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Comment by exasperaited | Hacker News Reader

The Pico series is, IMO, the truest implementation of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s broader goal to make physical computing accessible to education. I am so glad that this is now such a major focus for both the foundation and the trading company (a pivot that was accelerated by the pandemic chip shortage)

The RP2350 is an awesome device but hypothetically it feels like the next one is where things will really kick off, because there likely won’t be a 90s computer it can’t emulate, and it feels clear from what Eben Upton says that retrocomputing, historical device education and simple 90s-style computing environments are part of the picture, and that absolutely dirt-cheap simplified modern “home computer” environments on these devices could have value to them.

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+1 to simple machines.

As an analogy and anecdote, I've learned a lot about cars through RC racing as a teen. Building differentials, CVDs and Universal Joints, hydraulic shocks towers, and tuning radios really gave me the baseline to know and fix cars as an adult.

I still lack a very basic understanding of computers which has somewhat neutered what I'm capable of doing today. I'm now sorta getting back into learning these things but it's kinda hard when it is limited to weekends and holidays. I hope RPI keeps going with their vision as a publicly traded company. Kids need to learn these things.

Ever thought of writing an emulator? On Reddit theres /r/EmuDev which is a nice place.

For example you could start by writing a CHIP8 emu, then a Space Invaders Emu. After Space Invaders most people write a Game Boy(almost same CPU as Space Invaders and hardware is well documented) emu, but you could try to do a 8086 PC if you want to know more about "real" computers.

There are free BIOS you can use, and FreeDOS, and then rest of the machine is pretty well documented.

It has very few RAM to emulate PC's/higher end Classic Macs. You understimate 90's computing. A Pentium 2@333MHZ or a P3 at 500 MHZ was a beast and an RP2350 can't do nil. Maybe some very early computers like the Amiga and the m68k Macs could be emulated under it.

You can play DivX movies under a Pentium II. And a Pentium III at 600 can run Icewm, modern dillo, TLS 1.3... with ease, even post into HN.

I don't underestimate 90s computing; I remember it? It sounds like you only remember the very tail end of it.

And I am, to be clear, talking about the RP2350's hypothetical successor, which is where I think Eben Upton will see his beloved Archimedes suitably emulated.

But FWIW, the current RP2350's PSRAM implementation can be up to two thirds as fast as RAM transfer was in a Mac IIfx — up to 40MB/sec — so the RP2350 can already emulate System 7 Macs with 4 megs of RAM.

https://adafruit-playground.com/u/jepler/pages/mac-emulator-...

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