There are still older people than me who experienced an even steeper curve but I hope that my daughter will enjoy the same thing - to live in a massively better world than the one she started in.
It's not better in the human ways - still lots of fighting and evil - but it's great to be able to stay in touch with one's family over huge distances and to be able to make boredom vanish at the touch of a button, to want to fix something and instantly get 100 videos of how to do it. To find some bit of code extremely boring to write and to get a machine to write it.
There’s also https://github.com/tvlad1234/pico-rv32ima for people who are into this kind of stuff, but it requires adding SPI RAM.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
incanus77•1mo ago