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MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

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Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#71

Post by HeckFeck »

rnewme wrote: post #38
firewolf34 wrote: post #24

How are these people finding VGA cables in the street :S I needed like 10 or so VGA cables recently for an art installation and asked everyone I could and nobody had any lying around... I ended up having to buy new ones which seems a shame considering how many are thrown away!

You would be surprised how much trash there is in the city around us, that you suddenly start noticing when you have a diy project. Let me share you some moments of my own with you. I was leaving university campus with my buddies, talking about building magnetic card reader to check contents of my campus library card. Just as I was explaining magnetic heads to one of the guys I see a random cassette player few meters…

Someone had abandoned a vacuum cleaner identical to my own (10+ year old) model from a not so common make in the ground floor lobby of my apartment block. It was surreal walking past it for months, just sitting there alone in the corner.

My own vacuum cleaner was missing an attachment, but I never touched the abandoned one because I wasn't sure whether it was truly abandoned.

A few weeks later I found the same cleaner had gone missing, checked the dumpster - yep, there it was. Fished it out and now I have a complete set of attachments again.

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#72

Post by askvictor »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #62
layer8 wrote: post #34

The VGA interface is the most impressive part to me somehow.

Yeah, that's what sets the RP2040 apart from other micros. I think of it as being analogous to the recent advent of "software-defined radio" -- the RP2040's PIO are fast enough to allow for software-defined Composite video, software-defined VGA, software-defined DVI, software-defined USB, etc etc etc.

What other micros are you talking about? STM32 can easily do it (I suspect that any ARM based micro can), and I've seen some vga libraries for ESP32. There's not much special about the RP2040 other than it's price and brand name.

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#73

Post by qiqitori »

sitkack wrote: post #50
wds wrote: post #42

Why not store emulated RAM on disk and get the full 512KB experience? Killing the drive from overuse? Surely the flash speed of the RP2040 surpasses the RAM speed of the original Mac.

If only the RP2040 supported SPI PSRAM!

The PicoGUS uses PIO to implement a PSRAM interface in order to store 1 MB of audio sample data: https://github.com/polpo/rp2040-psram

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#74

Post by rbanffy »

Now I'm thinking about the creative misuse of (non-existing) technology.

From the numbering scheme, the "4" in "RP2040" is log2(ram/16K). If we wanted to emulate a Lisa, we'd need 1MB of RAM, which would mean, at least, an RP2060 chip (log2(1024/16) = 6) or, more comfortably, an RP4x70 or RP2x80). Those parts, unfortunately, don't exist yet. Maybe they get inspired with their IPO and start making those parts.

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#75

Post by rbanffy »

firewolf34 wrote: post #24

How are these people finding VGA cables in the street :S I needed like 10 or so VGA cables recently for an art installation and asked everyone I could and nobody had any lying around... I ended up having to buy new ones which seems a shame considering how many are thrown away!

Where I live I can only find discarded beer cans and (used) Costa Coffee cups, and inverted broken umbrellas, because itś windy. These people must live in a nicer part of a nicer city ;-)

BTW, in which city can I find a discarded DEC V230/240 or 330 terminal on the street? I need it as a reference implementation of Tektronix graphics ate ReGIS. I promised the VTE crowd I'd work on that.

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#77

Post by QVVRP4nYz »

ikari_pl wrote: post #67
rtpg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like a lot of major urban centers have "that" store whose entire business model is collecting electronics from failing businesses and then selling that. Great way to get a bunch of extremely underpowered Windows laptops or Android tablets. Terrible computing devices in general but if you're lucky it'll work well enough.

not in Poland... :(

Allegro is full of refurb mini PCs, mostly Dells. It is complete computer for less than $100 [0], like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40697831 says, it is very hard to beat it in terms of value. That said it is much harder to get nice notebook/tablet, the wear and tear is very visible on screens/keyboards.

[0] to my surprise the one I grabbed had an internal mono speaker(not beeper) somewhere in the case.

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#78

Post by rjmunro »

rjst01 wrote: post #68
firewolf34 wrote: post #24

How are these people finding VGA cables in the street :S I needed like 10 or so VGA cables recently for an art installation and asked everyone I could and nobody had any lying around... I ended up having to buy new ones which seems a shame considering how many are thrown away!

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…

> 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.

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#80

Post by rbanffy »

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.

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