To me at least, it makes much better sense to go all-in on a MiSTer, rather than gradually frankenstein-ing the build with ARM or FPGA-based chips. There's money to be made trying to maintain these 40+ year old units though. (if the cottage industry surrounding it isn't a clue)
I have an Ultimate64 too, I did this project for philosophical reasons, since everything is new, even the motherboard, it's definitely a new machine, but at the same time, if you look at the electrical activity on the traces, you would conclude it's a c64, and yet, there's no commodore chips on there..
The most commodore thing is the firmware which is on the UV EEPROMs, and even that is slightly different since the original machine used mask roms rather than writable roms. So, it's very much not about "sense" on a practical level (then VICE with a couple of Quickshot competition pro USB sticks makes the most sense)
I was really hopeful for OS/2 Warp as a mainstream desktop OS when it came out, even though they grossly understated the memory requirements (it really needed 8mb) I think the death knell was ultimately WIN-OS2 which discouraged developers to make 32-bit native software, had this strategy been implemented just a few years earlier, it would have had a chance to saturate in the market.
Once properly installed and running, it was clearly ahead of the curve compared to Win 3.11, or even NT 3.x.
> I was really hopeful for OS/2 Warp as a mainstream desktop OS when it came out
Yes, me too. I evangelised it for a while.
Then I saw NT 3.1 at work. I deployed it in production in 1993.
It was worryingly good, if you could afford the hardware.
Then 2Y later I got a beta of Windows Chicago, before the "Windows 95" name was formalised, and I tried it, and I shut up about OS/2. It was very clearly Game Over.
NASA is really good at planning future missions. Implementing them? I've heard hundreds of fantastical half-baked ideas and very few of them materialize over the course of my 46 years on earth.
Eh, almost every NASA robotic mission that has gotten this far in the design and selection process has also flown. They're way past the "fantastical half-baked idea" stage. The financial reality is that NASA can only finance one or two billion-dollar missions per decade, and the competition is rather fierce. To be selected as the New Frontiers class mission of the late 2020s is a big deal, and you can be sure that at this point the proposing team has made a very solid case for their mission.
Yup. The robotic program has a very good track record of successes, even for crazy stuff like the Mars Science Laboratory’s sky crane descent stage:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki_Af_o9Q9s
It’s the human spaceflight program that has had the, um, difficulties. There are signs of hope, though.
Their robotic programs are generally great successes though - Mars rovers, Saturn, Pluto for the most recent achievements. Incredible stuff, and unmatched.
Probably because the senate keeps their corrupt hands off of these types of missions.
