Making a C64/C65 compatible computer

We've got a great problem on the MEGA65 right now -- there are more cores coming out than you can fit in the 8 slots that the MEGA65 motherboard's flash can fit.

While I've been focusing on the software and case of late, work has been continuing on the hardware modules as well, as you can see below: This post is really to give an check-in on everything that has got us to that point, and show the progress against t…

Okay, so I have SMS working already, and a nice library to let me send and receive them, complete with emojis and international characters etc.

For the current MEGAphone prototyping, I am using the MEGA65 R3 mainboards.

In recent blog posts I've got the telephony and text messaging software working.

This post is really just a summary of the work done for the telephony software user interface and SMS/Text messaging user interface.

Okay, so I'm burning through a bunch of these outstanding items that have been mostly implemented in the background, and now I need to finish in a hurry.

Okay, in the last post, I got the dialer and contacts screen and SMS thread handling etc, all largely in place and tied together.

I've been thinking about this part of things for a while, because it's clear that the first iteration of the modular MEGAphone is going to be larger than originally planned, and subject to more evolution for a while.

Now that I've got the SMS message machinery more or less in place, it's time to turn to the contact list.

In a previous post, I got Unicode text rendering, complete with line breaking, emojis and a pile of other stuff working, that means we can show message threads.

Using LLVM has me wanting to implement a simple scheme that enforces memory protection, so that I can more easily detect memory corruption events, in part because of the unfortunate (although understandable) way that LLVM stores its stack pointer in zero-…

For the MEGAphone, I wanted to make my software debugging on the MEGA65 easier.

Okay, so another side-path I have to deal with for the MEGAphone telephony software: I need pre-rendered Unicode fonts so that we can support all languages and emojis (at least for display --- multi-language input and emoji inserting will come a bit later…

If you have a MEGA65, you'd probably like to be able to plug a SCART cable on to the VGA port and have it Just Work :tm:, causing the MEGA65 to drive 15KHz video.

I should be doing something else, so I've decided to get SCART / 15KHz RGB output working.

Goran has been working on refining the MEGAphone modules I designed earlier in the year.

Time for another couple of modules, neither of which are particularly exotic.

In a recent post, I worked out how I am going to store SMS conversations, contacts, phone state and a pile of other stuff in D81 disk images, for convenient manipulation.

Managing contacts on a system that has 384KB of RAM is not as simple as it first sounds.

In my previous post, I implemented a facility for accessing the brand new Shared Resources area of the MEGA65's System Partition.

In another blog post I'm writing at the moment, I'm exploring how I will do the UI for the new MEGAphone work.

The next module on the list is something that can do BlueTooth to talk to a headset.

I've been busy working on the schematic and PCB design for a bunch of the modules for the MEGAphone lately.

This post has turned into a bit of an epic, as it turned out to have a couple of modules (solar MPPT tracker and prioritised power input selection and over-voltage and reverse-polarity protection) that took quite a bit more effort to get right.