Epic! 8-bitguy uses 1 weird trick to detroy rare prototypes!

[Gamepad]

8bitguy is one of my "favs". He's almost-cow material, tbh. Between his severe plain-dress wife, living directly next door to his parents, his start as a computer scrapper (literally a garbage man for computers), his weird obsession with guns, and his incompetence, you really only need two or three of those to intersect for lols.

Anyways, that's why he keeps destroying shit. Because he started out destroying ibooks for money.

That and his involvement with trannies. His music guy, who looked so damn autistic in the first place, eventually trooned out. Then there's that guy who collects Hearoid robots.

At least he doesn't have an "updated" LGBTQ+ flag and BLM stickers in plain sight like Cathode Ray Dude.

 

[HumptiDouji]

8bitguy is one of my "favs". He's almost-cow material, tbh. Between his severe plain-dress wife, living directly next door to his parents, his start as a computer scrapper (literally a garbage man for computers), his weird obsession with guns, and his incompetence, you really only need two or three of those to intersect for lols.

He's an awkward weirdo, but one who seems to have his life together, does shit he enjoys, and doesn't seem to get into stupid e-fights with people, so he could be doing a hell of a lot worse.
Also, lol at 'obsession with guns', he's pretty fucking restrained for a Texan, I've only seen him show some air pellet guns, his Glock 19, and a Ruger 10/22, and he hasn't talked all that much about them, me and the other dudes in the Guntube thread are more 'obsessed' than he is.

That and his involvement with trannies. His music guy, who looked so damn autistic in the first place, eventually trooned out. Then there's that guy who collects Hearoid robots.

I instinctively recoiled and shuddered when I saw that dude. It was like being jumpscared.

At least he doesn't have an "updated" LGBTQ+ flag and BLM stickers in plain sight like Cathode Ray Dude.

I think he mentioned the Alamo being closed off for safety because of the riots back in the Retarded Summer Of 2020, and I recall that BLM types were insisting heavily that they weren't riots, but peaceful protests, and you were a racist for saying riots.
So, he can't be THAT pozzed.

 

[UCHUBomb]

Outside of his view on guns, I don't think he's espoused his political views very much. Honestly he doesn't come off like an outwardly political kind of guy, or at the very least he keeps it to himself. The vibe I get is that he just wants to grill, or in this case retrobrite.

 

[Dysnomia]

He's an awkward weirdo, but one who seems to have his life together, does shit he enjoys, and doesn't seem to get into stupid e-fights with people, so he could be doing a hell of a lot worse.
Also, lol at 'obsession with guns', he's pretty fucking restrained for a Texan, I've only seen him show some air pellet guns, his Glock 19, and a Ruger 10/22, and he hasn't talked all that much about them, me and the other dudes in the Guntube thread are more 'obsessed' than he is.


I instinctively recoiled and shuddered when I saw that dude. It was like being jumpscared.


I think he mentioned the Alamo being closed off for safety because of the riots back in the exceptional Summer Of 2020, and I recall that BLM types were insisting heavily that they weren't riots, but peaceful protests, and you were a racist for saying riots.
So, he can't be THAT pozzed.

I always thought he was pretty on par for a guy that into computers. At least he's married with a child and not some kind of freak living with Real Dolls or anything like that. It could be far worse. Remember, all those old Atari and Microsoft guys were pretty damn weird too. Anything to do with the technical side of computers and vidya attracts weird guys.

 

[seri0us]

 

[Schwarzhaar]

Kinda surprised it didn't show the clip of David lightly jogging.

 

[Pee Cola]

Between his severe plain-dress wife, living directly next door to his parents, his

Is it just me, or is there a bit of a Van Houten thing going with The 8-Bit Guy and his family? The thumbnail from his 200th Anniversary episode has a real Kirk and Luanne vibe to it.

That and his involvement with trannies. His music guy, who looked so damn autistic in the first place, eventually trooned out. Then there's that guy who collects Hearoid robots.

The vintage computing scene is full of so many troons that I just assume that any woman involved with vintage computers or electronics that actually resembles a woman is post-op. I blame Fran Blanche for that; I didn't realise she went post-op in the '80s. At least she doesn't bang on about LGBTIQOMGWTFBBQ++++ shit like so many trans people into vintage tech do.

