AGON™

Latest News

(Further down below you can find introductory information and options for buying ready-to-use units.)

Here's Pingo 3D running on Agon, using video mode 136, in BASIC (by Curtis Whitley):


"The most impressive off-the-shelf eZ80 machine we've seen is the Byte Attic Agon series. These are available off-the-shelf in several versions, such as the €50 (£43, $53) AgonLight2 from Olimex, and there's copious info on its own wiki," says none other than The Register.

There is now an index with links to most Agon light software out there, all from one place.

You can now emulate a number of classic, vintage systems on Agon light™! See the video below for a lively demonstration of some of the possibilities.


There is now an Agon FAQ.

A new series of short, educational, tutorial-like videos on Agon light™, by Richard Turnnidge, is now available on YouTube.


Agon Elite is coming!


Have a look at Agon Lander, a fantastic new game for Agon light™! The human voice sample is just a fantastic touch!


Check this awesome new custom case for Agon light™! Pure nostalgia!


If you ever doubted the audio capabilities of your humble Agon light™, take a good listen to this and be amazed!

There is now a fantastic YouTube channel called Learn Agon, with very instructive videos accessible to all, showing how to get the best out of your Agon hardware!

Christian Pinder, the original developer of Elite - The New Kind, is writing code for Agon™!


Mike Dailly, the legendary author of the classical game 'Lemmings,' is doing a Lemmings version for Agon Console8™!

Neil, from RMC - The Cave, has released a YouTube video introducing Agon Console8™ and its community of dedicated developers. It's fun to watch and provides a preview of the amazing things coming to the Agon ecosystem!


Olimex now has stock of ready-to-use, high-end, gold-finished ORIGINS Edition units! If you want one, you should be quick.

Konami's 'King's Valley' has been ported to Agon, on top of Agon's 'MSX personality' firmware layer. See video below for a demo. Soon, many more games from Konami's exceptional MSX library—arguably the best games of the 80s—will be available on the Agon platform!


Heber Ltd. has briefly opened pre-orders for Agon Console8™, after having released photos of the production units (see below). The prices were revealed and are surprisingly low. These pre-order units were sold out after a few hours, but Heber is making another batch of 500 available. You can order yours right now! (Maximum of two units per customer.)

Noel, from the YouTube channel 'Noel's Retro Lab,' has just published a video with a wonderful discussion of Agon light™'s design and goals; highly recommended!


Heber Ltd. has just announced Agon Console8™, a videogames console based on Agon light™. It uses the optimized board design originally developed for Agon's ORIGINS edition™ and features much broader and more flexible I/O, as well as expansion possibilities (the latter may include different video formats, more controllers, more sound formats, etc.). Heber is working on a whole ecosystem of future peripherals, games and applications, and have a team of developers onboard, dedicated to writing games for Agon Console8. This is the 21st-century's ultimate 8-bit console! And it looks just gorgeous in its custom case:


Agon light ORIGINS edition™, a new board revision meant to optimize signal integrity and circuit robustness, is now available! This new revision supplants the original Agon light™ and should be used by all makers and sellers from this point onwards (it does not replace Olimex's AgonLight2™, which is a separate development branch). Heber Ltd.'s Agon Console8™ is already based on the improvements of this new revision.

Since the original publication of this page, the Agon light™ ecosystem has had explosive growth. It has become impossible for me to record here every new development, repository, or documentation release. I thus encourage users to visit the Agon light™ developer's group for the latest news and developments, the Agon light™ Wiki for the latest documentation, and the Github Agon-light topic for the latest software and hardware peripheral releases. I will still try to maintain a 'Repositories' section below with the more visible Agon-related repositories on Github, but the list will certainly be incomplete and may have important omissions.

Agon light™ now runs the Amiga bouncing ball demo! No, really, it does! And in BASIC, no less!

Draegerman, yet another exclusive game for Agon light™, has been released!

You can now control your home from your Agon light™, in BBC BASIC! I kid you not!


Vezza is a tool for running Infocom-compatible (Z-machine) adventure games on Agon light™. See the accompanying video.

You can now easily and conveniently prototype hardware to be controlled by Agon light™ with Olimex's AgonLight2-Proto board!


Pizza-Dash, an original game for Agon light™, written in BBC BASIC, is now freely available.

The eZ80 development environment of TI calculators (CE C/C++ toolchain) has now been ported to Agon light™.

There is now an Agon light emulator available!

CP/M 2.2 is now available for Agon light™. It runs on top of the standard Quark™ firmware and does not require re-flashing anything.

Space Birds, a new game for Agon light™, is now freely available.

DigiKey (USA) is now also carrying Agon light 2™ and its custom metal case. Americans thus have an alternative to MOUSER.

