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Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter
- Uncle_Brumpus 5mo agoThank you. This is a spectacular amount of work and information. As someone who is interested in similar old hardware that occasionally lacks any kind of documentation (specifically cameras), I sincerely wish I had this level of patience and determination (and also understanding, I'm not really a software guy).
- AtlasBarfed 5mo agoI wish there was a law that all hardware vendors had to dump a sufficient amount of documentation if they discontinue a platform such that it can be emulated. The litmus test can be done by AI code generation in a sandbox during the period they don't have to make it open.
- genxy 5mo agoCould be part of the FCC certification process, which everyone has to file.
- contingencies 5mo agoIt is vastly more likely, historically speaking, for the EU to pass such forward-looking legislation in the public interest.
- VladVladikoff 5mo agoWow great work and great post! love stuff like this on HN.
- joe_mamba 5mo agoAlways a pleasure to read your articles Dimitry, ever since I discovered your "Running Linux on an 8-bit microcontroller" project, back when I was studying electrical engineering in university. Your low-level hobby work is insane, specially on the palmOS side.
- TruffleLabs 5mo agoThanks for the details :) I was half expecting you to find the Pixter Color VM to be a Forth like interpreter ;)
- mghackerlady 5mo agoI was expecting either that or some lobotomised Java VM since everyone was crazy about it at the time
- dmitrygr 5mo agoboth forth and java would have made more sense than a custom vm. not sure why they went this way on ARM. on 6502 it makes sense though. small cpu -> custom work needed
- mcphage 5mo ago> If that was not enough of crotch-punch, in a desire to cut more costs, they decided to save $0.000001 per device and used the cheaper BJTs instead of FETs. Having had coworkers who worked for Fisher-Price, using worse components to save a fraction of a cent per device seems their general MO.
- MSFT_Edging 5mo agoI still follow Dimitry on twitter for his technical talent, as I've done some palmOS software reversing as well, but man every other post is something along the lines of "we should let X group fend for themselves in a rattlesnake pit because they don't produce value". All to say it's a major bummer his cool work is tainted by his dehumanizing words and I wonder if he understands how he comes off to people.
- xyzzy_plugh 5mo agoThis puts it rather lightly. I stopped following him when he started posting incredibly racist memes.
- MSFT_Edging 5mo agoYeah I was trying to keep it civil for HN. The whimsy of the PalmOS work really clashes with the incessant racism and hate.
- contingencies 5mo agoUnfortunately that general part of the world has a lot of ethno-religious conflict normalized from birth. Monotheistic zealotry, current conflicts, Greece/Turkey, former Yugoslavia, etc.
- newsclues 5mo ago[flagged]
- harrouet 5mo agoAny part you are referring to? I can't find any personal attack. I actually like his writing style. I think he just speaks his mind in full honesty and you should not interpret it as aggressivity.
- joe_mamba 5mo ago[flagged]
- Rpu-Micro 5mo ago[dead]
- jcalvinowens 5mo agoYet again my plans for a productive morning have been derailed by an excellent new write up from Dmitry :) That hand rolled DAC for the touchscreen with the eight gpio lines is hilarious.
- AtlasBarfed 5mo agoIs this in MAME?
- dmitrygr 5mo agono, but i hope someday someone will make that happen. i provide enough info and reference material
- smusamashah 5mo agoIs there any dumb LCD console like that available these days for kids? (not those retro gaming consoles). I want to buy one for my kids. It looks so good, specially because it is a dumb and simple device. I found Pixter online but are there a little bit more capable systems like this for kids made today? EDIT: Looks like devices by LeapFrog and VTech are the closest alternative these days so far.
- LetsGetTechnicl 5mo agoWhat are you looking for them to be able to do? I feel like everything these days is just some form of an iPad
- smusamashah 5mo agoJust play around and learn perhaps. My kid like drawing on his LCD drawing tablet. This is more fun than that. It's like Paint Delux but in physical form. And it has games too. I think I am going to buy a Pixter itself. Everything else today is either too limited (vtech is buttons only and its screens are too tiny for example) or too powerful.
- pta2002 5mo agoNot sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but the playdate is pretty neat.
- joe_mamba 5mo agoNobody makes stuff like this anymore. You can vibecode your own using an Arduino and a pixel LCD.
- mghackerlady 5mo agoNo, but realistically it wouldn't be hard to make something with a Pi and a touch screen of some kind
- MisterTea 5mo agoCheck this out: https://play.date/ https://play.date/
- Tr3nton 5mo ago[dead]
- LocalH 5mo agoThe "bad things" link is broken, the href attribute is mistyped as "haref"
- dmitrygr 5mo agoSpelling is not my forte. Fixed it, thank you.
- doright 5mo ago> In 2000, the famous American toy company Fisher-Price released a simple drawing-oriented handheld gaming console for kids called Pixter. It featured no brain-rotting social media and focused, instead, on drawing, sketching, and educational games. I fear that the future will increasingly be filled with people framing old/new cultural artifact X or Y in terms of whether or not it reminds them of social media. (Not a dig at the article or the immense technical skills required to accomplish all of this)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]