6 ms·

Micro Beast: Self contained 8-bit computer kit in a box

90 points by jackdoe 3y ago

uticus 3y ago
> Goals > "These are my principles, and if you don't like them I have others." - Groucho Marx Love it. Great combination of hard work (emulator available!) and lightheartedness.
ithkuil 3y ago
Perfect for 1-D pacman!
- Koshkin 3y ago
  ... or Tetris
- Duanemclemore 3y ago
  And DOOM of course.
  - avhon1 3y ago
    I don't think a 10 MHz Z80 and 512 KB of RAM is enough for DOOM as we know it. There are some games called "doom" for the similar Ti 83/84 calculators, but they're more similar to Wolfenstein 3D: very cut-down from what DOOM is actually like. https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/238/23843.html https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/238/23843.htm... https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/419/41975.html https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/419/41975.htm...
    - fwsgonzo 3y ago
      Yes, you're right. I don't know if you can see this: https://i.redd.it/vtswj6s8wh321.jpg https://i.redd.it/vtswj6s8wh321.jpg But what it says is that it required 24MB of HDD (12MB after installation), and a 386 or equivalent computer. An i386 is quite powerful, to be honest. It even has protected mode! And, 4MB RAM, which is more than what I had on my 286 laptop back in the day.
    - Duanemclemore 3y ago
      You're correct. But hey, if Foone can "run Doom" "on a pregnancy test" then why not, in the same sense? ;)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway71271 3y ago
I feel like there is a computing renaissance, so many new and creative projects, I am not sure if its because of pcbway or because of riscv, cheap parts, accessible knowledge, kicad and opensource tooling, but it makes me super excited. People are having fun with computers.
- Duanemclemore 3y ago
  Yeah, it really feels like people are going back to the pre-5150 personal computer era and looking at things from the ground up again. This is especially exciting to me as someone juuuuuust old enough to have extensively used those machines (C64, //e, Atari 800, etc) when they were contemporary but now diving deep into an interest in the fundamentals of computing while in the middle of a completely different career. A project like this is specifically exciting because I could look at 8 bit computing from the ground up without having to worry about buying a vintage machine and a whole host of gremlins it might have built up over the years.
  - mechagodzilla 3y ago
    I'm too young to have participated much with 8-bit machines the first time around, but I've played around with Z80 + CP/M machines (both vintage and new/custom) a lot in recent years. To me it is an extremely fun, human-scale design space. Machines of lower capability are mostly toys or needlessly painful, but an 8-bit CPU running at a few MHz with 64KB of RAM is enough to provided a very nice text-only computing experience. You can run self-hosting development tools (Turbo Pascal!), get access to all kinds of CLI tools, real file systems, etc, while still keeping the entire memory map in your head. I love the idea of a computing environment that just provides you with a thousand fully-independent, 64KB 8-bit machines and just drops time-slicing and task switching completely.
- bluescrn 3y ago
  A lot of things came together over the last decade or two to enable ever-more-impressive 'maker'/hobbyist projects. Ubiquitous 3D printing, cheap PCBs, powerful CAD software available to hobbyists, YouTube's growth as an educational resource, excitement over FPGAs, super-affordable microcontrollers and single-board computers, and a big wave of 80s/90s nostalgia often giving it direction. At the same time, modern 'mainstream' computing has become increasingly user-hostile, built to encourage spending, ad-views, and content consumption rather than experimenting and creating.
phkahler 3y ago
That's a LOT of RAM for an 8bit, and to think it has no video display. This is not the 8bit world so many cut their teeth on, it's Kim-1 or Altair era but with more memory than anyone knew what to do with.
- mkesper 3y ago
  This is a CP/M 2.2 installation, with the CCP loading from address D800h giving approximately 54Kb free for user programs. The system supports two 248K drives - Drive A is in ROM (and therefore readonly at present) and Drive B is in RAM. Seen like that, you could have something like that on a C128, I guess.
- whartung 3y ago
  Adding video is apparently quite difficult. Apparently it's straight forward to breadboard a legacy CPU today and get serial I/O, which solves many ills. But getting video is a large wall to scale. There have been several video solutions out there that folks have made. I think Ben Eater has a video of banging together something that can drive VGA (but not, necessarily, what one would consider "video" for a computer). The original home 8-Bit computers were essentially video display systems that had some spare cycles to actually run some software. The fundamentals of the system design revolved around the video. Everything was a slave to the video clock cycle. There is no real one chip device folks can drop on to a CPU bus and "get video", not that I've seen yet, especially not the way folk remember the 8-bit experience with memory mapped video. Even integrating