7 ms·

The Agon light is the fastest 8-bit microcomputer

69 points by unwind 4y ago

LoveMortuus 4y ago
>Agon light™ is the fastest and cheapest 8-bit microcomputer ever made. But... The cheapest that I can see is about 50€... That doesn't sound very cheap to me :/ Am I just lacking some information or is it actually not that cheap?
- mat_epice 4y ago
  It’s really a single-board computer, analogous an 8-bit Raspberry Pi. Not expensive for a SBC, but not as cheap as I would expect an 8-bit thing with vga would be. Being that 8-bit processors have been gone from interactive systems for so long, anything under a couple of hundred dollars would have been “cheapest.” It would just have to come in under the price of the 80s systems. I could win the same kind of contest by making a 5-bit machine at any price!
- tyingq 4y ago
  The "DUINOMITE" is 20€, but it's based on a 32 bit CPU, even though it sort of functions like an old 8-bit home computer...boots to a BASIC interpreter. Similar is the VGA+PS/2 equipped ESP32 board: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832855287283.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832855287283.html at $12USD or so. But, again, not 8-bit. I think their claim of cheapest for this Agon light is because a 8-bit home-pc style computer is such a niche/purist space. It's more expensive to build a keyboard/vga ready thing because the chip doesn't have much built-in. https://www.olimex.com/Products/Duino/Duinomite/DUINOMITE/open-source-hardware https://www.olimex.com/Products/Duino/Duinomite/DUINOMITE/op...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
shrubble 4y ago
They use an 18MHz eZ80 part. I have a 33MHz on its way to me now, except it is in a tiny 40mm square case and access is serial only over USB. I think it is this one: https://www.tindie.com/products/circlem/minz-c-small-cased-33-or-36-mhz-z180-with-cpm/ https://www.tindie.com/products/circlem/minz-c-small-cased-3...
SinePost 4y ago
The TI-84 Plus CE has a eZ80 at 48 MHz.[1] https://www.brownmath.com/ti83/diff8384.htm https://www.brownmath.com/ti83/diff8384.htm
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
I like that its 32bit audio and video co-processor is superior in almost everyway.
Someone 4y ago
I wonder why they went for 18MHz. The TI-84 Plus CE has a 48MHz eZ80 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-84_Plus_series#TI-84_Plus_CE_and_TI-84_Plus_CE-T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-84_Plus_series#TI-84_Plus_C...), so it faster parts exist. Is it difficult for hobbyists to design the PCB, etc for a 50MHz machine? Or at the faster parts hard/impossible to find nowadays?
- derefr 4y ago
  > Is it difficult for hobbyists to design the PCB, etc for a 50MHz machine? My understanding is that, from 1MHz or so (like a 6502) through to about 10MHz (like an 8086), it's pretty easy to prototype a complete computer — CPU wired to memory, IO, etc, and everything in tolerance to speak to one-another within the CPU's half-clock sample rate — with just discrete logic components (e.g. NOR DIPs to combine address lines to make chip-select pins, etc) on a breadboard. Get much faster than that, though, and those discrete logic chips start to add too much delay; so you start having to prototype directly for a PCB with surface-mount components, rather than ever having a breadboarding phase. Which sucks, because now you're having to send your design out to be printed and picked, and so your iteration speed is now 1/100th of what it would have been before.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    This is, I believe, why many designs back in the day used wire-wrap. A cleanly done wire wrap can apparently get quite clean signal and achieve high frequencies. The Atari ST and Amiga generation machines were prototyped this way, for e.g.. For the ST, 8mhz memory bus but faster for the video shifter portions where the RAM was multiplexed between the CPU and the Shifter. http://www.bambi.net/atari/atari_st_prototype.html http://www.bambi.net/atari/atari_st_prototype.html Unfortunately wire wrap sockets are very difficult and $$ to source these days. Which is too bad because it seems like a good halfway point between breadboarding and PCB. FWIW I've managed to managed to get clean DVI/HDMI output off FPGA on a breadboard, and I'm by no means talented in electronics.
    - rootbear 4y ago
justin66 4y ago
> Agon light™ is a true 8-bit microcomputer in that there are no FPGAs and no emulation in it. It would be nice if people would stop pretending CPUs implemented on FPGAs are somehow not real.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  There's gotta be an academic graduate level anthropology thesis that could be written with the title "What Is Real?: The Online 'Retro-Computing' Subculture and Its Search For Authenticity." The whole "no FPGA" thing is kind of funny when you see people reach for microcontrollers to do their video display component, and those microcontrollers themselves often greatly outperform the main CPU. What's the major difference between dropping in an MCU vs an FPGA? Aside: A friend of mine has reimplemented the whole C64 VIC-II VDP in Verilog ("VIC-II Kawari") complete with a test harness built around VICE, etc, amazing work; it would be so cool to see someone pony up the cash to get something like that fabbed in fresh new silicon. Then we could have a "true" retro video display controller so we can have a truly authentic neo-retro computer :-)
  - sponaugle 4y ago
    Indeed - I was surprised to see an ESP32 on there, driven over serial, for the video output. That seems an order of magnitude more modern than using a CPLD, much less an FPGA. I am building a VGA adapter for my 68k supercomputer using a CPLD which presents some challenges that would be easy to solve in an FPGA. I have wrestled with that concept of what is retro enough, and there is no simple answer. Sticking with thru-hole is hard enough given the ever declining availability of parts!
    - justin66 4y ago
      The ironic thing is, if this were 1980 and anyone were taking this thing's "fastest" designation seriously, the very first step z80 developers would take would be to figure out how to use the ESP32 as a coprocessor for general computation.
- II2II 4y ago
fortran77 4y ago
There was a 24 MHz 16-bit microcontroller out in 1985 or so: The Fairchild 9445 https://www.cpushack.com/2017/11/14/cpu-of-the-day-fairchild-f9445-the-microflame-flames-out/ https://www.cpushack.com/2017/11/14/cpu-of-the-day-fairchild... It ran the Nova 4 instruction set. We were using it for a cutting-edge project: and all Digital Radio receiver, for EVLF communications to submarines in the 16 kHz range.

