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July 4, 2018 7:35 AM   Subscribe

The BASIC Engine is an open-source computer the size of a Raspberry Pi, modelled on the home computers of the late 80s/early 90s. It connects to a composite (PAL/NTSC) monitor/television, has connections for a PS/2 keyboard and a PlayStation game controller, contains a BASIC interpreter with a Commodore-style screen editor and an Infocom Z-Code interpreter, and has 256-colour graphics with software sprites, 5-bit digital audio, a SoundFont-based wavetable music synthesiser and 16 GPIO pins. You can't actually buy it, but for about €10 and passable soldering skills, you can build your own.

The BASIC Engine's history is even more interesting: the project started out as a cartridge for using cheap Nintendo clones to teach children to program, but along the way, evolved into a standalone system taking advantage of the capabilities of modern low-end components, including a system on a chip designed for wireless network devices and a RAM chip with a built-in video signal generator.
posted by acb (25 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
Are you seriously going to make me dig through the piles of crap in the front room for the PS/2 keyboard? You utter monster.
posted by pompomtom at 7:56 AM on July 4, 2018 [4 favorites]


(Seriously though: SOUNDFONTS?? AWESOME!!.... ahem: are you seriously going to make me dig through the piles of backups... etc)
posted by pompomtom at 7:59 AM on July 4, 2018


are you seriously

So much SMD.

Nope.
posted by pompomtom at 8:27 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


The history link is a wonderful lesson in feature creep, err I mean iterative design. My favorite is when (spoilers) he is forced to add a lowly 74HC04 at the end.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:02 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


are you seriously

... find a PAL/NTSC television or monitor? It's seriously been close to 14-years since I used something other than HDMI/digital input...
posted by jkaczor at 9:02 AM on July 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


Oh, it runs a BASIC as an OS... With labels and named procedures....

No more snark from me.
posted by jkaczor at 9:12 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Isn't that what receivers are for? IMHO they're just like mixers for vid.

The TV I'm losing World of Tanks on right now has ALL THE INPUTS (the TV sucks, really, but the SO likes it).

The upside being that I got the xbox (the original) working the other day. My proper amp would spew at S-Video.
posted by pompomtom at 9:18 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Also: didn't everything become PAL/NTSC agnostic around the time of S-Video, or is that an all-but-USA thing, which might make commercial sense).
posted by pompomtom at 9:24 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Man, lately I've been feeling like I should be building stuff and coding stuff, so this looks right up my (file away for "later" or order the parts but never do anything with) alley. I was just browsing Raspberry Pis, but couldn't really justify the cost.

What I should do is find a project using some of the stuff I have laying around already.

This is a pretty neat little thing to read about, thanks!
posted by ODiV at 9:27 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was just browsing Raspberry Pis, but couldn't really justify the cost.

Wemos D1 Mini (an ESP8266 board, with all the difficult parts sorted) is my fave toy at present. Keep thinking "I could do this with an ATTINY85" but that's about a 50c saving once you've included power supply, not even counting the ESP's wifi).

What I should do is find a project using some of the stuff I have laying around already.

Every mug with a soldering iron knows this, but...
posted by pompomtom at 9:44 AM on July 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


FTA:

(Cue hardware guys: "It’s always the power supply, mate.")

Bloke's not wrong.
posted by pompomtom at 10:12 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Seems like a lot of bad design decisions. Even if the insides are stripped down minimal you need USB & HDMI to talk to the outside world easily. The Raspberry Pi people got that.
posted by w0mbat at 10:56 AM on July 4, 2018


HDMI's crazy fiddly, though. If you look closely at a Raspberry Pi you can see that the HDMI traces are all wibbly to keep them the same length to keep the signal usable.

I like this, especially the history part. Will I build or own one? Probably not. But it (and other projects, like Stephany's C256 Foenix) hint at a speculative retrocomputing scene that is so very much my jam it's practically a conserve.
posted by scruss at 11:08 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Metafilter: So very much my jam it's practically a conserve.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 1:29 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


There was a time when I thought this kind of thing would be a great way to get kids into computers for the first time, but now I realise it's all about making me feel like a kid with computers for the first time.
posted by pulposus at 3:38 PM on July 4, 2018 [5 favorites]



The history link is a wonderful lesson in feature creep, err I mean iterative design. My favorite is when (spoilers) he is forced to add a lowly 74HC04 at the end.


You can tell he's a programmer. A real hardie would have used one transistor. Two, if they wanted to isolate the audio filtering from the serial input. "There was nothing to add, and nothing to take away" - yeah, mate, apart from those four unused inverters.

(I jest.)

(Mostly.)
posted by Devonian at 4:54 PM on July 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


This is ridiculous, cool, nostalgic and clever and I love it.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 6:11 PM on July 4, 2018


I feel the world would be very different if something like this had been available thirty years ago. Maybe it will still make a difference, but we've lost a generation of kids being invited to program on their first computer right out of the box.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:23 PM on July 4, 2018 [2 favorites]


Most early home computers booted into BASIC from a rom chip; the IBM PC and the Macintosh started us on the path of non hackable systems. I'm glad web browsers have advanced to become an available-everywhere coding environment with good debuggers, etc. It's a more than adequate tool to learn programming, but you won't learn how the machine works.
posted by scose at 7:05 PM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


Unless you make your own logic gates out of transistors, do you really know how the machine works?
posted by acb at 1:27 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


You had transistors? Luxury. We had to blow our own valves using dead lightbulbs and aluminium foil.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:36 AM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]


Since @pompomtom mentioned the ESP8266, I just can't stop myself mentioning MicroPython for ESP8266
posted by nickzoic at 4:08 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yes, MicroPython is nifty. There are now super-cheap esp8266 boards that'll run as intermittent wireless sensors for months (if not years) from a rechargeable battery.

If you're looking for something more educational based on the same platform, VGKits in the UK do neat stuff for little money.
posted by scruss at 7:40 AM on July 5, 2018


There's also the micro:bit SBC. It's also a small computer with an LED grid display, buttons and sensors programmable in MicroPython. I picked one up a year or so back for around $10.

I should really try to do something with it some time.
posted by suetanvil at 8:05 AM on July 6, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was stoked about this, as you can see above, but TBH — and it pains me to say this — you could likely do everything here with an ESP8266/ESP 32 board and MicroPython. Teaching folks BASIC these days is a bit hopeless.
posted by scruss at 12:16 PM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


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