Ask HN: Working on a minimalistic gaming platform, feedback? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Working on a minimalistic gaming platform, feedback?

2 pointsjacquesm3 comments

Hello HN,

Like probably many of you I have kids, they're clever and they totally get sucked into the non-creative game platforms on their phones, the web and basically anything with a screen.

Eye candy galore, zero creativity from their end, just consumption. They're utterly chanceless against the army of psychologists that is engineering their dopamine addiction. Like most other parents, this doesn't sit right with me so I've decided to at least try to do something about.

I'm working on the most minimalist gaming platform that I can imagine, think 'KIM-1' but for computer games. The catch: you will have to build it yourself if you want one. All of the designs and any of the code that is required to build it will be open, there are a number of things that I'm toying with that I'd like some feedback on:

- do you think it should come with some pre-built games or rather not?

- how much would something like this be allowed to cost? The BOM is probably around $200 or so, and it clearly isn't able to compete with commercial stuff out there, but it also isn't meant to be.

- are you aware of any other efforts like this one?

- do you think it is worth making them as kits or maybe even as pre-built units?

- The unit will be a case with the display and the computer built in and two wired joysticks with minimal functionality (u/d/l/r/click), power is via a USB adapter.

- I'm toying with the idea of distributing software on paper alone, to get kids to type in their programs and to fix them rather than to be able to click a few buttons and have a running game, do you thin that would fly?

Possible platforms: Arduino R4, Raspberry Pi, which one would you pick and why?

Any other feedback that you've got that you think might be useful?

I don't have software, pictures or CAD stuff ready to go yet but that will happen early next year.

thank you all for reading and responding,

   Jacques

What do you think about https://play.date/ and https://www.commanderx16.com/ ?

Hello Paul, those are very cool! But way more complex than what I'm cooking up. One of the things I figured is that fantasy and creativity thrive on limitations so I think I built the most restrictive environment possible :) You have to use your imagination and your creativity to be able to use it at all. These are almost commercial grade products and the one is pretty much a C64 or equivalent. But that's already many orders of magnitude more complex than my little project.

Thank you for pointing these out, I wasn't aware of either, there must be many more and searching for the various obvious keywords didn't turn up anything that looks remotely to what I'm cooking. I'm not going to release it until it is at least presentable (first weeks of January), and I have a few simple games running on it.

I'll add:

You mentioned the Arduino, which would be a tricky choice if you're assuming one of the AVR-8 variants. The trouble here is you do not have enough RAM or the bandwidth to the RAM to support a framebuffer or even a tile system.

I have seen display systems for the AVR-8 and they are all designed to reduce the bandwidth requirements. One approach would be to write to video RAM through ports the way the TI-99/A did and the Commander x16 does (avoids the 'your CPU is dog slow because half the cycles are stolen by the video system' problem most of the 1980s micros had) Another is to make something that is driven by commands, for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS.

The Raspberry Pi route is easier since it already has a display controller and it much more capable to begin with.

The CX16 points to one route which is to revive the old home computers, and particularly there is an existing culture of "type-in" programs in BASIC, you can find a lot of old magazines and things like

https://doc.lagout.org/science/0_Computer%20Science/0_Comput...

So one route is to try to build on that.

Now you can certainly repackage a Raspberry Pi so that it looks like one of these

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80

or looks like a handheld game console (how do people "type" into that?) and have some kind of language system on it. Back in the day it was BASIC, which people at MIT were furious about throughout the 1980s. Today we have a lot more insight not to mention better hardware so today we could build something similar in spirit but better, particularly from the viewpoint of games programming where BASIC never really gave you the access to graphics and sounds that you'd want for that. See also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PICO-8

Note the CX-16 runs into fundamental problems w/ the electronics industry. The current version which is made out of DIP chips on a motherboard is crazy expensive for what it is, but it has the advantage from a hobby standpoint that it is real hardware you can make cards for, hook up an oscilloscope to, etc. It still performs much worse than a Raspberry Pi that costs a lot less. If they ever get to the point where they're selling 10,000+ units they could cook the machine down to a few chips and make something that costs about the same as a Raspberry Pi but doesn't perform as well... and isn't amenable to hardware hacking the way the original CX-16 is.

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