Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

Something I’d buy, and that the Raspberry Pi almost might have been, is a computer running a “retro OS” (instantly boots, BASIC-like commands, direct access to hardware) on a semi-modern ARM chip with a few megs of RAM and HDMI out. That would be fun to tinker with and program for.

The problem with this is that it’s so incredibly hard to do anything in 8-bit, I can’t imagine many people going to all that trouble if they’re not even getting the badge of honor if running on real retro hardware.

View on HN

32-bit, megabyte-order-of-magnitude is a much more interesting place to be than C64-equivalent hardware. You can actually make things that look and feel good, but you still need to be clever about it.

Nintendo GBA and DS are very much in this space, and are great fun to work with.

I’ve actually tinkered with GBA programming, and you’re exactly right. It’s surprisingly accessible. Of course, it’s built as a console, not a computer, so you can’t actually program on it. But give it more RAM instead of ROM, a keyboard, and you’re almost there.

Maybe it is a feature of how old you are? To me at 50, GBA/DS just doesn't seem very retro. It's just a slightly worse version of modern gaming with no real charm of its own. But I suppose if you are 30, it has nostalgia value because it was what you grew up with.

Well I'm 37. We might split hairs here about what is and isn't retro. The GBA came out in 2001, which admittedly isn't that long ago, but in many ways, it was simply a modernized, mobile variant of the SNES. Indeed, many of its most successful titles were simply ports of SNES games from the 90s, like Super Mario World. So in my mind, it's a mobile 16-bit console in spirit (I know it actually has a 32-bit ARM CPU). That's less true for the DS.

And I don't think many people would argue that 16-bit gaming had "no real charm", I consider it to be the peak of the 2D era. In fact, Super Mario World is often held as one of the best platformers of all the time. With all its fan mods, it's still widely played to this day. It's the early 3D era that followed that's mostly forgotten.

The DS is really just a GBA where you added a bit more every single thing there was in the GBA, and a really weird 3D chip. A bit more RAM, a bit more memory, a bit faster ARM, a few more graphics plane modes, and so on.

I think so. Although I had a C64, I cut my teeth on programming the Atari ST in assembler. The 68k is so much nicer to program than the 6502. The graphics and sound capabilities of the x16 is more in line with a turbo charged Atari ST or Amiga 500. That would be my dream retro station. Still I'll buy a x16 if it ever materializes, could be fun to play with some raster effects and sprites again.

You can run RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi, that also supports a "Boot to BASIC" mode.

BBC BASIC V is one of the best of the classic BASIC interpreters too!

There are a number of hobby projects that aim to do exactly that (provide the instant-on, boot to BASIC experience of old 8 bit micros) without just being a recreation of an old system.

One that looks particularly interesting is the Color Maximite 2, which meets your specs except for the HDMI out (it uses VGA):

https://geoffg.net/maximite.html

Here you go -- exactly what you asked for. FOSS, available today.

https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Software%...

You could boot BMC64 on the Pi: https://github.com/randyrossi/bmc64

Not exactly what you want but there's Dosbian which boots the Pi to a dosbox instance, no login or desktop.

AFAIK, the "instant on" aspect is a big part of the draw. Linux boot time doesn't cut it.

And it's not just Linux. A little known fact is that during startup, before running a single instruction of Linux kernel code, the Pi spends the first several seconds booting the closed source OS that runs the weird Broadcom "VideoCore". Only then does it initialize the ARM processor and start the Linux kernel.

That's weird. I thought that VideoCore boots fairly fast.

Quick googling found this: http://himeshp.blogspot.com/2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry...

Apparently rpi spends about as long on vc boot as it does for kernel+userland combined... Not great imho

The article says it's about 1.5-2 seconds. For a firmware that's meant to just boot it's not great, but it's not as bad as I expected.

You’re right, that wouldn’t be too bad. I remember it being closer to five seconds, which I found really disappointing, and there are at least some hints of people with a similar experiences: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=278248

All of this might depend on peripherals, settings, SD card and so on, so maybe there’s more room for optimization than I had realized.

Yup. ThreadX from Express Logic, now part of Microsoft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX

Reply on news.ycombinator.com