69 points by unwind 4y ago

>Agon light™ is the fastest and cheapest 8-bit microcomputer ever made. But... The cheapest that I can see is about 50€... That doesn't sound very cheap to me :/ Am I just lacking some information or is it actually not that cheap?

mat_epice 4y ago
It’s really a single-board computer, analogous an 8-bit Raspberry Pi. Not expensive for a SBC, but not as cheap as I would expect an 8-bit thing with vga would be. Being that 8-bit processors have been gone from interactive systems for so long, anything under a couple of hundred dollars would have been “cheapest.” It would just have to come in under the price of the 80s systems. I could win the same kind of contest by making a 5-bit machine at any price!
tyingq 4y ago
The "DUINOMITE" is 20€, but it's based on a 32 bit CPU, even though it sort of functions like an old 8-bit home computer...boots to a BASIC interpreter. Similar is the VGA+PS/2 equipped ESP32 board: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832855287283.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832855287283.html at $12USD or so. But, again, not 8-bit. I think their claim of cheapest for this Agon light is because a 8-bit home-pc style computer is such a niche/purist space. It's more expensive to build a keyboard/vga ready thing because the chip doesn't have much built-in. https://www.olimex.com/Products/Duino/Duinomite/DUINOMITE/open-source-hardware https://www.olimex.com/Products/Duino/Duinomite/DUINOMITE/op...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

shrubble 4y ago

They use an 18MHz eZ80 part. I have a 33MHz on its way to me now, except it is in a tiny 40mm square case and access is serial only over USB. I think it is this one: https://www.tindie.com/products/circlem/minz-c-small-cased-33-or-36-mhz-z180-with-cpm/ https://www.tindie.com/products/circlem/minz-c-small-cased-3...

SinePost 4y ago

The TI-84 Plus CE has a eZ80 at 48 MHz.[1] https://www.brownmath.com/ti83/diff8384.htm https://www.brownmath.com/ti83/diff8384.htm

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago

I like that its 32bit audio and video co-processor is superior in almost everyway.

