DAN64, an AVR based 8-bit microcomputer

Yep, I enjoy AVR, even when programming in assembly for it.

IDK, there's a lot I miss when working with an AVR rather than a Cortex-M, or at least compared to the 328ps that are everywhere thanks to the Arduino ecosystem. Trying to get the chips to do more than one real time task at a time can be a pain. Like the interrupts don't have reconfigurable priority, most of the code out there is built on blocking rather than asynchronous work, etc.

I think the best about the AVR controllers and other ATMEL products is that the datasheets are top-notch because they contain all necessary information to use the device/peripherals in a concise and readable style.

It is usually difficult to read the entire manual of an ARM Cortex because of the sheer volume and because the documentation tends to be split over several documents. For an AVR chip, you can easily flip through the entire datasheet.

As to how excellent and powerful the AVR peripherals are -- there are some strange peculiarities and limitations which ATMEL never addressed, for example the strange SPI/slave behaviour: http://rpc.gehennom.org/2013/09/atmega2560-as-an-spi-slave/

There are ~four things that matter when developing product hardware:

Capability, cost, design and firmware: is the hardware/firmware combination capable of what you want, how much is the bill of materials, how laborious is designing the hardware (schematic and routing) and how easy and fast is it to develop on the system.

_Nothing_ so far has AVRs beat on the last aspect and they fare very well on the third also. And this is a shame, because similar development ease and LibC style is something that other vendors could very, very easily reproduce but are stuck up on forcing vendor lock-in and pushing their ever shittier IDEs on you.

However AVRs almost always lose on 1 and 2, especially compared to ARMs, which are just better in almost every way.

The peripherals are all i2c, pwm, spi or uart? So they are shared between all microcontrollers and even intel.

>AVRs, like ARM Cortex, are SOCs (System On a Chip) but have really excellent peripheral devices compared to the ARM Cortex I've used.

A 100% seconded. Check out their new line of ATtiny devices. They start at 0.30USD/pc, but come with every peripheral one could imagine.

Most lower end Cortexes only come with bare bone peripherals and are encumbered with poor glue logic like multi cycle GPIO access or flash waitstates.

> Can it be put in a very silent case but still with a fan so as to not overheat?

The fan itself probably will heat up more than the chips here.

What fan? What heat?

It generates composite video, you can use just about any TV ever made.

wrong scope/weird sentence structure. 64 since he found a fitting 64k chip (one running with the right voltage), not 32 as planned I guess.