something like the ubiquitous 6845 (which was used everywhere back in the day) is challenging, as it's not a one chip solution, plus, today, interfacing it to a generic HDMI monitor is a trick. (Also, I'm not sure today how availability of the 6845 is today.) Even the Commander X16, which went through great lengths to reinvent the 8-bit experience, created their own video chip (FPGA I think), and it does not share video memory with the host 6502, it use a memory mapped I/O interface. Then, of course, there's things like a Raspberry Pi 0, that (in theory) can be bought for $10. Tie that to the serial port, and host some software on it, and it can do all sorts of amazing things far faster than a 10MHz Z80. The original creator of this kit (which by the way, looks like a really nice, well packaged kit) had this as an original goal: * Genuine 8-bit design, don't cheat with "support" processors that are more powerful than the main CPU. Obviously, a Rasp Pi is quite disqualified from that. And, to be fair, I'm going to quibble, because the CP2102N chip they use for USB connectivity is likely a powerful CPU, more powerful than the Z80. You have to be to be able to drive USB 2.0. But I can't condemn them for that, the addition of the UART talking to the CP2102N is a very good design. And adding USB to the system opens it to a huge variety of peripherals. With that clock chip, they can go to 56K baud, that's 5K Bps. That's fast for a floppy at the time. Slow for a hard drive, but overall not too bad. At 10MHz, they might have got better transfer rates with a bit banged SPI USB driver.
Duanemclemore 3y ago
It's perfect for CollapseOS http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/ I know the point of it isn't to run on new hardware, but this would be a way to learn it on a stable platform without having to worry about dealing with constant problems from old hardware before trying to implement it on said.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  Tangent on CollapseOS/DuskOS because this is the first time I've encountered this and it is very much up by alley: --- Being that it is for a post-Collapse world would be nice to see it ported to run on RISC-V (not trolling) because RISC-V is already the subject of "Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition" and very well documented, but also going to be increasing the architecture with the most resources through student, assignments, etc, but also to salvage from existing electronics. Thought the author's timeline is 2030, which is a bit too soon for that, but by 2040 I think my argument holds.
- cl3misch 3y ago
  You sent me on a Collapse OS and Forth rabbit hole. Apart from the technical appeal I like the sober writing style of its author and the website. I do not think the postulated collapse of global society is imminent but I am glad that this project exists.
01100011 3y ago
I'm not sure why there is an obsession with 8-bit architectures for these sorts of projects. Are there no 32-bit CPUs with a simple architecture and easy programming model? I say this as an old fart who has a great deal of nostalgia for the 8 and 16 bit days. If I were teaching my kids computer architecture these days, I don't think I'd start with an underpowered, out dated arch.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- avhon1 3y ago
  > Are there no 32-bit CPUs with a simple architecture and easy programming model? There really aren't. You could consider Arm (maybe with the simplified but 16-bit "thumb" instruction set), or MIPS, or RISC-V. Between all of those, it's rare to find bare CPUs; usually you get them in a system-on-a-chip, with things like DDR memory and other sophisticated peripherals built-in. You need complicated drivers and a bootloader, maybe even with signed payloads. Nothing as architecturally simple as wiring the address and data lines of a CPU into the address and data lines of some RAM or 7800 logic directly wired into a keyboard. In principle those devices could exist, but as a hobbyist you can only really get your hands on hardware with that kind of conceptual simplicity by either programming it into an FPGA, or by using hardware that dates back to when that approach to computer design was cutting-edge. edit: you could maybe consider some kinds of microcontrollers? The Parallax Propeller comes to mind.
- noone_youknow 3y ago
  Probably not exactly what you’re looking for (since you mention “outdated”) but there are similar projects with 16 and 32 bit architectures, e.g. https://github.com/rosco-m68k/rosco_m68k https://github.com/rosco-m68k/rosco_m68k (Disclosure: I’m the designer and lead developer on that project).
  - 01100011 3y ago
    Cool. It's more or less what I did for my senior project back in the late 90s. I think the 68k is the perfect choice for something like this due to the simplicity and much more reasonable performance compared to, say, a 6502 based design.
fiscalnonsense 3y ago
The arrow keys seem to be placed for maximum torture, which was pretty typical in the 8bit era. Inverted T forever.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

90 points by jackdoe 3y ago

> Goals > "These are my principles, and if you don't like them I have others." - Groucho Marx Love it. Great combination of hard work (emulator available!) and lightheartedness.

ithkuil 3y ago

Perfect for 1-D pacman!

