12-06-2022, 10:38 AM
(11-06-2022, 06:57 PM)elpiggio Wrote: - Real Time Clock KitAll of the above I would support, too.
- SN76489a Sound Generator Kit (I do have a Beethoven, but would also like to try out the chip option that the Premium / 256TC has "onboard".
- Definitely interested in the Telnet adapter.... also been keeping an eye on FujiNet and things like that. Hope to see this on the Microbee one day. I really want a text-based email / messaging kind of system.
- Hard Drive image option for the Premium+ (would be excellent as a paid ROM upgrade)
- Mouse adapter, so I can play around with GUI programming
- Wi-Fi SD Cards (eg. Toshiba FlashAir) so we can easily add disk images to our Premium+ any time we want
Personally, I'm more interested in expanding and enhancing the capability of my existing Bee than ripping it's brains out and making basically a modern emulated Bee that at best has software backward compatibility to my current hardware and very little connection to it, otherwise. I have absolutely no interest in learning what goes on inside those mystical black boxes called FPGAs.
I honestly think there would be a bigger market for brand new old stock of Bees than anything that tries to modernise the Bee. Have you seen what prices the Bees go for on eBay?! And those are old ones with dodgy keyboards and unknown functionality and usually not even Premiums. How much and how many would sell if the best of the old Bees (I guess the 128k Premium+?) was re-made and put inside a sexy new case like Owen showed off at the March of the Microbees? (I didn't get a photo of it, but it kinda looked like this sexy Philips MSX machine)
It's a shame we can't do polls here, but would be interesting to cast it out there and see how many and for how much $ are people willing to buy what Owen is putting his efforts into right now, vs how many would buy a New Old Bee with maybe a couple of quality of life things like a hard disk or removable storage like Compact Flash or SD cards. Maybe I'm just too old school, but I don't want the Z80 replaced with an FPGA. Make it a faster Z80, sure. But an emulated Bee... I have that in uBee512, soon to make it's way to a Raspberry Pi Keyboard, I bet.
(Please don't take this as anything but hopefully helpful constructive criticism. I want Owen/Microbee to be financially successful, more than anything.)