I've spent a fair amount of time looking into Kickstarter and a couple other croudsourcing websites lately for a personal project. At first I was all hung ho about using Kickstarter, but now I think I'm leaning more towards using Indiegogo.com. What I like about them is that if you don't reach your goal, you still get what people have pledged (though they take a larger cut). If you *do* meet your goal, they actually take a little bit less than Kickstarter.
See, I LIKE that Kickstarter doesn't take folks money unless the goal is made. If you take money even though you haven't hit your goal there's a much greater chance the folks who pledged aren't going to get anything back at all, because the funding just isn't in place to make what needs to happen possible. Now, with any of these sites, it's not like people are going to just come crawling out of the woodwork to throw money at projects, but with some spreading of the word, reasonable goals (technical knowledge achieved or almost achieved, for example with only the sunk costs of circuit mask design and such remaining), and conservative financial estimates, you never know.
And me talking about this doesn't mean we should do it now, but it DOES mean that we shouldn't automatically reject hardware-related ideas just because they are harder.
Yes Necro, I think a POAC would be a good goal, assuming we can collect more info. It might not take much to step up from a POAC to a SGOAC. Hell, I'd love to see a modern CD expansion, too. There are so many cheap IDE drives out there, there's got to be a way to hack a cheaper expansion deck that's more reliable. Even a ghetto Turbo Booster Pro for PCE would be great.
Pie in the sky would be a cloned Arcade Card Pro and an add-on for the expansion port that would allow CD images to be used from flash card. The chips on the add-on would take a standard ISO with WAV files or something and mount it virtually in a slow flash RAM pool and make sure the CD-ROM calls over the expansion port are properly mapped and directed.
You know what? None of this is, right now, reasonable, but electronics manufacturing is now a commodity. How heavily customized were the various HuC6xxx chips? Was there a lot of custom firmware or just a few expansions on existing chip design? The base 65C02 architecture is so well known by now that it should be trivial for someone in circuit design who's familiar with the 6502 family to add in whatever is needed, assuming we can know for sure what is needed. Has anyone tried using a programmable FPGA like the Alterra line to mimic the chip? I know the Alterra stuff's a bit pricey to use in devices intended to be resold, but for personal experimentation and design the stuff is priced pretty well. That said, I'm not familiar enough with this filed to know if a programmable FPGA would be appropriate to try and mimic and map such an older chip architecture.
Topic: PCE hardware development and funding (Read 1281 times)