Someone 4y ago

I wonder why they went for 18MHz. The TI-84 Plus CE has a 48MHz eZ80 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-84_Plus_series#TI-84_Plus_CE_and_TI-84_Plus_CE-T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-84_Plus_series#TI-84_Plus_C...), so it faster parts exist. Is it difficult for hobbyists to design the PCB, etc for a 50MHz machine? Or at the faster parts hard/impossible to find nowadays?

derefr 4y ago
> Is it difficult for hobbyists to design the PCB, etc for a 50MHz machine? My understanding is that, from 1MHz or so (like a 6502) through to about 10MHz (like an 8086), it's pretty easy to prototype a complete computer — CPU wired to memory, IO, etc, and everything in tolerance to speak to one-another within the CPU's half-clock sample rate — with just discrete logic components (e.g. NOR DIPs to combine address lines to make chip-select pins, etc) on a breadboard. Get much faster than that, though, and those discrete logic chips start to add too much delay; so you start having to prototype directly for a PCB with surface-mount components, rather than ever having a breadboarding phase. Which sucks, because now you're having to send your design out to be printed and picked, and so your iteration speed is now 1/100th of what it would have been before.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  This is, I believe, why many designs back in the day used wire-wrap. A cleanly done wire wrap can apparently get quite clean signal and achieve high frequencies. The Atari ST and Amiga generation machines were prototyped this way, for e.g.. For the ST, 8mhz memory bus but faster for the video shifter portions where the RAM was multiplexed between the CPU and the Shifter. http://www.bambi.net/atari/atari_st_prototype.html http://www.bambi.net/atari/atari_st_prototype.html Unfortunately wire wrap sockets are very difficult and $$ to source these days. Which is too bad because it seems like a good halfway point between breadboarding and PCB. FWIW I've managed to managed to get clean DVI/HDMI output off FPGA on a breadboard, and I'm by no means talented in electronics.
  - rootbear 4y ago

justin66 4y ago

> Agon light™ is a true 8-bit microcomputer in that there are no FPGAs and no emulation in it. It would be nice if people would stop pretending CPUs implemented on FPGAs are somehow not real.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
There's gotta be an academic graduate level anthropology thesis that could be written with the title "What Is Real?: The Online 'Retro-Computing' Subculture and Its Search For Authenticity." The whole "no FPGA" thing is kind of funny when you see people reach for microcontrollers to do their video display component, and those microcontrollers themselves often greatly outperform the main CPU. What's the major difference between dropping in an MCU vs an FPGA? Aside: A friend of mine has reimplemented the whole C64 VIC-II VDP in Verilog ("VIC-II Kawari") complete with a test harness built around VICE, etc, amazing work; it would be so cool to see someone pony up the cash to get something like that fabbed in fresh new silicon. Then we could have a "true" retro video display controller so we can have a truly authentic neo-retro computer :-)
- sponaugle 4y ago
  Indeed - I was surprised to see an ESP32 on there, driven over serial, for the video output. That seems an order of magnitude more modern than using a CPLD, much less an FPGA. I am building a VGA adapter for my 68k supercomputer using a CPLD which presents some challenges that would be easy to solve in an FPGA. I have wrestled with that concept of what is retro enough, and there is no simple answer. Sticking with thru-hole is hard enough given the ever declining availability of parts!
  - justin66 4y ago
    The ironic thing is, if this were 1980 and anyone were taking this thing's "fastest" designation seriously, the very first step z80 developers would take would be to figure out how to use the ESP32 as a coprocessor for general computation.
II2II 4y ago

fortran77 4y ago

There was a 24 MHz 16-bit microcontroller out in 1985 or so: The Fairchild 9445 https://www.cpushack.com/2017/11/14/cpu-of-the-day-fairchild-f9445-the-microflame-flames-out/ https://www.cpushack.com/2017/11/14/cpu-of-the-day-fairchild... It ran the Nova 4 instruction set. We were using it for a cutting-edge project: and all Digital Radio receiver, for EVLF communications to submarines in the 16 kHz range.