Koshkin 3y ago
... or Tetris
Duanemclemore 3y ago
And DOOM of course.
- avhon1 3y ago
  I don't think a 10 MHz Z80 and 512 KB of RAM is enough for DOOM as we know it. There are some games called "doom" for the similar Ti 83/84 calculators, but they're more similar to Wolfenstein 3D: very cut-down from what DOOM is actually like. https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/238/23843.html https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/238/23843.htm... https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/419/41975.html https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/419/41975.htm...
  - fwsgonzo 3y ago
    Yes, you're right. I don't know if you can see this: https://i.redd.it/vtswj6s8wh321.jpg https://i.redd.it/vtswj6s8wh321.jpg But what it says is that it required 24MB of HDD (12MB after installation), and a 386 or equivalent computer. An i386 is quite powerful, to be honest. It even has protected mode! And, 4MB RAM, which is more than what I had on my 286 laptop back in the day.
  - Duanemclemore 3y ago
    You're correct. But hey, if Foone can "run Doom" "on a pregnancy test" then why not, in the same sense? ;)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

throwaway71271 3y ago

I feel like there is a computing renaissance, so many new and creative projects, I am not sure if its because of pcbway or because of riscv, cheap parts, accessible knowledge, kicad and opensource tooling, but it makes me super excited. People are having fun with computers.

Duanemclemore 3y ago
Yeah, it really feels like people are going back to the pre-5150 personal computer era and looking at things from the ground up again. This is especially exciting to me as someone juuuuuust old enough to have extensively used those machines (C64, //e, Atari 800, etc) when they were contemporary but now diving deep into an interest in the fundamentals of computing while in the middle of a completely different career. A project like this is specifically exciting because I could look at 8 bit computing from the ground up without having to worry about buying a vintage machine and a whole host of gremlins it might have built up over the years.
- mechagodzilla 3y ago
  I'm too young to have participated much with 8-bit machines the first time around, but I've played around with Z80 + CP/M machines (both vintage and new/custom) a lot in recent years. To me it is an extremely fun, human-scale design space. Machines of lower capability are mostly toys or needlessly painful, but an 8-bit CPU running at a few MHz with 64KB of RAM is enough to provided a very nice text-only computing experience. You can run self-hosting development tools (Turbo Pascal!), get access to all kinds of CLI tools, real file systems, etc, while still keeping the entire memory map in your head. I love the idea of a computing environment that just provides you with a thousand fully-independent, 64KB 8-bit machines and just drops time-slicing and task switching completely.
bluescrn 3y ago
A lot of things came together over the last decade or two to enable ever-more-impressive 'maker'/hobbyist projects. Ubiquitous 3D printing, cheap PCBs, powerful CAD software available to hobbyists, YouTube's growth as an educational resource, excitement over FPGAs, super-affordable microcontrollers and single-board computers, and a big wave of 80s/90s nostalgia often giving it direction. At the same time, modern 'mainstream' computing has become increasingly user-hostile, built to encourage spending, ad-views, and content consumption rather than experimenting and creating.

phkahler 3y ago

That's a LOT of RAM for an 8bit, and to think it has no video display. This is not the 8bit world so many cut their teeth on, it's Kim-1 or Altair era but with more memory than anyone knew what to do with.