Here's a massive article on Agon light™ in Germany's main electronics publication. You can subscribe to it for one month free, to read the whole thing.

Small Rocks 'n Diamonds, a new open-source game for Agon light™ by Alexander Sharikhin, is now published!

A complete Agon Quark™ BBC BASIC manual is now available online, thanks to Tim Delmare.

Agon light™ 2 can be connected to the Internet through a €3.45 UEXT WiFi module by Olimex. Alexander Sharikhin has used it to create a Gopher browser for Agon light™!

There is now a library of functions for making full use of Agon light™'s 512KB of system memory from BASIC. It has been written by Curtis Whitley.

Nova-Star, an original game for Agon light™ by Nicholas Pratt, is now released! See also a video review of the game.

Jeroen Venema and Mario Smit have created an amazing utility to flash the eZ80's firmware for the first time, without the Zilog Smart Cable! The expensive cable is, therefore, no longer needed at all; not even for first-time programming. In addition, if you bricked your Agon during firmware experimentation, you can also unbrick it with this tool, again without the cable. The utility and respective instructions can be found on Github. There is also a video illustrating the process.

Breaking: You can now order the Olimex Agon light 2 from MOUSER in the USA, for just $58. MOUSER offers worldwide delivery too, with free shipping. Americans can thus finally purchase Agon conveniently, without import taxes and shipping costs. It took a while, but Agon is now finally available in all geographies!

You can now buy the Olimex version of Agon light™ from ThePiHut, the premier Raspberry Pi & maker superstore. If you are in the UK, this should finally make it very easy for you to acquire Agon! The corresponding metal case is also available.

Firmware documentation is now collected and maintained in the Agon light™ WiKi.

There is now an improved, native Agon light™ assembler.

Olimex is now offering a professionally-designed and -made metal case for their Agon light™ board.

There is now a public 3D-printable case design on thingiverse for the Olimex version of Agon light™. And another one, textured.

A technical overview of Agon light™, as well as its design history and motivations, has been published in print by Electronics World magazine. A digital version can be accessed for free here.

A native FORTH interpreter is now available for Agon light™.

If you have an Agon light™ running Quark™ MOS version 1.00 or 1.01, it is now possible to upgrade it to the latest MOS versions without the dedicated Zilog USB Smart Cable! All you need is the 'legacy' release of  Jeroen Venema's software utility. If you are already running Quark™ MOS 1.02 or later, then from now on you can use the 'generic' version of the utility to upgrade the eZ80 firmware to all future releases of MOS. No more Zilog cables, unless you're flashing the eZ80 for the first time (we're working on that too).

European Union computer company Olimex Ltd. has created a lower-cost version of Agon light™ (fully compatible with the original) and sells it for just EUR 50 (!) fully assembled, programmed and tested.


What is Agon light™?

Agon light™ is a fully open-source 8-bit microcomputer and microcontroller in one small, low-cost board, built with state-of-the-art 21st-century technology. It has two claims to fame, both of which are substantiated in the next sections. In a nutshell,

Agon light™ is the fastest and cheapest true 8-bit microcomputer ever made.

In addition,

Agon light™ is the world's sole standalone, instant-on, BASIC-programmed microcontroller that dispenses with a host PC and sketch compilation.

This allows projects to be controlled from the immediacy of a BASIC interpreter's prompt.

The illustration below details Agon light™'s key technical specifications.


Agon light™ is a true 8-bit microcomputer in that there are no FPGAs and no emulation in it. It also has no layers of abstraction such as virtual machines. The bare metal is exposed directly to the firmware programmer.

As a microcomputer, Agon light™ has VGA resolution of up to 640 x 480 pixels and 64 simultaneous colors. It supports sprites and scores best in all popular microcomputer benchmarks by a large margin (see the "Benchmarks" section below).

As a microcontroller, Agon light™ has a control port featuring SPI, I2C, 20 distinct GPIOs (including UART lines), a system clock output, as well as power (3.3V and 5V) and ground rails. It also features a separate ACCESS.bus header.


Much more information about Agon light™ can be found in the Hardware Manual. For firmware and software information, check out the Agon WiKi.

Demonstration

The video below contains an extensive demonstration of Agon light™'s BASIC capabilities, as well as an accessible overview of the system.


A follow-up demonstration, discussing Agon light's game programming capabilities and the Olimex version of Agon light, is also available:



Unique selling points

  • The fastest and cheapest 8-bit microcomputer ever made, by a large margin.
  • No host PC or sketch compilation required to control your projects: you can control your whole house from the immediacy of interpreted BASIC commands.
  • A hardware canvas for you to make of it your own dream, customized microcomputer, with your own preferred look-and-feel and functionality. Agon is a laboratory for computer science experimentation.
  • No more assembly programming to customize or personalize your computer's firmware: Agon light™'s entire firmware suite, including the functionality of the Video Display Processor (VDP), is programmed in C with freely available tooling (compilers, IDEs, loaders, etc.). 
  • Agon™ is an open-hardware and open-source project through and through, so you get all the information about the system.


