> In the future (fairly distant, as in 10 or 20 years), it would not suprise
> me one bit if standard ICs are gone - just about everything is an ASIC or
> field programmable. The tools will be so advanced that burning a clone of
> some 1970s part could be child's play, and available on the desktop. It
Hmmm. But will it be a problem that the knowledge of the internal
specifications may be gone? I'm not a hardware engineer, so take this with
a grain of salt, but as I understand it, that's one of the things that makes
writing software emulators so difficult. Timing is an issue, of course,
especially when the emulator runs on a multi-tasking OS with unpredictable
performance. But duplicating the precise behavior of the chips (including
the "undocumented" behaviors that advanced programmers used to rely upon) is
even more of a challenge from what I've heard.
I wish we had the advanced technology you're talking about today. It would
be great to fry up some copies of the C64 and C128 hardware. Maybe even a
VIC-20. But then again, it would be more important to copy some of the
older, less abundant machines lest they disappear for good...
- Earl
>
> William Donzelli
> aw288_at_osfn.org
>
Earl Evans
retro_at_retrobits.com
Enjoy retrocomputing today!
Visit the Retrobits web site at
http://www.retrobits.com
Received on Sun Jul 30 2000 - 21:57:17 BST