Outside of his view on guns, I don't think he's espoused his political views very much. Honestly he doesn't come off like an outwardly political kind of guy, or at the very least he keeps it to himself. The vibe I get is that he just wants to grill, or in this case retrobrite.

David seems to be a pretty complex guy. He's a proud Texan and a gun enthusiast, yet he befriends troons and drives a Tesla.

 

[HumptiDouji]

How much of a "gun enthusiast" is he actually? I've only ever seen him with two guns, the Glock and Ruger, the former seeming like he has it for pragmatic reasons, and the latter seeming more like it's meant for recreation more than anything else.
Someone who's a gun enthusiast, lives in Texas, and has a job that can support a family and a vintage computer hobby, really seems like they wouldn't settle on two firearms and a couple of airguns.

It just seems a modest interest at most.

 

[Likely]

he hasn't talked all that much about them

he did open carry in a walmart a few times, which i (and the rest of the civilized world tbh) consider to be lunacy.

200th Anniversary episode

i like the part where he shows himself walking and running, and it's the virgin from the virgin/chad meme. Also, his wife never smiles.

 

[Least Concern]

he did open carry in a walmart a few times, which i (and the rest of the civilized world tbh) consider to be lunacy.

Why is it lunacy? Crazy shit goes down in Walmarts all the time.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Lots of these youtubers don't really have any fucking idea what they're doing and for every interesting guy who talks about a subject he's actually passoinate about there's a felt dozens to hundreds who just skimmed old forums posts from 15 years ago and are regurgitating poorly while being intentionally vague about their credentials sometimes. They're grifters and in it for the money. Any kind of authenticity is carefully acted out. The more "sucessful" a youtuber is, the more skeptical I am of them really.

Imagine wanting to be a youtuber. Think about it, who does that? What kind of personality gets you there? A lot of them remind me of the kids in school that'd eat live rain worms for the attention.

 

[Pissmaster]

Is it just me, or is there a bit of a Van Houten thing going with The 8-Bit Guy and his family? The thumbnail from his 200th Anniversary episode has a real Kirk and Luanne vibe to it.

His wife looks like she could be his sister, there's no body language to indicate they're a couple, and they're even wearing the same color of clothing. It's nearly impossible to imagine them ever having sex beyond strictly procreation.

 

[69ing Ur Mom]

he did open carry in a walmart a few times, which i (and the rest of the civilized world tbh) consider to be lunacy.

It's Texas.

In Texas, you could stop on the side of the highway, stand in the bed of your truck, shoot feral hogs, and you'd get honks of approval. That would also be completely legal to do.

 

[Not Really Here]

It's Texas.

In Texas, you could stop on the side of the highway, stand in the bed of your truck, shoot feral hogs, and you'd get honks of approval. That would also be completely legal to do.

It's also environmentally friendly.
Fucking hogs destroying the environment.

 

[Beanie]

I mean, the guy did make entire games for the Commodore 64 and MS-DOS that people like. That, and making/shipping physical copies by hand.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Writing for DOS and C64 isn't as hard as it sounds, especially if you have access to a modern computer. (a lot of the cool modern demos, while running on old hardware, would not exist without new hardware and software) It's mostly just tedious. Especially DOS is kind of a PITA to do anything more advanced in because it was completely buried in legacy crap already when personal computers were still relatively new.

I looked a bit at mr 8-bits dream computer because I've been looking at computer kits. What I write now is not targeted at his project only. All these kits suffer from the creators thinking that they'll be the next big thing/a revolution. It's kinda like the insane Amiga community was 10ish to 20ish years ago. (and maybe still is, I don't follow anymore) Hate to break it to you but your piece of hardware is not bringing the 80s/90s and your youth back, nor will it start the next computer revolution. The tiktok/fortnite addled teens of today don't care about your clever memory layout (neither did you as a teen -and don't pretend otherwise- you just wanted to play vidya) and are not your target customers, so selling these computers as "educational" is pointless, especially since they don't teach anything that has anything to do with how modern IT work is (as sad as that is). Also locking down the hardware/OS software completely to have the option to take your ball and go home if somebody upsets you will pretty much guarantee that there won't be much of a community later because it'll do a great job at keeping the more technologically inclined people away and have them design their own kits where they can reign freely and guarantee you'll just sell to retro-consoomers who will just chug your kit into some box with all the other kits. Then overengineering of the hardware, which makes it often unreasonably expensive while really don't offering that much benefit. It's especially silly when they try to somehow come close to modern's system features, it's simply not worth it to make your design $100 more expensive to add a feature when it'll still be surpassed by a $5 aliexpress mp3 player.