Media coverage (earliest to latest)

Get an Agon™!

Here are the sellers of Agon™ that I am aware of:

  • Heber Ltd. (UK, EU and worldwide) carries the ready-to-use Agon Console8™ videogames console and associated accessories.
  • DigiKey (USA and worldwide, free shipping) carries the Olimex version of Agon light™ and its accompanying custom metal case.
  • MOUSER (USA and worldwide, free shipping) sells the Olimex version of Agon light™ (for only US$58) and corresponding accessories.
  • ThePiHut (UK, Canada, EU, USA), the premier Raspberry Pi & maker superstore, sells the Olimex version of Agon light™, ready to use, as well as the corresponding metal case.
  • Olimex Ltd. (EU) made their own cost-reduced version of Agon light™ (fully compatible with the original) and offer it ready-to-use for just 50 Euros! They are a company with lots of experience designing, manufacturing, testing and commercialising computers, controllers and embedded systems. I have tested one of their Agon light™ boards functionally and it worked just fine, as shown in this video.
  • PCBWay (China and worldwide) sells ready-to-use units (fully assembled, tested, and with firmware flashed from factory) of the original over-engineered Agon light™ in their online gift shop.
  • Agon Australia (Australia) offers ready-to-use units of both the original Agon light™ and the Olimex version, CP/M pre-loaded, firmware flashing service, Olimex peripherals, cases, and even the Zilog programming cable for firmware developers!
  • agon-light.store (UK) offers options from ready-to-use units to SMD-populated boards.

Unless stated otherwise, I have not personally tested or characterised the products of the sellers above. What I did test and characterise thoroughly was my original Agon light™ PCB design. And I am confident about its excellent signal integrity. Indeed, that original board was designed for high frequency performance, even though it runs at only 18.432MHz. None of this, however, means that variations of the original PCB design produced by other teams are inferior; it only means that I haven't designed or characterised them personally.

Benchmarks

The figure below shows Agon light™'s raw performance (in seconds to completion) in the Rugg/Feldman benchmarks, compared to the performance of other machines running the same benchmarks with essentially the same BASIC interpreter. Click on the figure to zoom in.

Rugg/Feldman benchmarks, raw results without normalization.


To compare the architectures while taking the clock speed out of the equation, the next figure shows the same benchmark results now normalized for clock frequency. In other words, the results below can be interpreted as the relative performance of each machine when they all run at the same clock speed.

Rugg/Feldman benchmarks, now normalized for clock speed.


In all results above, Agon light™ is the best performing machine. To illustrate its advantage over other systems at a glance, the following picture shows the speed-up factor (rounded to the closest integer) of Agon light™ relative to the other machines, for each of the Rugg/Feldman benchmarks. On the top table, raw performance numbers without normalization were used to calculate the speed-up factors. On the bottom table, performance results normalized for clock speed were used.


Agon light™'s speed-up factor with respect to other systems, for each of the Rugg/Feldman benchmarks. The table on the top is based on raw performance numbers without normalization. The table on the bottom is based on performance results normalized for clock speed. All speed-up factors were rounded to the closest integer.


Another popular benchmark for 8-bit machines is Noel's Retro Lab's BASIC benchmark. The figure below shows all results of that benchmark available at the time of this writing, including Agon light™'s performance (namely, 1.8s to complete the benchmark). Agon light™ is almost a factor of 3 faster than the next best machine. As before, you can click on the figure to zoom in.

Noel's Retro Lab's BASIC benchmark results, including Agon light™'s performance (1.8 second) at the very bottom of the plot.


Finally, one more BASIC benchmark is often used today: Matt Heffernan’s “Battle Royale.” The table below summarizes all known results next to Agon light™'s own performance, which is more than a factor of 3 faster than the next entry, and almost a factor of 5 faster than the best-performing real machine.


Matt Hefferman's "Battle Royale" benchmark, including Agon light™'s performance.


Manufacturing costs

At PCBWay, in volumes of 100 boards, the cost of the original board is $46 (PCB plus SMD-only assembly, including the cost of the SMD parts). For higher volumes, the cost decreases appreciably. Only the through-hole components are missing, but anyone can buy and solder them for well under $10 extra. Therefore, we can say that, for relatively low production volumes in the low hundreds, the total costs for the bill of materials and assembly is about $50 for an original Agon light™ unit (significantly less for Olimex's lower-cost version).


