rubber_jonnie wrote: ↑Mon Apr 01, 2024 12:12 pm
Maybe it's a question of marketing? Is there some way we can get the message out there in a better way.
I know it's been mentioned on forums at least briefly at some point. Though I'm not really sure what else could realistically be done. I think there is still a lot of confusion about what the platform is all about in the direction it is going in. Though Icky has done three or four talks on all this by now anyway.
And are people going to potentially kill a good working ST in order to do an upgrade? Probably unlikely.
It is a valid point yes. I never really condoned the idea of sacrificing the working ST to build a H5. Though as use old-timers know, these boards just have so many problems, it can become rather problematic to fix all the issues and indeed troubleshoot. At which point it's probably just easier to go with a H5 as it has all the mods and it is unlikely to fail after a few weeks like the original boards do.
It is a bit of a weird limited market in some respects. Of course I'm not going to go over the H5 design philosophy of easier upgrades and all that again. Indeed it has a lot of advantages over a original board. Realistically the H4/H5 are replacement boards for the originals which have basically gone beyond reasonable repair. As we know, a lot of people managed to totally destroy the motherboard. So rather than the rest of the system going to landfill, this is where the replacement boards such as the H4/H5 really shine.
But even that is not entirely accurate because I want to get the ST chips and have them recreated in FPGA in order to have a much faster machine ultimately. That would not necessarily need a original machine been sacrificed. But of course, i've already wrote loads about all that already. But the FPGA cores would basically become a type of plug-in accelerator for the H5 series. It doesn't really lend much point in recreating the board to have that built on unless there was sufficient demand.. So it basically hits the proverbial brick wall again.
There Is of course a lot of other features and things I have talked about previously in expanding the capability of the original ST. This involves higher resolutions, better sound system, and of course faster bus etc. It would basically run rings around a machine like a stock Falcon ultimately. The problem is who is going to code for the platform ? You basically hit the proverbial brick wall again. I just have to work with the philosophy of having the legacy library of software usable as the top "requirement".
It's why ultimately why my motivation has been to only work on a original ST design as that is where the bulk of the software and games lives. Of course if we can have a faster machine which can still backwardly be compatible with the original library then I think that is just the simplest and most realistic thing to do. But of course even that still needs a sufficiently large user base to make it worthwhile.. Again the proverbial brick wall...
I also think it is somewhat getting confusing with the amount of "clones" appearing. More recently we have the ATX boards, there is already MiST, firebee, suska, the milan basically died because of lack of support if I remember rightly. Suska I don't think ever really took off either. Then there's other things like the pistorm, buffee and god knows what else. I'm not trying to bash any of these projects, but with such a small user base and more and more different directions people are moving in, it is just ultimately going to dilute the user base even more IMO. As to what projects people ultimately get excited with and support, who knows. But the bottom line is still ultimately the same that the user base is very small and the people contributing to projects is only ever decreasing.
Even if you go with the H5 is just a replacement board for the originals. It could be another 10 years before the original Atari machines and people realise they are just simply not fixable any more. But that also has the problem of, will people even care about these machines in another 10 years time..
I think if anyone is going to care about anything in the future, it will be getting the original machines running again by whatever means necessary.. This is where the H4/H5 would come in because it can run the entire legacy software catalogue. But again, I think the user base is just going to be pretty much non-existent in the future anyway.