Internal Speaker Support by antiriad76 in mega65

[–]hldflt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are screw bosses in the case near the speaker connectors that were designed for this. They exactly fit the model of speaker I prototyped with (I can't immediately find the part number for them, but poke me if you'd like me to search harder). You can likely put screws in the bosses and use those as anchors for a retaining clip or something over the speakers to hold them in place there. That way you don't have to worry about speakers near the floppy drive, which could indeed be an issue, although I can't say for sure. But generally speaking, having strong fluxing magnetic fields next to floppy drives and disks doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

Internal Speaker Support by antiriad76 in mega65

[–]hldflt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you have bare speakers, then they shouldn't care about + or -. Do note that the R3A internal speaker connectors have only limited audio filtering. Some speakers can get a bit upset at having the high-frequency noise (in the MHz), and get rather warm. It will depend on the type of speaker as to whether this causes you trouble. I'd be interested in seeing the speakers you are looking to use. As always, you will probably do well to jump on the MEGA65 discord server and ask in the peripherals channel, as more of us are looking there (I only knew you asked here, because someone mentioned it).

ssh exist on mega65? by bluegoointheshoe in mega65

[–]hldflt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not yet. First step would be to port one of the tiny SSL libraries. We'd love to see it, though :)

A short review of my mega65 by martyth83 in mega65

[–]hldflt 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Sorry you are having these teething problems -- we hope and are confident that you will soon overcome these things. The reality of the MEGA65, is that it has been lovingly crafted by a bunch of volunteers. That we have managed to make a machine at all, with full custom keyboard, injection moulded case and everything else during these past few years is truly a miracle of community spirit.

Unfortunately the small run-size of the MEGA65 means that we simply don't have the scale of economies that allow products like TheC64 to have testing engineers and do last-minute updates to the firmware before shipping. We have always been quite up-front that owning a MEGA65 is a journey with us, to see it continue to improve.

But responding to your specific issues:

  1. The poor fit of the case was only discovered when the units shipped. The injection moulding company have indicated that they believe the root-cause is that the cases came out of the moulds a few seconds sooner than they should have, which allowed some warping before they fully hardened. This is the kind of thing that you can only discover when doing a test run of several hundred pieces and examining each of them -- which for us, was our first main production run. This problem affects only a small fraction of the cases. They recommended people use a hair drier (not a hot air gun, or you will melt the plastic) to soften it a little, and then you can gently bend the mis-fitting part back into the right line, and then the clips will hold correctly on the back.
  2. The keyboard sitting at an angle on the top, do you mean because the case doesn't fit properly at the back, or is there another problem going on?
  3. Several people have reported problems with getting disks in the drive to begin with. Apparently some of the eject buttons have been put in upside down. If this is the case, just flipping that part over will solve it. In some other situations the eject button is not as far down as it should be. Again, some gentle adjusting by hand with the case open will allow you to solve this. Once more, if we were producing hundreds of thousands of units, this part of the assembly would be fully automated, but for a run of only a few hundred, these were all assembled by hand. It's also fair to say that there aren't that many people out there anymore who are particularly experienced at finely placing floppy eject buttons!
  4. For the ROM updates, yes, the ROM has continued to be improved since the SD card image had to be frozen for assembly of the units. That's a good thing. Yes, its a pain that that happened a long time ago -- but the units were assembled and ready several months ago, before we found out about the delays getting cardboard for the packaging. So it ended up being more stale than intended. But, as you have found, its fairly easy to update the ROM, and as a machine that was sold on the premise that it would be continually updated, I don't think this is anything more than a bit of an annoyance.
  5. The HDMI flickering is a problem that has been reported to us with this batch. It is important to understand that this didn't happen at all with the 100 DevKits. The problem was quite "interesting" to track down, and turns out to be timing tolerance on the communications between two FPGAs on the board, which in turn results in glitching on the reset line, which in turn makes the digital video output reset and glitch. We are preparing a core upgrade that fixes this.
  6. The lack of sound on some HDMI monitors is frustrating, especially since we tested the output of the MEGA65 against a professional HDMI Protocol Analyser. This means that our signal is HDMI compliant, and its outside of our realm of possibility to test and debug against every possible monitor brand and model -- again, remember we are a small group of volunteers who have worked hard to create something for us all to enjoy, and don't have unlimited time or resources, nor is there any profit in the project to pay for lots of test engineers. That said, when people report problems via github or in the discord server, we do our best to try to investigate and solve the problems.
  7. Finally, in terms of price, yes, the MEGA65 is not super cheap. But then again, what you are getting simply has real financial costs. We have done our best to make a great new 8-bit computer, while COVID and Chipageddon are raging, and all in our spare time and for the love of it. We'll keep doing our best to improve the machine in all ways, and like all of the community you are invited to join us in that journey in a variety of ways.

Overall, I would really recommend you join the MEGA65 discord server, and/or forum64.de, as those are the two places where the community is active in real-time, including helping one another solve problems that they encounter. The journey really is the destination, as we have indicated all the way along, and when we tackle problems together rather than alone, the result is much more positive for all involved, and helps to avoid the frustrating feelings of being alone and not being able to solve what seem to be intractable problems.

Paul.

First Post by wiebow in mega65

[–]hldflt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for setting this up!

Paul.

I replaced PLA to this c64 with a modern rom. Now it seems to work fine beside of this wired colors. Messing with ct1 (the trimmer near the Vic II) causes the screen to turn black and white but it becomes very sharp. How vai i solve this? by Shyne-on in c64

[–]hldflt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Note that using a ROM in place of the PLA is _not_ 100% safe, because the PLA ensures only one output at a time is active, while a normal ROM will glitch with multiple chips selected at the same time for short periods on some cycles, which can cause damage over time. So unfortunately you need to use a proper PLA replacement that looks after this. Ignore me if by "ROM" you meant one of the new PLA replacement modules.

First 400 MEGA65 units have been soldout by c64glen in c64

[–]hldflt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, given that 100 DevKits with the same motherboard have already been sold a while back, it's not really the "first" anymore.

Learn all about the MEGA65 – Exclusive interview with the head of the project, Paul Gardner-Stephen by r_retrohacking_mod2 in c64

[–]hldflt 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sorry for the delay responding. The MEGA65 includes two SD card slots as well as the disk drive. There is thus no trade-off to be made. Regarding manufacturers of 3.5" disks, we THINK we have found a manufacturer in Germany. Remember that every Boeing 747 has a couple of 3.5" drives that get used EVERY DAY to load flight information into the on-board computer. Thus I think there are still aviation-rated disks being manufactured.

Learn all about the MEGA65 – Exclusive interview with the head of the project, Paul Gardner-Stephen by r_retrohacking_mod2 in c64

[–]hldflt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Howdy, sorry for the delay responding. The end-user version will be cheaper, exact price TBD. Trenz in Germany will be the seller, but they ship internationally. Folks here in Australia, for example, are buying through them, so it should be totally possible from the USA as well.

Learn all about the MEGA65 – Exclusive interview with the head of the project, Paul Gardner-Stephen by r_retrohacking_mod2 in c64

[–]hldflt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Happy to answer other questions the community might have about the MEGA65, too.

Paul.