We can compare this to the estimated manufacturing costs of the historically lowest-cost 8-bit computer before Agon light™: Sinclair's ZX81. We know that it sold for £70 in 1981. Assuming that Sinclair had 40% gross margins (which is unrealistic, but safe to assume for our purposes), it would have cost £42 to make. In today’s money, that is £165, or $187: over 3.7x more expensive than Agon light™.

Keep in mind, however, that regardless of the seller, there are other costs involved if you want to purchase a complete and tested unit delivered to your doorstep: margins, taxes, shipping and import fees, etc.  All design and manufacturing files are already available on Github.


Firmware

Agon light™'s official firmware has been written by Dean Belfield, with contributions by Jeroen Venema and others. It consists of three main parts:

  1. Quark™ VDP: the code that runs on Agon light™'s Video Display Processor.
  2. Quark™ MOS: the machine's basic operating system, akin to DOS and CP/M.
  3. Quark™ BBC BASIC: an extended version of Acorn's classic BASIC interpreter, with graphics and control extensions specific to Agon light™.
There is also the Quark™ MOS firmware update utility. This allows users to update/change the firmware of the eZ80 CPU without the need to have a Zilog USB Smart Cable for doing so.

Moreover, there is now a software suite that allows you to flash the eZ80's firmware for the first time without the Zilog Smart Cable. In addition, if you bricked your Agon during firmware experimentation, you can also unbrick it with this tool, again without the cable. See Agon Electron HAL, Agon Electron Flash, and Agon ZDI Load. Here is a video illustrating the process, by Jeroen Venema.

Agon light™'s BASIC interpreter has a built-in (inline) assembler. But if you want to natively code in eZ80 assembly, we offer an even better option with this improved native Agon light™ assembler by Jeroen Venema.

Firmware documentation is now collected and maintained in the Agon light™ WiKi. There is also a complete Agon Quark™ BBC BASIC manual available.

The demonstration video linked above features an extensive demonstration of Quark™. A follow-up demonstration video shows its game development capabilities.

Now, since Agon™ is a fully open-source platform, others have been busy creating their own firmware and ports. Koen van Nieuwehoven, for instance, has ported CP/M (a specific version of the VPD firmware is also needed):


He even managed to run WordStar 4 on it:


A native FORTH interpreter, ported by Lennart Benschop, is also available for Agon light™.

CP/M 2.2 is also available for Agon light™. Unlike the example above, it runs on top of the standard Quark™ firmware and does not require re-flashing anything.

There is now an Agon light emulator available, which enables software development even for those who haven't got the hardware yet.

The eZ80 development environment of TI calculators (CE C/C++ toolchain) has now also been ported to Agon light™.

Agon light™'s architecture

Agon light™'s architecture takes inspiration from the classical mainframe + terminal structure. Its 'mainframe' or processor subsystem includes the CPU proper (an eZ80 running at 18.432 MHz), system memory (parallel SRAM, 512KB), a µSD-card slot and several general-purpose I/O lines. The 'terminal' or Audio/Video subsystem contains an ESP32-PICO-D4 system-on-a-chip running at 240 MHz, 8MB of memory (pSRAM) and ports for video (VGA), audio and keyboard (PS/2). Agon™ takes 5V input power either from its USB or GPIO port.

Here is Agon light™'s system diagram:


Agon light™'s high-level system diagram.

Agon light™'s Hardware Manual contains a much more detailed architecture description.

Agon light™'s CPU is an eZ80 pipelined core, compatible with the classical Z80 but much faster and more efficient on a MHz-per-MHz basis, and featuring a 24-bit address bus capable of directly addressing up to 16MB of memory and I/O.

Agon light™'s flexibility

The two main subsystems that constitute Agon light™ (namely, the eZ80 processor subsystem and the ESP32 A/V 'terminal') can be programmed in standard C with freely-available tools, such as the Arduino IDE and Zilog's ZDS-II IDE. This means that Agon light™ is essentially a hardware platform, built for maximum flexibility, that allows you to make of it your own dream, personal, customized computer, according to your own vision of what a computer should look, feel and do.

Instead of having to program kernel code in assembly so to write to an EPROM, you can simply write C code, compile it with free tools, and upload your firmware into the eZ80's and the ESP32's embedded flash memories. You have full control not only of the basic functionality of Agon light™, but also of the look-and-feel the user experiences upon turning the machine on. You can brand it yourself and show your dream computer to your friends. In a sense, Agon light™ is a laboratory for computer science experimentation.

Repositories

Due to the explosive growth of the Agon community, it has become impossible for me to keep track of every new software and hardware peripheral release. The list below is thus incomplete. You can always follow the Github Agon-light topic for the very latest.

Chris Rennie's low-profile case for Agon light™. Photos by Chris Rennie.

Join us!

You can join Agon's development group on Facebook and participate in this exciting project!