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MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

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Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#111

Post by Wowfunhappy »

rbanffy wrote: post #80
benob wrote: post #76

How about the same thing on a 68K emulated with an FPGA? (ok it will probably cost more than 5 pounds)

Unless you want cycle-accurate interfaces, it's pointless. Software can provide more than good enough performance and be a lot more flexible at that. As microcontrollers get faster, the cycle-accurate timing becomes less relevant, as you can still match external timings with software and have the support of an RTOS to help with that.

What about power consumption? Could you have a tiny Mac which runs approximately forever on a single charge?

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#112

Post by lupire »

ale42 wrote: post #88
rjmunro wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> possible exception of unit-specific power adapters No. Unit-specific power adapters should not exist. Either put a USB-C or a 120v/240v AC connector on the device, depending on power requirements. It's really not that hard. Note: it must be connector, not a fixed cable. I.e. an IEC C8 or C14.

This might apply to (most) IT devices. But there are devices that require 24 V, or 48 V, or any other voltage that USB-C can't supply, and that for various reasons (space, EMI, possibly even compliance with some safety regulation) can't contain an integrated power supply unit from 120/230 V mains. Of course this should be an exception and most consumer devices can definitely work with the regular voltages and current…

That's fine but it should be a standard for a entire class of products.

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#113

Post by hunter2_ »

ghaff wrote: post #87
ssl-3 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things come and go. :) I save at least one example of every kind of computer, RF, or AV wire, but I only keep what I deem to be current-gen for my own world. The stuff that doesn't make the cut get sold by the pound periodically at a local scrap yard after I prep them by snipping the connectors off, which generates a meaningful amount of folding cash -- enough for a coney dog and some ice cream from around the corner…

At some point, you have boxes and boxes of stuff that may contain something that might be useful someday on the off-chance that you can actually find that thing when you need it. I'd love to connect everything to the person--including future me--who would find it useful (or thinks they would in the moment) but it's often not practical.

> I'd love to connect everything to the person--including future me--who would find it useful (or thinks they would in the moment) but it's often not practical.

It actually amazes me that this isn't a well-solved problem by now. We've got various marketplaces for used items (eBay, CL, FB Marketplace, etc.) and we've got various rental/sharing platforms for niche things (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) and those are decent for what they are, yet somehow the inherent inefficiencies (effort to list an item, effort to discover an item, platform fees, etc.) suggest that there is a lot of room for improvement.

It's kind of like how scheduling assistant features/products, such as Calendly, offer a massive improvement over writing messages back and forth along the lines of "send me your availability," yet a verbal/synchronous discussion isn't nearly as bad as written/async, since it gets you across the finish line quickly despite many round trips, so lots of people are fine doing that instead of using efficient tools, so there's no mass adoption/demand.

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#115

Post by DrNosferatu »

dflock wrote: post #114
DrNosferatu wrote: post #106

What about every computer up to the 90s for ~10€ of hardware to house inside of an existing keyboard? (or your subset of favorites)

You can do this with a Rasberry Pi 400, no problem. I have one running https://retropie.org.uk/ and it works great.

a Rasberry Pi 400 is ~90€

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#116

Post by habi »

numpad0 wrote: post #108
rbanffy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need doubly-curved OLED screens. We can already do Trinitron (cylindrical) ones with the flexible displays we have. It is an interesting problem, though. I noticed in Disney's Loki, they used a combination of VFX and lenses on top of flat panels to give the impression they were using CRTs (notably in their ADM-3 lookalikes). For a 9~14" CRT it'd be a fairly large lens that would need to be optically connected to t…

Can't it be done with a DLP device? CRT was X-ray projection device with phosphor paint applied inside to convert the rays to visible light.

CRTs were emitting an electron beam to draw images on a phosphorescent screen, not emitting X-rays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode-ray_tube Blasting X-rays through a screen to the face of an observer would not have been a good idea…

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#117

Post by xp84 »

yrro wrote: post #69
rjst01 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hill I will die on is that tech products should just stop bundling cables, for anything, with the possible exception of unit-specific power adapters. A while back I purchased a KVM switch - it came with 3 DP cables, which went straight into my e-waste box. I've also seen office fit-outs where mountains of cables that came with monitors went straight from factory to landfill because they were the wrong length. I und…

Printers stopped coming with a USB A-to-B cable many years ago. Who knew that the printer makers were in the right all along?

Yes, and I think they did that for relatively cynical reasons -- as a handout to the Best Buys of the world who would then be able to attach a 90% margin "Printer cable" at $29.95 to your $50 Black Friday special inkjet.

I suspect the reason why this didn't go on to become standard across all classes of device, is because since 2010 or so, the average or median margin on accessories has cratered thanks to Amazon Marketplace sellers. You could realistically end up needing to buy a Belkin $30 printer cable in 2005, unless you'd heard of Monoprice. Today by contrast if you just search Amazon for it, you'll have one for $4.94-$6.49 delivered within 2 days. If margins were still what they used to be on cables and stuff, I think you'd have a strong incentive for places like Amazon and Walmart to pressure suppliers to make cables a la carte (officially for environmental reasons, but also, for great profits, lol)

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#119

Post by ghaff »

hunter2_ wrote: post #113
ghaff wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, you have boxes and boxes of stuff that may contain something that might be useful someday on the off-chance that you can actually find that thing when you need it. I'd love to connect everything to the person--including future me--who would find it useful (or thinks they would in the moment) but it's often not practical.

> I'd love to connect everything to the person--including future me--who would find it useful (or thinks they would in the moment) but it's often not practical. It actually amazes me that this isn't a well-solved problem by now. We've got various marketplaces for used items (eBay, CL, FB Marketplace, etc.) and we've got various rental/sharing platforms for niche things (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) and those are decent for wh…

It's just hard to get away from the transaction costs associated with exchanging low-value physical goods over distance. A swap meet with a local electronics club? Sure. But selling individual items on eBay? Not so much.

There were a bunch of ideas associated with the early Web like sharing tools and so forth that just don't make sense outside an informal neighborhood "economy" (and often not even there).

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