Is there room for a "Beyond Commodore" blog here?

[ChuckT]

I wanted to start a blog with a title of something like "Beyond Commodore" or "Out of Commodore".  I'm wondering what the rules or sensitivities of this site are.

I'm basically an orphaned Commodore user.  I grew up on the Commodore 64, tape drive, 1541 and 1581 disk drives.  I owned a Commodore 128 and Amiga 500.

I invested in ARM development boards which I feel are a successor to the 6502 chip.  I don't have a lot of money so I found one of the books which retail for $45 on ebay from a Goodwill store for about $8.59 and free shipping.  I bought another ARM programming book for about $50.

What I'm looking to do is learn how to program the ARM chip into an SBC (Single Board Computer) and chronicle my development.  I don't like how Microsoft or Apple build computers so my build may be "Commodore like" on more modern hardware.

I'm not here to bad mouth Commodore or Amiga.  I'm very fond of them but I would tell it like it is but I have really fond memories of them and I have a functioning C-64.

I haven't been able to get people interested in investing and developing other hardware.  I'm thinking that maybe if I have a little more to offer that people might be nudged a little.

[commodorejohn]

If it doesn't belong here, you could go to the Vintage Computer Forum. In any case, I'm interested in hearing what you have to say on the subject.

[ChuckT]

In any case, I'm interested in hearing what you have to say on the subject.

Thank you for your interest.

Like everyone, I was waiting for someone to do something with the Commodore / Amiga intellectual property and we all know where that went.  I can't exactly get old chips made so I decided to look at off the shelf parts that were available.  There are a number of options that I could look at such as the Beaglebone Black, the Raspberry Pi, Uzebox, etc.

I chose the STM32 F4 Cortex ARM chip which is a 168 MHZ processor.  The part I am talking about has development boards which I have but this is one of the parts without the touch screen:

http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/STMicroelectronics/STM32F4DISCOVERY/?qs=sGAEpiMZZMvFPGEOwQcrY8eCSOyOXcPBXPB8snd5oaY%3d

It is basically a 32 bit chip with 1 Megabyte of flash, 192 KB of Ram, a motion sensor, a 3-axis accelerometer, an audio DAC with amplifier, and an omnidirectional digital microphone on this board.

This board can run several different LCDs including the iPhone LCD and Nokia LCD.  I think I've even seen a Hackaday post where someone claimed this board could run a Radeon driver.

I thought that programming a chip that can run an LCD would be easier for me to start out on than trying to make a VGA ladder right from the start which would allow me to do other things but there are some video options.

I didn't make these videos but these videos show what it can do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=32Q-PeT5H8c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Sv9fKLKvKc

And I can add Eproms to the board to give it more memory.  There are other GPUs that I could try to program with the board.  There is enough i/o that I could add a keyboard, mouse, wii controller, etc.  My goal would be a single board computer and I have all the hardware except for the ST Link which is inexpensive.