In a previous video I did on the Commodore 65, a rare prototype of a Commodore 64 successor,
I had mentioned the Mega65, which is a modern recreation of that. I also mentioned that I had
never been able to acquire one for a video. And so, I'd like to introduce you to Dan,
he's part of the actual Mega65 team, and he flew all the way from Seattle to show
me a Mega65. Yeah, I heard you didn't get a chance to play with one yet, so I thought
I'd bring one down. Sorry I don't have an extra one, this is my own personal Me ga65,
but I thought I'd bring it down to show you. OK, let's go ahead and get something out of the way,
because I'm sure a lot of people are going to be asking about this. They're going to say, "Well
David, don't you have this Commander X16, isn't this going to be a competing product?" Why would
I do a review of this? And, I would just like to point out that over the last several years,
I've done a number of reviews on what could be considered competing products, such as the little
Mini C64s and the Amigas and stuff like that. I've done the Gigatron, I've done the mini-PET. And oh,
I've got another one I'm going to be doing eventually, the Aquarius Plus. So, yep, I've got
one of those on hand too. I just happen to like all of these systems. I think that they're pretty
cool, and I think my viewers like to see them. So, having said that, we are going to do some
comparisons between the mega 65 and the Commander X16 later. Just so people can see what does make
them different. But I also think that they're similar enough that we're hoping to see some
software synergy between these. yeah, absolultely, I mean they're similar architechtures,
similar CPUs, in a lot of cases similar graphics capabilities, sound capabilities. Even though they
are very different in some cases, in interesting ways, there's a lot of potential for a single
investment in like a game project or something like that to benefit all of these platforms by
re-using the game assets and even some of the game logic. Yeah, if you've ever heard that term the
rising tide lifts all boats. We kind of feel like that applies to these retro computers. The Foenix
project could be included in that as well. OK, so let's do a quick comparison. At the
hardware level, the Mega65 is essentially powered entirely by an FPGA. Where as the
commander X16 runs on discrete DIP package chips, more similar to computers from the
past. I'm not neccessarily saying one design is better than the other, at this point it's
just a different way of doing things, and each concept appeals to different groups of people.
So, CPU wise, the Mega65 has a 16-bit CPU running at 40 mhz, which is backwards compatible with the
CPU in the X16, which is an 8-mhz 65c02. Then there's 8 MB versus 2 MB of RAM.
Both machines have a very nice graphics system that can display 4096 unique colors. Each one
has their pros and cons of how they work. The Mega65 has 12 channels of SID sound. Or
like having 4 SID chips. The X16 has a combination of FM and PSG channels. Both systems have a stereo
DAC for sound effects. Also both systems use
an SD card for primary storage. And both systems run a variant of
Commodore BASIC. So, as you can see they have more in common than you might think.
And one big difference is the price. The Mega65 currently sells for 666 Euros, which at the time
of filming roughly translates to 740 US Dollars. And the X16 sells for $350 US Dollars. And there
are certainly reasons why the Mega65 is more expensive, So let's take a look!
The first thing you'll notice about the Mega65 is, of course, the case. It's a
very nice injection molded plastic case, which is almost identical to the Commodore
65. The keys themselves are also very nice and use mechanical switches, which fell great to type on.
On the rear, you get audio output here. The next slot is for one of these tiny micro-SD
cards. And that slides in there. Next you have ethernet, HDMI compatible video, VGA,
standard commodore disk drive port, cartridge port, and the power port. On the side, we have
power, two joystick ports, and a reset button. The rest of the port areas on this side are blank,
you'll see why shortly. But, I just wanted to point out that this USB jack is not standard.
This was added on by Dan, and this is for external reprogramming of the computer.
