Agon light

Discuss anything not related to the current Uzebox design like successors and other open source gaming hardware
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danboid
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Agon light

Post by danboid »

Yet another open source 8 bit computer, but this has a few important features.

The most significant one I'd say, apart from the fact its actually available now (unlike the X16) is that is doesn't use any FPGA's, like most other modern retro platforms do. It uses an ESP32-Pico-D4 to handle VGA output. It would seem the Commander X16 devs overlooked this option? It uses a Z80 compat CPU which is faster than any of the other (modern) retro 8 bits, except maybe the super expensive, FPGA based MEGA65.

https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/agon.html
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danboid
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Re: Agon light

Post by danboid »

I was watching a video about the Agon light yesterday. On the whole it seems to be one of the better modern retro computers and easily one of the most affordable but what ruins it for me is it only has a beeper for audio. It seems sad that the designer put so much effort into designing a retro computer and almost totally wrote of audio as not being worth the effort.

Yes, a GPIO add-on soundcard is possible but the lack of a semi-decent audio chip of some sort pretty much hobbles its prospects of attracting much interest as a modern retro games platform.
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Agon light

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Huh, that is a curious contraption. It is interesting in a way. The thing could run maybe SNES++ level games...but seems focused on BASIC with beeper audio :?

The benchmark stuff I see on some of these various systems really confuses me. They'll show performance at a whole magnitude higher than the classic machines...while trying to sell it as "programming like the 8 bit days". ESP32 drawing with 240Mhz, 8MB RAM is too much for my taste.

It's cool, but for me I'll keep on Uzeboxing 8-)
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danboid
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Re: Agon light

Post by danboid »

In the video that I watched last night, it claimed the Agon ran 8-bit the fractal drawing benchmark in 1.8s but the Uzebox renders that fractal in 1s whilst the Uzebox MCU is also doing the video and providing much better audio than the Agon. If we disable the video output then the Uzebox is clearly the winner. See about 39m into this video for the fractal benchmark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2dYZmlu1D4

The Agon has much more RAM but Uzebox wins out for me here currently. Lets see if someone fixes the audio issue by coming up with a hopefully zero cost audio solution good enough to become the standard for that platform. I said he could probably 'borrow' the Uzebox sound engine but I'd prefer the Agon devs try to outdo the Uzebox sound engine.

There are currently no decent quality games or demos for the Agon that I'm aware of. Will they come? It looks to me like the Spectrum Next has took any potential games Neo-Speccy games devs away from the Agon Light and at least the Next has some form for standardised audio support thats not just a beeper.
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