Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter | Hacker News Reader

Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter

dmitry.gr

238 pointsdmitrygr52 comments

Thank you. This is a spectacular amount of work and information.

As someone who is interested in similar old hardware that occasionally lacks any kind of documentation (specifically cameras), I sincerely wish I had this level of patience and determination (and also understanding, I'm not really a software guy).

I wish there was a law that all hardware vendors had to dump a sufficient amount of documentation if they discontinue a platform such that it can be emulated.

The litmus test can be done by AI code generation in a sandbox during the period they don't have to make it open.

Could be part of the FCC certification process, which everyone has to file.

It is vastly more likely, historically speaking, for the EU to pass such forward-looking legislation in the public interest.

Always a pleasure to read your articles Dimitry, ever since I discovered your "Running Linux on an 8-bit microcontroller" project, back when I was studying electrical engineering in university. Your low-level hobby work is insane, specially on the palmOS side.

> If that was not enough of crotch-punch, in a desire to cut more costs, they decided to save $0.000001 per device and used the cheaper BJTs instead of FETs.

Having had coworkers who worked for Fisher-Price, using worse components to save a fraction of a cent per device seems their general MO.

> In 2000, the famous American toy company Fisher-Price released a simple drawing-oriented handheld gaming console for kids called Pixter. It featured no brain-rotting social media and focused, instead, on drawing, sketching, and educational games.

I fear that the future will increasingly be filled with people framing old/new cultural artifact X or Y in terms of whether or not it reminds them of social media.

(Not a dig at the article or the immense technical skills required to accomplish all of this)

I still follow Dimitry on twitter for his technical talent, as I've done some palmOS software reversing as well, but man every other post is something along the lines of "we should let X group fend for themselves in a rattlesnake pit because they don't produce value".

All to say it's a major bummer his cool work is tainted by his dehumanizing words and I wonder if he understands how he comes off to people.

This puts it rather lightly. I stopped following him when he started posting incredibly racist memes.

Yeah I was trying to keep it civil for HN.

The whimsy of the PalmOS work really clashes with the incessant racism and hate.

Unfortunately that general part of the world has a lot of ethno-religious conflict normalized from birth. Monotheistic zealotry, current conflicts, Greece/Turkey, former Yugoslavia, etc.

Any part you are referring to? I can't find any personal attack.

I actually like his writing style. I think he just speaks his mind in full honesty and you should not interpret it as aggressivity.

> I can't find any personal attack.

Your parent comment gave a paraphrased example of discrimination against a group, not a person.

> you should not interpret it as aggressivity

Your parent comment didn’t describe it as aggressive, they described it as dehumanising. There is a colossal difference between the two. Patton Oswalt demonstrates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkKo1_RP_0c

Note: I don’t have a Twitter account nor have I ever encountered Dimitry’s writing, so I’m not commenting either way, but if you want to refute/contradict/disagree what your parent comment said, it’s important to respond to the point they made, not different ones.

Thx, indeed I was only referring to the article. Not doing a full background check. The GP was not providing any detail.

I had a stroll though his Twitter. It's just a grab bag of strawmen being summarily beaten mostly by the fact that no one is replying to challenge him.

Took two minutes of reading his Twitter to find him comparing black people to chimpanzees.

He tried to start a shit-flinging contest with me in an HN comment thread once. Accused Zephyr RTOS of being "bloat" or something.

As a fellow embedded dev, I smile every time one of his projects shows up on HN. He's really talented. But c'mon, dude.

Dmitry was interviewed on the Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast[0] a few years ago. I didn't feel like he came off at all like that in that interview, at least.

I don't interact w/ Twitter so I can't speak to anything he's written there.

[0] https://unnamedre.com/episode/2

What's his x handle? It doesn't seem linked from his blog

The guy refers to social media broadly as "brain rot" in this article, and your first question is what his handle is on the most rotten social media site on the Internet?

I'd wager he doesn't use X.

Someone else could have answered. I found it eventually. https://x.com/dmitrygr

People who continue to use Twitter today have made their positions clear.

Frankly, that includes you, too.

You can't hang out at the Nazi Bar and complain about all the Nazis.

Meet him IRL, I will vouch for him being cynical and a pleasure to be around.

Is there any dumb LCD console like that available these days for kids? (not those retro gaming consoles). I want to buy one for my kids. It looks so good, specially because it is a dumb and simple device.

I found Pixter online but are there a little bit more capable systems like this for kids made today?

EDIT: Looks like devices by LeapFrog and VTech are the closest alternative these days so far.

What are you looking for them to be able to do? I feel like everything these days is just some form of an iPad

Just play around and learn perhaps. My kid like drawing on his LCD drawing tablet. This is more fun than that. It's like Paint Delux but in physical form. And it has games too.

I think I am going to buy a Pixter itself. Everything else today is either too limited (vtech is buttons only and its screens are too tiny for example) or too powerful.

Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but the playdate is pretty neat.

Nobody makes stuff like this anymore. You can vibecode your own using an Arduino and a pixel LCD.

No, but realistically it wouldn't be hard to make something with a Pi and a touch screen of some kind

Check this out: https://play.date/

Or https://www.arduboy.com/. (Though both of these are "more capable" in the sense of kids being able to make their own games for them; not necessarily in the sense of the games having even the fidelity of a Gameboy Color.)

Pimoroni Presto (https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/presto) + some firmware you can write for fun :)

Thanks for the details :)

I was half expecting you to find the Pixter Color VM to be a Forth like interpreter ;)

I was expecting either that or some lobotomised Java VM since everyone was crazy about it at the time

both forth and java would have made more sense than a custom vm. not sure why they went this way on ARM. on 6502 it makes sense though. small cpu -> custom work needed

Wow great work and great post! love stuff like this on HN.

The "bad things" link is broken, the href attribute is mistyped as "haref"

Spelling is not my forte. Fixed it, thank you.

Yet again my plans for a productive morning have been derailed by an excellent new write up from Dmitry :)

That hand rolled DAC for the touchscreen with the eight gpio lines is hilarious.

Is this in MAME?

no, but i hope someday someone will make that happen. i provide enough info and reference material

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