And check out this spiral bound user manual. This is something I'm quite jealous of that
we don't yet have for the X16. This is really nice. And it definitely has the
look and feel of the Commodore 64 manual. So, we're going to go ahead and plug this
thing in. And I'm going to use a VGA monitor. But since the Mega65 outputs HDMI compatible
video simultaneously, we're going to plug that into a capture device so we can get
good recordings of what we're working on. Okay, so I need to explain something about
HDMI video. So you may or may not have noticed that I was saying "HDMI compatible" video and
the reason for that is technically speaking in order to have HDMI video you have to pay a license
and you have to go through a bunch of red tape. However, much like it's possible to create an IBM
compatible computer you can create create an HDMI compatible video output. You simply can't use the
HDMI logo or technically even call it HDMI video And so, let's power it on! You may notice the
boot screen resembles the Commodore 65 boot screen, which is not a coincidence.
The Mega65 is running a version of the original Commodore ROM. The original Commodore kernal
code for the Commodore 65. The Mega65 team has made enhancements to the ROM, we've licensed it
from Cloanto so that we can make some enhancements for the mega65. But otherwise should look pretty
familiar. We can always type in BASIC programs and run them. Very familiar. This is running
a version of BASIC that was originally based on the Commodore 128 BASIC, BASIC version 7. For the
Commodore 65, they made some extensions and called it BASIC 10. For the mega65, we have also made a
few enhancements and so we're calling it BASIC 65. So just to be clear the Commodore 65 and the
Mega65 are not exactly equal. The Mega65 hopes to be backwards compatible with the C65,
but is in fact more advanced in nearly every way. So, one unfortunate side effect of this is that
software created for the Mega 65, generally speaking, is not compatible with the original
commodor 65 prototypes. So, for the dozen or so people out there who actually have and use
a working c65 prototype, there's not much software out there for those machines and
unfortunately they're not getting any new software out of this deal.
One bit of software that Dan wanted to try was the kaleidoscope program I had
written in BASIC. So I put the program on a disk and we tried it out. And sure enough,
it worked. Of course, here it's running at 40 mhz. But you can set the clockspeed all the way
down to 1 mhz. So here's that. And then here's 3.5 Mhz, which is the original speed of the C65.
So, one interesting comparison is that this program runs as fast fast if not faster on
the commander x16 despite the fact that the mega 65 is at least five times as fast. And so Dan and
I talked about that a lot and I think we both came to the agreement that there's really two
issues. One is just the implementation of basic is probably a little bit slower but
probably the bigger deal is that the c65 uses planer graphics much like the Amiga,
which is slower to plot pixels than the type of graphic system that we're using. Now,
they have added some other types of graphic systems to the mega 65 that the c65 didn't have
and that should alleviate a lot of that, but make no mistake any program that's written in assembly
language is going to run way faster on the MEGA65. So, let's have a look at some software written
just for the Mega65. Dan connected up a gamepad and showed me some examples. This little boat
game is interesting. It's basically like flappy bird, but in the water instead.
This is a bit more impressive, it's called the Great Mega Sisters. For those that don't get it,
it's based on the Great Giana Sisters, which was a popular side-scroller game on
the C64. And while it has a lot of graphical similarities to Giana Sisters, the behavior
of the main character is quite different. Still, this is a good showcase for the system, I think.
This is a nice, mouse controlled solitaire game. It runs in hi-res graphics and looks great.
Oh, and this is pretty interesting. It's called Battle Sparrow. it's interesting for
a couple of reasons. One is that it uses PETSCII graphics, showing that people still love Petscii
Graphics even in 2023. But more interesting is that it actually was written in BASIC. And I
think that's great because one of the goals of all of these retro systems is to give us
enough actual speed so that BASIC can actually be used to make games and be fun to program in.
Here's an interesting puzzle game with some great looking graphics!
And here's a game called first shot. This one is really impressive from a graphics and sound
perspective. Definitely looks like something from the late 16-bit era. And here's another
puzzle game, it's one of those match-3 type games. And here's one called Unicone, I think. And it's
quite interesting. I think the unicorn is possibly pooping out icecream and you have to catch it?
