Not really looking for anything specific here, though some project is always just over the horizon with me. Seeing things like the RP2350 PC emulator and some retrocomputing videos got me wondering about intentionally low-end bare-iron devices that evoke the 8-bit computing era without emulation or FPGAs (both of which are cool and obviously the easiest way to recreate software and hardware, respectively) but also without being obligated to literally re-create an old machine with new old stock chips.
The easy solution is a Single Board Computer running Linux without a windowing system, but that’s not really in the spirit of what I’m getting at. Like, what machines or pjrects do you know of that boot straight to a text based interface, or even a BASIC or Python prompt as the “OS”, have some sort of removable storage, some sort of video and audio out, and support a keyboard, but are aggressively not a modern commercially viable architecture for PCs? Bonus points if it does have some enthusiast community.
All that said, I’m intrigued by this whole category, so I’d love to hear about your favorite retro-inflected projects even if they don’t exactly match my poorly defined parameters (some FPGA stuff boggles my English-major mind). Some I’ve run across include:
- Microbeast, thougb it seems to lack “proper” video out without an add on.
- CODY
- Olimex RP2040-pc, though it seems only to run emulators and demo code
- Geoff Graham’s Maximite and Picomite may be the purest expression of what I’m talking about. Fair warning: he does have some interesting ideas about open source (TL;DR he got burned not trademarking a name and blamed the GPL, though not exactly open source generally. Current software uses his own source available license)