching 40 years now, and one could argue that after yet as many years we won’t have anything different.

It's 41 birthday is next month

If we’re being pedantic, the Commodore 64 was produced until 1994, so the most recent specimens around 29 years old.

94?! That's quite the impressive run C64 got.

It's hard to comprehend why Commodore was making these even past A1200 and CD32 releases.

I would like to learn about the background of the project developers. Not their names and where they are from, but how they got the knowledge to realize projects like this. Are they hobbyists who work in unrelated fields and just learned this from books and videos? Do they have degrees in electronics and do work like this in their jobs?

Stuff like this looks almost superhuman to me and I would like to know how one can get the abilities to pull this off.

I know nothing about this project devs, but I made a framebuffer/driver for my old EGA monitor out of an ARM Cortex-M7 devboard, some SRAM pulled out of old 486 boards (cache memory they were) and a level converter.

It did not go as far as being worthy enough to be published, but it worked.

It is not particularly superhuman, me not having any degrees or related work, just some years playing with electronics as a hobby, then taking old IBM EGA manual and designing the thing in a couple of evenings.

It's not rocket science :) However nowadays even rocket science isn't.

Everything is pretty simple, especially if you throw sufficiently large FPGAs on the problem.

Your skills are valuable.

Usually they do this sort of thing professionally and they use these skills in their hobby projects as well. An electrical engineering degree would be a good start to acquire these kind of skills, alternatively a hardcore HAM or very serious hardware hobby.

I worked with a software engineer at Apple that played with FPGAs on the side. So maybe as a hobbyist it is doable.

Definitely doable! There are neat little FPGA kits from Digilent that are a good starting point for hobbyist entrance into this realm.

The hardest part for people coming from the software angle is that you tell an FPGA what to be, not what to do.

FPGA stuff isn't hard to pick up at all. At least to do basic stuff.

(I got as far as building my own HDMI-outputting simple video chip with a character generator, tied to a RISC-V processor, addressing SRAM, booting a primitive OS. But I kinda fizzled out after that when I ran into SD card interfacing)

The creator is a friend of mine and an and on-off coworker for 20+ years.

Software guy. SWE background. Mostly unrelated fields though we did both work at Google in the Nest division with embedded LInux stuff, but on the software. No degree in electronics, taught himself the hardware end of things and the FPGA end of things.

Not superhuman. Just really passionate about the C64. You can do it, too.

The basic answer is "yes." Some of them are hobbyists, some are professionals.

It's a good occasion to mention the Ultimate64: https://ultimate64.com/Ultimate64

Gideon isn't very good at advertising, so not everyone knows this even exists. It's a complete C64 emulation motherboard. You mount it into an existing C64, place the SID in a socket (for real analog SID sound) and enjoy a modernized C64 with perfect zero-delay HDMI output, great sound, 1541 drive emulation, cartridges, etc.

It still blows my mind that you can plug in a USB stick containing every C64 game ever written.

This thing is really impressive and after you've used it for a while, it's actually hard to go back to the "real" C64 motherboard :-)

Implementing all this on an FPGA is a mind-boggling feat, and I have nothing but the highest respect for Gideon.

>Gideon isn't very good at advertising

He's so bad at it that I thought none of the Ultimate64 was open source hardware.

But most if not all of it is.

Likewise Dennis van Weeren's 'MiniMig' Amiga do-over:

https://www.minimig.ca/

> You mount it into an existing C64

There are also replacement C64C cases, mechanical keyboards and at least two SID-chip replacements based on ARM-based MCUs available. ARMSID is the most well known of the SID boards (I forget the other one)

> It still blows my mind that you can plug in a USB stick containing every C64 game ever written.

This reminds me of a friend who had every Atari 2600 game ever written on a 3.5" floppy...

The amount of C64 projects out there is pretty amazing. Having been a Sinclair user, I am almost envious (although there are plenty of software emulators that deliver a very nice experience)

Don't forget the Spectrum ZX Next (https://www.specnext.com/) if you can get one. I managed to get a N-GO clone from ebay last year (https://manuferhi.com/p/n-go-full-include-wifi-rpi-zero) which is excellent.

Great work!

Also, I think it is a brilliant idea to have included DVI/HDMI output for this chip -- which didn't support it in its original incarnation; i.e., DVI/HDMI didn't exist in the 1980's...