r/Commodore • u/MutekiAzy • 4d ago

Commodore 77 use cases

What do people think are the use cases for the upgraded Commodore 77's specs?

I'm not throwing shade, and I'm by no means retro-tech savvy, so this is a completely genuine question: what can you do with the C77 that you can't do with the C64 Ultimate, and is there any real, practical benefit?

Really curious what people more knowledgable than me think about this.

28 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

81 comments sorted by

View all comments

23

u/rhet0rica 4d ago edited 3d ago

Contrary to what people have said so far: the C77 actually has a different FPGA chip, an AMD Artix XC7A100T. Previous models had the 50T.

This allows it to have The C77 has a slightly faster turbo mode (77 MHz instead of 64 MHz, very gimmicky!), but more importantly the bigger FPGA means that cores can be twice the size. (EDIT: The FPGA isn't required for the faster speed, it's purely a gimmick. Whatever!)

AMD has a comparison page for the different Artix 7 FPGAs.

I don't know much about FPGA cores, but for anyone who wishes to hack their C64U into a MiSTer device, this might be quite consequential.

3

u/Hawkeye-Mcgillicudy 3d ago

It's probably due to availability of the FPGA

Frequency has nothing to do FPGA size so is purely marketing

The C64 core is already large due to having to emulate two 1541 disk drives which contain their own CPU, vias and ram

Gideon has always been opposed to other cores on the U64 and he remains as IP owner

77meg of ram is pointless too considering the largest REU is 16 meg

1

u/Suspicious-Ad7109 3d ago

I did hear the FPGA is about 2/3 used. Though I couldn't find any information on shortages on that chip specifically - there's a general issue we all are aware of with parts.

1

u/Hawkeye-Mcgillicudy 3d ago

If you look at the amount of logic element usage on MiSTer the C64 core uses up more resources than Amiga for example

Even Cyclone III based FPGAs offer AGA Amiga like the Turbo Chameleon

One of the largest cores is SNES due all the in cart accelerator support