mkesper 3y ago
This is a CP/M 2.2 installation, with the CCP loading from address D800h giving approximately 54Kb free for user programs. The system supports two 248K drives - Drive A is in ROM (and therefore readonly at present) and Drive B is in RAM. Seen like that, you could have something like that on a C128, I guess.
whartung 3y ago
Adding video is apparently quite difficult. Apparently it's straight forward to breadboard a legacy CPU today and get serial I/O, which solves many ills. But getting video is a large wall to scale. There have been several video solutions out there that folks have made. I think Ben Eater has a video of banging together something that can drive VGA (but not, necessarily, what one would consider "video" for a computer). The original home 8-Bit computers were essentially video display systems that had some spare cycles to actually run some software. The fundamentals of the system design revolved around the video. Everything was a slave to the video clock cycle. There is no real one chip device folks can drop on to a CPU bus and "get video", not that I've seen yet, especially not the way folk remember the 8-bit experience with memory mapped video. Even integrating something like the ubiquitous 6845 (which was used everywhere back in the day) is challenging, as it's not a one chip solution, plus, today, interfacing it to a generic HDMI monitor is a trick. (Also, I'm not sure today how availability of the 6845 is today.) Even the Commander X16, which went through great lengths to reinvent the 8-bit experience, created their own video chip (FPGA I think), and it does not share video memory with the host 6502, it use a memory mapped I/O interface. Then, of course, there's things like a Raspberry Pi 0, that (in theory) can be bought for $10. Tie that to the serial port, and host some software on it, and it can do all sorts of amazing things far faster than a 10MHz Z80. The original creator of this kit (which by the way, looks like a really nice, well packaged kit) had this as an original goal: * Genuine 8-bit design, don't cheat with "support" processors that are more powerful than the main CPU. Obviously, a Rasp Pi is quite disqualified from that. And, to be fair, I'm going to quibble, because the CP2102N chip they use for USB connectivity is likely a powerful CPU, more powerful than the Z80. You have to be to be able to drive USB 2.0. But I can't condemn them for that, the addition of the UART talking to the CP2102N is a very good design. And adding USB to the system opens it to a huge variety of peripherals. With that clock chip, they can go to 56K baud, that's 5K Bps. That's fast for a floppy at the time. Slow for a hard drive, but overall not too bad. At 10MHz, they might have got better transfer rates with a bit banged SPI USB driver.

Duanemclemore 3y ago

It's perfect for CollapseOS http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/ I know the point of it isn't to run on new hardware, but this would be a way to learn it on a stable platform without having to worry about dealing with constant problems from old hardware before trying to implement it on said.

Pet_Ant 3y ago
Tangent on CollapseOS/DuskOS because this is the first time I've encountered this and it is very much up by alley: --- Being that it is for a post-Collapse world would be nice to see it ported to run on RISC-V (not trolling) because RISC-V is already the subject of "Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition" and very well documented, but also going to be increasing the architecture with the most resources through student, assignments, etc, but also to salvage from existing electronics. Thought the author's timeline is 2030, which is a bit too soon for that, but by 2040 I think my argument holds.
cl3misch 3y ago
You sent me on a Collapse OS and Forth rabbit hole. Apart from the technical appeal I like the sober writing style of its author and the website. I do not think the postulated collapse of global society is imminent but I am glad that this project exists.

01100011 3y ago

I'm not sure why there is an obsession with 8-bit architectures for these sorts of projects. Are there no 32-bit CPUs with a simple architecture and easy programming model? I say this as an old fart who has a great deal of nostalgia for the 8 and 16 bit days. If I were teaching my kids computer architecture these days, I don't think I'd start with an underpowered, out dated arch.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
avhon1 3y ago
> Are there no 32-bit CPUs with a simple architecture and easy programming model? There really aren't. You could consider Arm (maybe with the simplified but 16-bit "thumb" instruction set), or MIPS, or RISC-V. Between all of those, it's rare to find bare CPUs; usually you get them in a system-on-a-chip, with things like DDR memory and other sophisticated peripherals built-in. You need complicated drivers and a bootloader, maybe even with signed payloads. Nothing as architecturally simple as wiring the address and data lines of a CPU into the address and data lines of some RAM or 7800 logic directly wired into a keyboard. In principle those devices could exist, but as a hobbyist you can only really get your hands on hardware with that kind of conceptual simplicity by either programming it into an FPGA, or by using hardware that dates back to when that approach to computer design was cutting-edge. edit: you could maybe consider some kinds of microcontrollers? The Parallax Propeller comes to mind.
noone_youknow 3y ago
Probably not exactly what you’re looking for (since you mention “outdated”) but there are similar projects with 16 and 32 bit architectures, e.g. https://github.com/rosco-m68k/rosco_m68k https://github.com/rosco-m68k/rosco_m68k (Disclosure: I’m the designer and lead developer on that project).
- 01100011 3y ago
  Cool. It's more or less what I did for my senior project back in the late 90s. I think the 68k is the perfect choice for something like this due to the simplicity and much more reasonable performance compared to, say, a 6502 based design.

fiscalnonsense 3y ago

The arrow keys seem to be placed for maximum torture, which was pretty typical in the 8bit era. Inverted T forever.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]