- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
I've thrown forth on an ESP32 and RP2040 the other day and even if it wasn't a bare metal forth in the case of the ESP32 (running on the top of the OS means direct memory poking often won't end well, also slower since it's implemented in C) it was a very nice experience. A big thing about the old tech for me is it's simplicity and ease of understanding. These micros are very similar (although admittedly their peripherals and instructions sets are considerably more complex) while being powerful enough that they easily leave every system of yore in the dust. The argon (which seems quite successful vs. the commander, probably because of its ease of use and low price) is also just an eZ80 strapped to an ESP32. The time was never better to build your own low end, minimalistic computer from first principles for little money. It's a pity people seem to be more interested in rethreading old designs/software over and over again. My self-built Z180 does not run CP/M because I wanted something new with old tech. I recently got my hands on 25ns RAM and could clock it to 36 Mhz with zero wait states. I wonder why the eZ80 in the Argon is clocked so conservatively, that thing goes to 50 Mhz and I bet you could push it far past that even. My guess is because old software would just utterly crap itself.
Yeah same. I have all ISA cards I could ever need but this seems like something that could make life easier. In general though, don't be put off by his angry, weird way of writing. The guy making these is french, they all write english like this.
I know this was always a big problem with the TED, the same with the early C64 PLAs, some early rev. SIDs (? IIRC) and I think MOS branded 74xx logic (if that was the problem with those). Really *all* of them? Besides these I haven't seen or heard about a whole lot of failure about a decade ago. Sadly we can't check these videos now (see post above). Would really suck if so.
