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I typed a thing and ILX ate it. Bah. Anyway. I glanced at a friend's copy of ULA book, seems v heavy on technical electronics details.
Brian Bagnall's "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" is a p. readable mix of personal history, comparisons of rivals, etc, with a little technical detail, but maybe not enough for you, especially if you want something specifically about microprocessors and custom logic arrays? I was pleased to see a couple of pages about the SID sound chip but they weren't very in-depth regarding the electronics or the audio capabilities, and here's all it has to say about the C64's equivalent of the ULA:
The engineers wondered how they could create such a complex memory layout before CES. They found their salvation in the Programmable Logic Array chip (PLA). According to Russell, “I remember finding that chip and saying, ‘Oh, that will do exactly what we want!’”The PLA chip acted like glue to hold the different parts of the system together. Yannes could simply insert the PLA chip and program it later. “I didn’t have time to design all the logic before they laid the PC board out, so I just took a PLA and named the signals I needed and told them to lay that out,” recalls Yannes. “While they were laying it out, I could figure out the coding for the PLA. That got us to the show.”
Also it doesn't get into the Amiga - there's an interesting-looking book about that which I haven't read called "The Future Was Here" but I think that's more about how software programmers worked around hardware limitations rather than how those limitations came to be. I think it's more technical than the Commodore book but less so than the Spectrum book, though, but maybe too late in the home micro era for you.
Can't think of anything not platform-specific, sorry, and even there most of what I've read has been either glossy picture books with no real content or online anyway. The Register had a series of (mostly) 30th anniversary posts which were surprisingly interesting: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Atheregister.co.uk+Archaeologic (they don't seem to have a browseable archive, though I'm not sure all the articles I'm thinking of have that buzzword at the top)
― a passing spacecadet, Wednesday, 19 August 2015 18:24 (eight years ago) link
btw above half-formed opinions of the Amiga book are (mostly) from reading the Amazon preview but also partly from reading an Atari VCS book in the same series - the VCS one ("Racing the Beam") is p. flimsy for the price but the Amiga one looks better
― a passing spacecadet, Wednesday, 19 August 2015 18:27 (eight years ago) link
Thanks, I'll definitely check that Commodore one out. I think I'll have to read multiple books about this subject to fully appreciate it.
Currently reading The Story of the Computer, not the most inventive of titles and it's not great but its a good starting point. Was only cheap (as you'd guess) and goes into analogue computing too.
― Drop soap, not bombs (Ste), Wednesday, 19 August 2015 19:54 (eight years ago) link
It's got good reviews hasn't it. Noticed someone in the reviews mentioned a new edition covering the Amiga, but I don't see any proof of that.
― Drop soap, not bombs (Ste), Wednesday, 19 August 2015 20:03 (eight years ago) link
three years pass...
one year passes...
They've released a full sized C64-mini. I'm so tempted but what can it really do that I can't already do with emulation? That keyboard though, ooooh.
― Ste, Friday, 20 December 2019 15:04 (four years ago) link
one year passes...
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