Also at the end of the day, even if you do everything right, you design a piece of hardware that will still do absolutely everything considerably worse than a $20 ARM SBC. I think there's a niche for these kits, I even think there's room for a self-built computers who pronounce the minimalism and transparency, but I also think these people always target the wrong customer base and have the wrong views of what their piece of hardware really is. (especially this sitting on their proprietary stuff because they think it's worth it's weight in gold is a bit dumb)

Ok rant over. Thanks for reading my blog.

(I got it in my head to build a very simple electronic typewriter with a very basic OS, storage of text, printing and the option to export text files to SD card, that's why I was looking around)

 

[Pee Cola]

I looked a bit at mr 8-bits dream computer because I've been looking at computer kits. What I write now is not targeted at his project only. All these kits suffer from the creators thinking that they'll be the next big thing/a revolution.

This dude, who holds a Ph.D in Computer Engineering and whose thesis was about reconfigurable processor architectures. posted an scathing opinion piece about the Commander X16 on his blog.

That said, this dude has his own 8-bit kit computer, the CERBERUS 2080, that he designed from the ground up. We're talking old school stuff here: dual Z80 and 65C02 CPUs, through-hole components and programmable CPLDs, all running at 5V. As well as 6502 and Z80 assembler, it offers BBC BASIC and Forth. As an added bonus, it's open-source. This dude doesn't even sell it in kit form (although some third parties do).

How much educational value these new kit computers like the CERBERUS 2080, RC2014, Colour Maximite 2 etc actually have is hard to say. I guess if there are people out there who are interested in understanding computers at a logic gate level and to do their own coding, the CERBERUS 2080 is probably a good option. If you just want a fun and relatively inexpensive weekend project and something to mess about with BASIC on, you could do worse than the Colour Maximite 2. ngl I wouldn't mind an RC2014 machine to noodle about with CP/M, but as an educational computer it's about as useful as learning how to code in COBOL.

If all you want to do is relive vidya from when you were a kid, just get a Pi400 with RetroPie and be done with it.

 

[AmpleApricots]

This dude, who holds a Ph.D in Computer Engineering and whose thesis was about reconfigurable processor architectures. posted an scathing opinion piece about the Commander X16 on his blog.

Didn't even look closely at the Commander X16 but well said. This ridiculous over-engineering and at the same time not really improving on designs is especially something that bothered me a lot in most of the things I saw so far. Commodore is also really not somebody you should orient yourself after in designing a computer to begin with. They cut every corner possible and many of their designs were less than stellar, even in the more expensive Amigas. For example the power layout not capable of delivering when you actually planned to use the expansion features the computers offered, AGA being actually pretty hack-ish, Zorro 3 basically being eternally unfinished and developed on by one guy, some very adventurous timing decisions, and so on. The OS software-side was also chaotic. (unused variables and structures that are shoved back and forth but don't do anything, lots of examples of 'too clever' programming that lead to stuff like off-by-one bugs, weird non-standard things in the source that would only work with very specific compilers etc.) Well to be fair, they were one of the first so it's fine to cut them at least some slack, they had to figure out what not to do, they didn't have quite the repertoire of bad examples and good practices we have now.

For correctness, I do have to point out though that the atmel he uses in his design runs circles around both his CPUs performance-wise and is way, way more high tech and a bit of an anachronism which would've made his design more complex and also slower if replaced with simpler parts. It's forgivable though, elegant in it's inclusion and makes the platform more accessible for tinkerers in it's ease of programming. It's also not "abused" in some weird way as graphics chip or something like that in this design which I also saw often, which is also nice. Kinda have my doubts that the 5v CPLDs and the dual port RAM will be really so "easily available" as he claims in the future but a quick google says that yes, at least the CPLDs are actually still in production. Cool *if* true. The last time I did anything with programmable logic it was still on ISA cards, so really, no idea. I didn't find this in my googling around for kits and I like this one the best, actually. Nice!

