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A friend of mine, an 8-bit enthusiast, calls usage of ATMEGA chips "cheating" :) "True" 8bitter relies solely on component base of the 80s.
by dmitripopov 7y ago
A friend of mine, an 8-bit enthusiast, calls usage of ATMEGA chips "cheating" :) "True" 8bitter relies solely on component base of the 80s.
- rbanffy 7y agoYou could do a lot with period-correct SoCs like the 8052. https://archive.org/details/BYTE_Vol_10-08_1985-08_The_Amiga/page/n109/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/BYTE_Vol_10-08_1985-08_The_Amiga...
- pritovido 7y agoSteve Wozniak himself was cheating. Instead of using proper D/A converters that costed 100 times more, he made a hack. And the hack was good enough. It is one of the things in which academical training is perverse. It trains you to always complicate more and more any subject, and that the hard work is the goal, shortcuts are not permitted.
- dmitripopov 7y agoI agree. But, you know, enthusiasts enjoy holywars. And there's a thin hazy line between a "true" and a "cheater".
- glouwbug 7y agoWhat was the hack? PWM to an RC filter?
- Cyberdog 7y agoI believe it's the one mentioned in the article about how to achieve a color NTSC signal by just outputting ones and zeroes with proper timing. It begs the question what was done in parts of the world that didn't use NTSC, though.
- fsckboy 7y agothe other video standards (Europe used PAL) aren't much different in principle than NTSC, just some different timing and encoding parameters, the same D to A techniques work. PAL is higher bandwidth (and higher quality) than NTSC and Woz's timings were on the edge for NTSC so PAL versions didn't do color till a little later.
- rzzzt 7y agoThe display controller chip seems to be a hard to source part if you want to stick to 80s components. Do you know what his recommendation would be for that piece?
- snarfy 7y agoIt looks like it would take about 20 chips. [1] [1] - https://eater.net/vga https://eater.net/vga
- rzzzt 7y agoNot an unreasonable choice, but it has to be noted that home computers of the era already used LSI/VLSI dedicated ICs for this purpose, condensing the functionality of these 20 chips into a single package.
- transitorykris 7y agoYes, that’s been a frustration for me. I’ve settled on the Motorola 6847 which requires a couple supporting chips. This is scavenging parts off eBay though, which seems to be a plentiful source. I’ll find out shortly whether any of them are actually good.
- tyingq 7y agoMeh. The spirit of a self contained unit (display output, keyboard input, etc) and boot-to-interpreter are there. The Maximite family of boards "cheat" even more with a PIC32. But they are popular, and have the same feel as the 80's 8 bit PCs.
- dmitripopov 7y agoYes, but it's not about the feel of the product which is definitely there, but about the skills required to design. I, personally, would never call anybody who designed his own computer whether with ATMEGA or not, a "cheater". It deserves respect, to say the least.
- lvturner 7y agoSaw this a few times on HN, but immediately thought of it and feel its an appropriate response to your friend. "I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all."
- okareaman 7y agoBeautiful. The law of diminishing returns means that the perfect is the enemy of the good (or something like that.)
- sjwright 7y agoThe lesson is that when it comes to personal pursuits, there are no bright lines between doing something “properly” or “cheating”. It truly is all in the eye of the beholder.
- joefourier 7y agoWhile clever, I’m not a fan of this argument as it ignores the fact that each of steps are different things requiring different skills. Putting samples together is more arranging music, while creating the notes is composing. After that, you have sound design, playing an instrument, making an instrument yourself... Sure none of these are “cheating”, but someone somewhere has to do each of those things, and the further down the chain you go, the more “control” you get over your sound and composition. The law of diminishing returns of course hits at some point (although someone may argue that their breed of goats has a certain sound they can’t get any other way). It’s the same thing in programming: someone chaining together libraries may eventually run into a point where there’s nothing out there that does exactly what they need. That doesn’t mean it’s not your work unless you’ve written the compiler yourself, or have your own fab in your garage, it just means you have to be aware of the degree of control you give up the higher level you go.
- phire 7y agoPersonally I don't care that it's a modern "90s" chip. But the fact that it's a microcontroller rather than a microprocssor bugs me. The lack of an external memory bus feels incredibly in-authentic to me.
- tyingq 7y agoMany of the ATMEL 8 bit chips do have an external memory bus. Not used in this case, but it's possible. Sometimes it's pretty blurry what is a microcontroller and what is a microprocessor. The PIC32MZ/DA has an integrated Graphics Controller and 32MB of DRAM.
- Gracana 7y agoThe AVR can't execute programs from the data bus, which means no execution from RAM or external memory, though you could write a virtual machine that could do so.
- pinewurst 7y agohttp://geoffg.net/maximite.html http://geoffg.net/maximite.html That’s a cool PIC32 home computer - PIC32 is MIPS btw far beyond the old 8 bits though...
- girvo 7y agoThere’s a BSD 2.11 port for PIC32: http://retrobsd.org/wiki/doku.php/start http://retrobsd.org/wiki/doku.php/start
- phkahler 7y ago>> The lack of an external memory bus feels incredibly in-authentic to me. Yep. It's still a neat project, but don't claim to build an 80's computer using "only 5 chips" when they're more modern chips that allow that low count. A single FPGA can do it all too. On a tangent, I'm curious about upgrades to old machines that could have been done at the time. For example, my Interact has super low-res graphics where each pixel is 3 scan lines high. That machine was designed for 4-8K of ram but shipped with 16K and had an upgrade to 32K. It seems like increasing the vertical resolution should have been a fairly trivial hardware hack since the RAM is all there. Bumping the horizontal resolution might have been possible but harder. Increasing the available colors should have been fairly easy. It seems to be a case of not enough time for the design to bake. The other 8bit machines with ASICs might not be so incomplete, but there may still be some things that could have been done.
- hyperpallium 7y agoZX81, from 1981, used 4 chips.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dmitripopov 7y agoWell, his argument is not about the number of chips but rather component origins. If you are about to pretend that you are in the 80s and you develop a computer in that time, you've got to use what was available. I argue that ZX Spectrum used custom-made ULA and you kind of emulate that approach to design with ATMEGA and he just laughs :) The truth is that we live in magnificent times where there's a wide range of choice on how to do things and it is amazing.
- jeadfa 7y agoThe Travelers Talk – Getting Your Travel Information https://thetravelerstalk.com/ https://thetravelerstalk.com/
- fred256 7y agoOne of which was custom designed (an ULA) for the ZX81. The ZX80 used 21 (IIRC) off-the-shelf TTL chips.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tenebrisalietum 7y agoA lot of 8 bit designs used designed ASICs that weren't a generally available part, like the Atari 2600 with the TIA, the Commodore 64 with the PLA, etc. Using microcontrollers for these seems fair.
- djmips 7y agoThe PLA wasn't an ASIC but you could call out the VIC 2 instead.
- derefr 7y agoThat’s not much of a constraint—the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Soft_HuC6280 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Soft_HuC6280 was an 8-bit CPU produced in 1987, and yet was powerful enough (in combination with the PC Engine’s 16-bit PPU) to drive very rich experiences.
- yellowapple 7y agoI feel like it depends on the goal. If your goal is faithful retrocomputing, then sure, an ATMEGA is out of the question v., say, a 6502 or Z80. If your goal is minimalism or simplicity, then an ATMEGA is perfectly viable as a way to get there.
- djmips 7y agoI can do this in one Chip, an ARM emulating the whole thing or an FPGA version.