Back in the 80s, buying a home computer could easily mean an inflation-adjusted cost of thousands of dollars (or your equivalent currency unit of choice), and all for an 8-bit machine that might not have a hard drive and almost certainly didn’t connect to a network. Here in the future it’s easy to get spoiled by all the computing power and inexpensive devices practically falling into our laps, but using some modern low-cost microcontrollers can connect us to our early computing roots like [Joe]’s latest Arduino-based computer.
Taking design an engineering cues from computers like the Timex Sinclair 1000, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 MC-10, this computer uses a trio of Arduinos to accomplish what the best computer manufacturers once did with tons of integrated circuits. An Arduino Due handles all of the processing and traditional computing tasks, including a somewhat customized BASIC implementation, while an Uno performs audio processing duties. Taking care of the video processing is the much more capable Arduino Mega, outputting 40×25 monochrome NTSC composite video at 8×8 character resolution. There’s even WiFi courtesy of an ESP32 — certainly an upgrade compared to the source material.
After booting it up, the user gets a Commodore-like experience that replicates the 80s computing era quite well, and is even built inside its own keyboard case just like that era of computers usually were. [Joe] plans to release all three firmware images and the Python script used to get files onto the faux-retro machine, so keep an eye out for that.
In the event that you used rubles instead of dollars to pay for your expensive 8-bit machines back in the 80s, this computer might be more up your alley instead.
This is legitimately really cool and the website is adorable. I love this for so many reasons; thank you for sharing!
That reminded me of the Amethyst: https://github.com/74hc595/Amethyst – which, I suppose, is the Apple (if someone had told Woz about Forth?) to the Daisy-1’s Commodore / Atari.
“Here in the future it’s easy to get spoiled by all the computing power and inexpensive devices practically falling into our laps…”
Man, I wish I had a lap like that.
Is that a transputer?
The garbage collectors says: “The transputer is a series of microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers.”
So, to me, transputer.
i have a couple transputers on ISA cards found in a university dumpster in southern Ohio circa 1994. At least one of them works; i managed to download software for it and test it out back in like 2003. somebody come up wtih a good use for them other than occasionally bringing them out to fondle!
A personal computer that’s just three microcontrollers in a trench coat.