How much educational value these new kit computers like the CERBERUS 2080, RC2014, Colour Maximite 2 etc actually have is hard to say. I guess if there are people out there who are interested in understanding computers at a logic gate level and to do their own coding, the CERBERUS 2080 is probably a good option. If you just want a fun and relatively inexpensive weekend project and something to mess about with BASIC on, you could do worse than the Colour Maximite 2. ngl I wouldn't mind an RC2014 machine to noodle about with CP/M, but as an educational computer it's about as useful as learning how to code in COBOL.

To be educational on an engineering level they have to be kinda simple and well laid out/open/explained like the Cerberus or the various Z80/Z180 computers that float around. A "black box" like the Color Maximite 2 (I researched that one and found out you can "ask the creator via mail for the source code" now how likely is it you get an actual productive answer and really the full source code? I might be cynical but I have my doubts, gatekeeping at that stage usually just doesn't bode well) isn't really going to teach you much, nor are proprietary FPGA implementations. If they run BASIC or a similar abstract high-level language really really fast (often with no way to inject assembler or bitbang hardware because it's just not that simple under the hood) well.. what is that going to teach you you can't learn on your PC? I can run BASIC on my 6 core AMD too, but why would I want to learn how to write simple BASIC programs in 2021? Also the creative thinking often comes with the limitations. If your computer can just bruteforce your way through your code you will be too lazy to optimize.

It can also be a good experience to start from zero, a Z80 is not hard to bootstrap. You can do it on a breadboard with a few ICs. I think many people get discouraged to try anything by themselves because they google around and then see the fancy finished products other people have made and then wonder why they should even bother with their own stumbling and bumbling attempts, but I think that's the wrong attitude. Also if you build something from the ground up, you have a whole other connection to it as if you just check out the design of somebody else and then solder a fancy kit together.

 

[Least Concern]

There does seem to be a certain appeal in placing limits on your capabilities and seeing what you can build under those constraints. See the popularity of the PICO-8, which is basically a Lua interpreter and 2D game framework which limits you on the sound capabilities, resolution, and color palette of the games you can make - it's like ten years old now but seems to be more popular than ever, even inspiring half a dozen knock-offs. So hardware developers see the problem as "how interesting and usable can I make a machine using only 8-bit CPUs?" and software devs see it as "what fun and interesting things can I do on a machine which only has an 8-bit CPU?" And, of course, until these graybeards are dead and gone, they will be nostalgic for the days when you switched a computer on with a big physical switch that went CLICK and it dropped you into a BASIC/PEEK/POKE-ready command line in under five seconds.

I don't really have the money to spend on or the space to put a machine as ultimately unuseful like the X-16, but I do think they're interesting projects and in an alternate timeline where I had enough money to use computers solely as a hobby rather than something to put food on the table (and occasionally shitpost about fat people) I probably have a workbench in a spare room with at least two or three of them.

 

[Pee Cola]

I can't quote your last post, @AmpleApricots ... but you make some great points,

With the CMM2, that's why I said it was a fun weekend project rather than a serious kit computer. There's enough of the kit building experience to make it feel a bit old-timey, but most of the really chunky stuff is hidden. Buying a prebuilt CMM2 is pointless, as it's just as easy to fire up your preferred BASIC dialect and code. There's an MMBASIC (Maximite BASIC) interpreter that runs in a Windows command line, and source is available if you want to port it to another platform. That said, if all you want to do is learn BASIC, I'd just go straight to BBC BASIC.

As for the CMM2's source, the dude that designed the Maximite series is quite critical about where open source is in the current year, which would explain why he insists that people contact him for a copy.

BTW it's funny you should mention bootstrapping a Z80 on a breadboard... this video came up in my feed yesterday. This guy makes it looks so simple that even I could probably manage it (eventually).