Pictures of the C-One reconfigurable computer

[Waccoon]

Ah! cool! if i didnt just spend a ton of cash on an Amiga and a cell phone, I'd get one..

I hate to rain on the parade, but if you used an emulator, you could just use it on your newly-acquired Amiga and cell phone (or laptop, etc.)

Even strictly for nostalgia or novelty value, this seems pretty expensive and inflexible.  Emulators can do a hell of a lot more than any hardware if they're done well, and there's plenty of "micro" platforms to choose from, so ATX is hardly a reasonable form factor.

[Waccoon]

I just think it's odd that the holy grail of computing is turning hardware into software, but Amigans and other retro fans are the complete opposite.  Let me tell you, I'm much, much happier playing my old Sega Genesis / Megadrive games on an emulator where I can pause, slow down and speed up, hack into memory and the CPU registers, and do save states, instead of plugging my Genesis into the TV.

Why invest money in a platform that is no better than the original and will never achieve critical mass?  Novelty is a strange beast.  Not like Amigans would know anything about that, of course.

[Waccoon]

NOTHING BEATS THE REAL THING

Well, the real thing is the C64 itself.  There has to be quite a bit of emulation going on in the C-One in those programmable logic chips (emulation in hardware is still emulation).

Besides, turning those portable game joysticks into full-blown C64's is cool.  Buying a huge ATX board and putting it in a full-sized PC case is rather silly to me.

None of the software emulators are 100% accurate.

That's because of the reverse engineering and lack of documentation, not the emulator itself.  I fail to see how building a new hardware platform based on an old platform differs from emulating an old platform in software.

It's worth noting that the Playstation2 actually has an original, hardware-based Playstation core built into it, and it still has compatibility issues with some PSX games.  I still have a lot more fun running my PSX games on ePSXe in 32-bit color, super high resolutions, with antialiasing, and a keyboard, rather than use the crappy, original core built into my PS2.

Like for example good old scroll games, they just dont run as smooth on a pc as on the real thing with custom chipset.

Do you have VSync on?  WinUAE runs perfectly smooth on my computer -- far better than any modern PC game, where they always turn VSync off to get better benchmarks.

It's also arguable that the host OS is causing the timing hickups.  With a real OS in place, instead of Windows, I doubt there would be so many problems.