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Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000
The VDC was just something off the shelf Commodore had clogging up warehouse shelves.
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sure - it was originally designed for the C900.
That fact alone does not make it a bad chip.
(the missing interrupt signal does, but that got fixed in later revisions)
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It's really two more or less mutually exclusive machines put onto a single motherboard and a decision is made early in the bootstrap process which
'machine' is going to take charge of the motherboard.
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It has its own RAM ... but so do all PC gfx-cards and also the gfx-chip of the Apple-IIgs
The problem was the requirement for an EGA-monitor - well at least for European customers, since in the US these monitors were rather cheap and easily available in comparison.
And as I said: this can be fixed - adapters exist. A sync-mode with overlay would have been quite easy to implement.
But Commodore desperately wanted to offer something more "business-like" ...
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Nothing about the C128 really made sense.
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something without the Z80 but still 128k of ram and possibly more speed would have been nice a year earlier instead of the 264 line
85 was a terrible timing and did cut into the Amiga sales ...
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Ideal option would be to have the Z80 and 8502 working in parallel and an 80 column chip that worked with RGB. That's how it should have been. the >
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no.
(the CBM-II line offered this, but virtually nobody was interested and they only sold about 20k units...)