In SX Microcontrollers, SX/B Compiler and SX-Key Tool, kmonsx wrote:

Wow.  This really just hit me today.  I think I subconsciously ignored the single line EOL thread summary when I was here a month or so ago.

This is really a shame.  The SX is a great little device.  It was my introduction into microcontrollers, and with the books, good documentation, tech support, and of course everyone here made the learning process fun, easy, and rewarding.

Like others here, I've got some decisions to make about how/if to migrate my current SX hobby project to another uC.  I've been playing around with Xilinx FPGA's, and add on 8-bit Picoblaze uC and 32-bitMicroblaze uP's soft cores.  I'm seriously thinking about going down that path.

The last time I mentioned this, probably because I'm too naive to understand the whole market, I was shush'd up quickly.  I would [b]love[/b] a softcore SX!  While I'm no expert, given the size of the instruction set, limited built-in hardware peripherals, etc, creating a softcore for it wouldn't be an impossible task.  I know, I know, Ubicom won't release the IP and all that.  Just dreaming.

I will say that given my retro-computing interests, FPGAs are really neat for future-proofing stuff, and bringing stuff back to life.  Custom silicon made years ago by Atari, Commodore, etc can be reverse engineered (or at least functional equivalents produced), using Verilog or VHDL, and then can loaded into just about any FPGA.  So you can do the clone thing where you emulate/duplicate the original hardware (full on, including, say a 68030 processor) --- but you can also bring old hardware back to life, by interfacing the new FPGA with an old computer when replacement chips are no longer available.

Sorry to hear about this.

Keith

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