What follows was originally formatted as a tweet-storm, but I felt it important enough to be preserved here.

All of the problems I'm running into with the Kestrel-3 have led me to "down-spec" several times. I've felt (and still feel) really horrible about down-spec'ing the computer. It makes me feel like a failure. I hate promising A, but delivering B, and even then, only after a year-long fight. But, what if fate is causing me to evolve the design to something more open, or more flexible?

It's occurred to me that the constraints imposed by icoBoard, etc. forces me towards something closer to a mainframe architecture (especially IBM System/360) than to an Atari ST. Maybe this isn't the architecture I wanted, but the architecture the open-source hardware community will accept.

Not that I'm bashing mainframes, mind you. I love learning about them, and always wanted to play on one. It's just that I expected a desktop to be easier to build. Maybe I was wrong?

I figure a "desktop" Kestrel will just consist of the mainframe with an embedded terminal hard-wired to the system console. This might not be a bad way to go: it isolates the terminal's capabilities from the core of the computer, freeing the Kestrel from any possibility of firmware coming to depend upon specific hardware attributes. This allows the terminal to evolve independently of the core computer: the Nexys-2 has a 256-color display, the DE-1 a 4096 color display, but the myStorm and icoBoard both have nothing (at least without an external attachment). Maybe someone would want to use a Gameduino-1 or -2; all it'd take is a microcontroller to sit between the user's monitor and the Kestrel-3.

My problems could very well be a blessing in disguise.