Vibe coding? No thank you. I prefer to generate unintelligible reams of C code the old fashioned way: a near-lethal combination of sleep deprevation, caffiene, and mescaline.

Why am I trying to make my little games console / microcomputer a reality, given how fucked the world is? Self-answering question. The more fucked the world, the more you have to push your dreams, even small ones.

Excuse me while I quietly freak out about maybe having actually finished and delivered a project for once.

If I somehow ship this thing, and nobody cares, and it's a big flop, I can handle it. That shit happens. I just need to be able to say I delivered a working design, that I finished a project, and that it does what it's supposed to do. But I really want people to like it too. I want them to look at it and go "this is the machine the Commander X16 should have been".

This might well be the most complex thing, in terms of density, that I've ever designed. I am definitely going to need peer review before I can stomach having it fabricated and populated. I'm feeling out of my depth. It does look the business, though, doesn't it?

Can anyone think of a good reason not to punt on the power supply, and use a power-only USB-C connector with two 5.1KΩ resistors to ground on CC1/CC2 to get 15W at 5V, use that to power the controller ports, and feed the 3.3V and 1.2V regulators with that?

Another change in revision 5 of the prototype is that I extended the board length a bit, to flush up the SD card slot and the fronts of the controller ports. This would make it much easier for someone interested to design a console style case.

Okay, so Sentinel 65X. It's not dead, it's not a dud, it's a working design that's published and tested, as far as hardware goes. I put further development on hold for a variety of reasons, some of which still apply, but not all. But let's say, hypothetically, that I got it started up again. Never too late, after all. Plus it's a system with gobs of potential, in my opinion. Put the "how" aside for now, we're doing hypotheticals, not practicals. Does anyone actually care about it? Despite it being a working system, I mean, does anyone actually want it? Reminder of the basic pitch: 8MHz 65816 compatible CPU 512KB each on-board RAM and ROM VERA graphics and sound Dual SNES-compatible control ports SD card slot Stereo audio and VGA video output ROM cartridge port Bus expansion port "Clock port" for small expansions

Imagine a world where people who want to work as programmers had to maintain ethical standards to keep their licenses. How much better the world would have become.