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Post by robertb on Dec 20, 2017 7:09:27 GMT
Today I was awakened between 7:30 and 8 in the morning by a knock at the front door. At the door I found a package with the new Brian Bagnall book, "Commodore: the Amiga Years". Excitedly, I skimmed through some of it before I had to take my car to the mechanics. More comprehensively than the older book, "On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore", it picks up just after Jack Tramiel resigns from Commodore Business Machines, and it takes the reader through the ups and downs of the Plus/4, Commodore 128, Commodore LCD, C900, and more. It stops just about at 1987, and Bagnall's next book in the series will take the reader to the end of CBM in 1994. What a wealth of information! Robert Bernardo Fresno Commodore User Group www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
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Post by robertb on Dec 23, 2017 3:54:11 GMT
After reading the first few chapters, I discovered that the C128 had an enemy within CBM! (something that I didn't know) Gerard Bucas, head of business systems development, thought the C128 was a bad idea and preferred his C900 Unix machine. In the end, with CBM being limited in money in 1985, the C128 and the Amiga 1000 got the go-ahead, and the C900 and Commodore LCD were killed. Merry Christmas! Robert Bernardo Fresno Commodore User Group www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
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Post by hydrophilic on Dec 23, 2017 18:00:53 GMT
Very interesting! Now I guess I need to buy these books. Too late to ask for them as a Christmas gift!
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Post by robertb on Dec 24, 2017 8:32:17 GMT
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Post by VDC 8x2 on Dec 30, 2017 1:59:31 GMT
cool to know that tidbit of info.
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Post by robertb on Dec 31, 2017 5:54:34 GMT
I always thought that the fabled Commodore 256 would have been something like this: www.sdiy.org/richardc64/c128/new256k/c256v2prelim.htmlBut according to Brian Bagnall's book, it would have been much different. Here are a few edited excerpts from the book -- Jeff Porter presented four projects...the C256, a laptop C256, a C64 with built-in modem and disk drive, and his Amiga in a C128 case. For the C256, Porter turned to Dave Haynie, who worked on the original C128 project. [Haynie] would attempt to take the C128 concept even farther by creating versions with faster processors and better memory options. To improve those options, he need better chips than he had for the C128. Commodore's LSI group began designing an MMU chip for the C256, named the 8725 chip... Bill Gardei... felt the MMU should be a real memory mapper and not use the budget “bank-switching” solution... Dave Haynie wanted to design the whole new [C256] using the 65C816 chip, which ran at 4 MHz and was capable of emulating the 8-bit 6502. The downside to Haynie's C256 was that it would not include a C64 mode, or CP/M mode... Haynie and Porter saw the C256 as a business machine... [By 1986] Dave Haynie had only recently completed the schematics for this C256 motherboard, codenamed BMW... he had a few prototypes to display to demonstrate the additional memory. [For CES] because he could not demonstrate a prototype with a 4 MHz 65816 chip yet, Haynie's co-worker, Frank Palaia, hacked together the next best thing. “Frank and I each took half the problem,” says Haynie. “He made a verson of the C128 that ran a 4 MHz Z80. I made a version of the C128 with a slightly different MMU that gave 256K of built-in memory.” Happy New Year! Robert Bernardo Fresno Commodore User Group www.dickestel.com/fcug.htmSouthern California Commodore & Amiga Network www.portcommodore.com/sccan
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Post by hydrophilic on Jan 5, 2018 9:38:50 GMT
Thanks for the link! I still want to build a C256/C512 -- a C128 modified with an extra MMU -- if only I could find the time But Commodore's plan for a C256 is news to me... thanks for sharing!
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Post by robertb on Jan 6, 2018 7:17:01 GMT
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