And there are also some text adventures like this one, called Hibernated 1.
Here's an unfinished game, which is really just a proof of concept game engine for Turrican. It
has no sound, and really no functional gameplay. Apparently this will not be finished as the author
was not able to secure copyright clearance. And the last one I'll show you is a little
western game called Showdown. And there are a number of demos on
the system too, like this one. or this one. Okay, so those were all Native Mega65 games
and demos, however there are some larger libraries of software out there that you
can run the machine because the Commodore 65 had a C64 mode, and so does the Mega 65.
So, you can just type Go 64, and bam! You are in C64 mode. But, if you remember my
video on the C65, I pointed out some issues that made it not 100% compatible. Still,
you can play a number of games this way. And here it is playing Petscii Robots, which is no surprise
because we already knew the C65 could do this. Since the Mega65 has a cartridge port,
I thought I'd also try that. I have a wall of cartridge games, but what
we need is a Commodore 64 cartridge game. So, I'm going to be honest, there weren't
really a lot of great cartridges for the C64. So, I'm not really sure.
This would probably be a good one here. So, we found that the cartridges worked,
but they had some weird glitches. Like Avenger runs kind of slow, and Gorf always starts at the
second level instead of the first for some reason. But keep in mind these are running
in the C64 compatiblity mode of the Mega65. However, because the MEGA65 is based on fpga
technology, it can transform into a completely different system simply by loading a new core,
much like a Mister would do. You can select a core on boot up by simply holding down the
no scroll key while powering on the system. And, one of the cores that's available for the
system is a Commodore 64 core. Now, using this core it should be darn near 100% compatible!
So when running this core, not only can you run Petscii Robots, but you can run the REU
version which has much improved graphics. And that also means you can run other REU games
like Sonic the Hedgehog, or Sam's Journey. One of the other cores it has, which seems
almost like heresey, is the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. And it even has an arcade machine core, which is
Galaga. As you can see, this is ported from the Mister core. So what this core is simulating
is the actual board that was in the Galaga cabinet, as well as the original ROM code. So,
needless to say this should be very authentic. Of course, backwards compatibility can be a
double-edged sword. I mean, obviously there's the benefit of the larger upfront software
library, but it could come at the cost of discouraging native software development!
Historically we've seen cases where it wasn't a problem, such as the Nintendo Gameboy Color.
The old black and white games still played fine, but a lot of new software emerged for the color
systems. Also the Apple IIgs had a fairly healthy native software market. But then,
look at the Commodore 128. Those were doomed to spend most of their lives playing C64 games.
One more thing I'd like to mention is that the Mega65 also has a BASIC IDE,
which is very similar to what we've developed on the X16 platform. It allows you to write
BASIC code without line numbers, in a much more structured and readable way using a text editor,
and then compile or tokenize it over to regular BASIC code. And it seems to work pretty well!
And now, I think it's time to take it apart! The first thing that took me by surprise is
how small the board is relative to the case. This little board and cable here
is a fix for older motherboards, not needed on the current ones. And the other cable is
the JTAG addon used by developers. And then I noticed this extra SD card slot.
So we have actually have two SD-Card slots on the thing. The external one overrides the internal
one. So you could just go without the external one and pretend like it's a magical. The ROM is
actually a file on the SD card so you can pretend it is a ROM chip as if it were inside here, and
you can put disk images and stuff on this SD card. And of course, here's the floppy drive. Which
is just a standard PC floppy drive. These are not new, since nobody makes them anymore. But
apparently they've found a pretty good stash of them for now to keep production going.
Anyway, so that about wraps it up for the Mega 65. There's really a lot more material I could
have gone into. I could have easily made a 2 hour video about this machine and still not covered
every aspect of it. I also want to give a big thanks out to Dan for bringing it by so that I
could get my hands on one and do a proper video on it. Anyway, as always, thanks for watching!