Comment by K0balt
4 hours ago
I’d love to see something like this but designed to run on esp32 or raspberry pi 2530. Either can handle basic HDMI and USB. Or a little <$100 laptop with a 7” display.
Easy to think raspberry pi, but with a full Linux you won’t get that intrinsic understanding that you fully control the hardware, you never control the “bare metal” unless you are a much more advanced user.
IMHO the feeling of not being in full control of your computing device is not a good starting point. I’m very fortunate to have started out on my 8kb BASIC machine.
I have been thinking along those lines myself.
I have been playing around with a per scanline generated display on a rp2350 outputting to a tiny LCD. I think there's potential for some pretty fancy stuff on HDMI. A 2350 with PSRAM, HDMI connector plus a MicroSD for bulk filesytem, and USB for input could be quite a fun micro PC.
I would be tempted to make somthing that had a second RP2350 with its own PSRAM sitting unutilized just as a temptation to users to figure out how to get more out of the gadget and learn about different multiprocessing architectures.
One of these https://www.waveshare.com/core2350b.htm
With one of these https://www.waveshare.com/rp2350-matrix.htm
Mounted on top, and an HDMI connector squeezed in somewhere,
I am a bit reminded of what GeoWorks Ensemble managed on a 640k 8086. Theoretically you could make a tiny system like this do even more.
> I am a bit reminded of what GeoWorks Ensemble managed on a 640k 8086.
I was looking at similar recently for a project, and came across FrankOS: https://github.com/rh1tech/frank-os
Yes, they are more powerful than classical MS-DOS PCs, so there is plenty of juice in them.
Not sure on the performance but it might be possible to port this Mini Micro to those platforms.
Doubtful. Isn't Mini Micro build on Unity? That has much higher system requirements.
why not just use a vintage computer or game console then?
The main thing is video output. Even VGA is fading away now. HDMI is kind of what you need to be relevant to a lot of potenial users.