HiroProX

Actually what you suggest is as or more complex than a FPGA. You're effectively building two computers on one board at that point, and that can be a major pain. Not only whould the two computers have to talk, they'd have to operate in a synchronized manner. Never mind that the emulation would have to be re-coded to deal with the intricacies of accessing real RAM chips.

Yes, and yes.

The problem with the "Let's build a new A8" approach is that doing so would represent a major investment of time and money. Even then, the resulting product would cost several hundred dollars and have a maximum potential user base of maybe 300-400 people, worldwide. I contemplated such an idea at one time, and reached the conclusion that buying a 130XE off of ebay, buying a Blackbox with a floppy board, doing the dual POKEY mod, upping the ram to 320k, doing a video mod for good and clear s-video, and building a MyIDE would cost about half as much as doing what would amount to nothing more than fusing all of that onto an AT form factor mobo. That doesn't even touch on trying to build a "modern" A8. Frankly, I don't think I'd even like a "modern" A8. To me one of the appeals of the A8 is that it's such a small system, one person can write an entire program for it, without that program becoming a life-consuming nightmare. The last thing I want to do is program an A8 with 16-bit ML and a 16Mb address space. If I want to code for that, I'll dig up an Amiga 500.

Seconded. Ok, you got me if we can go with one-offs...definitely Beetle's XL laptop. That goes without saying.

I've collected all I can probably, reasonably get a hold of that interests me. Beyond that... a 1400XL and a 1090 would be gravy.

800XL: 256K upgrade, back around 1985 1050: Happy upgrade Amiga 500: MFM HDD controller (THE kludge from hell) Atari 1040STF: 16MHZ 68000 (for compatibility I had to literally open the ST up and swap the 8MHz 68000 back into the socket), 4Mb RAM

Love your avatar! I picked it because it shows what I consider the current prize of my Atari collection.

East Texas. Nearest city worthy of the title... Beaumont.

There's no point to it. Just to graft MARIA into an A8 you're looking at pretty much designing a whole computer from scratch. It'd be incompatible with A8 software, and incompatible with the 7800. A computer with no software is a doorstop. The point here, is to design a fully compatible upgrade for an existing computer with an existing software library. Not to build some kludge that no one will write software for.

XEP80 Stacy4 Indus GT And more to come I'm sure...

Commodore didn't need to reverse engineer anything. As has been pointed out, they had a very competent engineering staff, and they owned MOS Technologies which meant they had the ability to fabricate any VLSI silicon their engineers could design. They didn't need to copy Atari, and the C64's design its self refutes any idea of reverse engineering. It's not designed like an A8 at all. And it's by accidents of circumstance and Tramiel not having enough money to buy Apple that both companies wound up producing the 16-bit/32-bit successors of the other's 8-bit products.

The RAM on a Stacy is implemented on a separate daughterboard along with the TOS ROMs. The chips, if my Stacy4 is any indication are ZIP packages rather than the DIP packages used in the ST series. Best Electronics has the 4Mb daughterboard listed at $85 last I checked. I highly recommend 4Mb.

Which is pretty much how the future looked circa the mid-1980s. But Commodore and Atari could never get past the stigma of their products being labeled "game machines", even when the ST and Amiga were superior business platforms compared to the Macs and PCs of the time. Even both companies' PC compatible offerings suffered from that stigma. The Atari PC-1 showed that Atari could build a better PC than IBM for alot less. Unfortunately, both companies failed to pull off their more advanced offerings that would have moved them into the low-end workstation category, namely the Atari TTX and the Amiga 3000UX. The home computer was displaced by the PC, and both companies suffered because they couldn't adapt, or find another niche. Ironicly, both companies were killed off by game machines. For Atari it was the Jaguar, and for Commodore, the CD-32. The console gaming industry of today is the kingdom of the dead.

A "new" A8 is possible. The trick is, it has to be realistic. Personally, I'd settle for capability comparable to what the XL line was supposed to achieve. On that vein, a good starting line for development would be 1400XL/1450XLD/65XEM level machines. To that end, the idea of a replacement board for existing cases makes the most sense. Keep the board small, and it should be able to be hacked into any model of A8 case without too much difficulty. Forget about "enhancing ANTIC or GTIA". Make the board expandable using the PBI, which is known and established tech. Though some enhancements could be built into the new board, such as SIO2IDE/MyIDE, dual POKEY, 1meg flash for ROM images/Cart. images, PBI FDD controller, USB. All things that have been worked up already. Maybe one extravagance would be to use SIMM memory, ala 30-pin SIMMs or such. For the truely adventurous, an ATX form-factor board with PBI slots, or a PBI backplane that'd fit in an existing ATX case, and would connect to the re-boarded A8. From that point, if you want hot-rodded video, make a PBI card for it. But get a working foundation that isn't going to break the bank just getting to the point of being capable of making it. At this point, I'd settle for a 1090XL clone backplane.