Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

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>Part of the magic is how bonkers frugal the Epson SoC (PN S1C88349)

Would it blow your mind that such ultra-frugal 8-bit parts have been available for about 30 years now?

Those Seiko-Epson chips, alongside with EM-Swatch, and OKI-Casio chips, were used in all kinds of timekeeping, calculator, thermometers, and all kinds of cheap low-power widgets with segment LCD displays that need to run years on a single button cell.

I have a calculator and a digital fever thermometer(the stick-type ones for the armpit or anus) that's over 15 years old, also using on one of those Seiko-Epson chips and it's still running on the same 1.5v button-cell that it came with, which is mind blowing when you factor in the charge decay of the lithium cell over time.

You should be reaching the charge decay of that cell more or less now. :)

But yes, incredible. These are products made with a lot of care, unlike modern counterparts that are just so very lax on these things.

> [...] unlike modern counterparts [...]

What makes you think so? You can still buy calculators that last a long time, and 'solar' powered calculators that work in pretty dim light inside of a class room.

I didnt mean to compare it with calculators that are entirely powered by light. More to modern watches, smartwatches and whatever modern devices we have.

You are right about them. But battery hungry monsters ain't new. Have a look at the Sega Game Gear.

The Game Gear had much higher specs than Nintendo's Game Boy. It had a proper colour display, instead of a pea soup screen.

> The internal reaction to the Game Boy at Nintendo was initially very poor, earning it the derogatory nickname "DameGame" from Nintendo employees, in which dame (だめ) means "hopeless" or "useless".[19][20]

(An idiomatic translation might be, 'Lame Boy'.)

As you might be aware, the supposed Lame Boy won the market. Partially because the Game Gear ate through batteries like crazy, while the Game Boy subsisted on a more measured diet.

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