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Neotron Pico: powered by the Raspberry Pi Pico, in a micro-ATX form-factor
- tmikaeld 5y agoHm what are the use-case for boards like these? Industrial?
- ansible 5y agoIt is more a retro-computing platform. Intended use case is for a CP/M like operating system. So I get the whole retro-computing thing in general. However, even 22 years ago, I was working hard to get away from analog video interfaces, and I'm never going back!
- sgt 5y agoGet a VGA to HDMI converter.
- ansible 5y agoHah, no. At least the early iterations of those chips required considerable fiddling to get all the pixels to line up correctly. Modern monitors are better, but you still suffer some noise and color artifacts. It is fairly common to have even low-end SoCs with some kind of LVDS or HDMI output. Like I said, I get the whole retro-computing deal. A nostalgia for the days when you could really master an entire platform, hardware and software. I scratch that itch in other ways this year, like messing around with RISC-V instruction set simulators written in Rust. I'll likely try to make a low-level debug monitor for one of them (instead of debugging via GDB), just for fun. Back in the old days, I had EDTASM for the Color Computer, which combined an assembler, disassembler and debugger into just an 8K ROM.
- sgt 5y agoI had to come back to this comment. You seem to know a lot about this stuff. Do you have a blog or something?
- ansible 5y agoI do, but I haven't updated it in quite a while: https://partiallyappliedlife.blogspot.com https://partiallyappliedlife.blogspot.com By the way, back when I had more disposable income, I bought a couple of these for my desktop PC systems when they came out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_1600SW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_1600SW I ended up using them both for around a decade until LCDs with higher resolutions and DVI interfaces became common. They were very expensive at the time, but offered unparalleled display quality. The only downside is the brightness and other controls were software-only, and the utility was only released for Windows (predating XP). These days I'm just using an LG 4K TV, which has its own downsides.
- 1MachineElf 5y agoSource code (WIP) for the operating system, Neotron OS: https://github.com/Neotron-Compute/Neotron-OS https://github.com/Neotron-Compute/Neotron-OS
- ngcc_hk 5y agoCan you run turbo pascal ?
- tinco 5y agoDid this guy just design a hardware system, a BIOS, and an OS, specifically to run video games? We are truly back in the 80's! Frankly I think this is quite exciting. A couple of years back we were all afraid the days of children having hardware access to computers were over, but here we are and cheap ARM devices have made fiddling with hardware as exciting as ever.
- floatboth 5y agoIt's somewhat amusing that the main processor is using the same M0+ cores as the management one. Actually, how come the RP2040 uses the M0+? Would using something like the M4 or the new shiny M33 really make it that much more expensive? e.g. Nordic for the nRF52 series went all M4, the only core difference is not having an FPU in the lower end models, but with no weaker cores at all in the lineup.