I am using the Xteink X4 as my primary e-reader now-a-days. Simple ESP32 microcontroller. Plastic+glass shell with an e-ink screen. MicroSD card works like a cache. Battery lasts for weeks. Works great.
Don't get me wrong. I like modern CPUs with huge caches and incredible power, but you do not need this for most devices. Also leads to lazy programming practices and calculators consuming hundreds of megabytes of RAM.
I'm currently building a RP2350 board with the HDMI/USB and I2S Audio I have also added the 16MB SRAM and higher vCore for overclocking which the RP2350 supports for a similar personal project to this. My first PCB had a few newbie mistakes which due to my lousy hand/eye coordination I wasnt able to fix so I am spinning up a V2 to go to JLPCB in the next week or two (https://rodyne.com/?p=3999). Your post resonated with a lot of why I am doing it so keep up the good work.
Caveat: 60p RP2350 microcontroller on a board that sells for $40 and has 8MB of RAM (as opposed to the 520K that the RP2350 comes with). But that is only needed for Photoshop. The 520K is more than enough to emulate the Mac 128K.
I am thrilled by this. While the world is understandably complaining about the price of RAM and CPU I keep thinking about the demo scene or people like this. In the worst case scenario, we could retool our lives to some extent using optimized version of older tech.
I'm reminded that chips like the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 were not intended to be general-purpose computers, and were originally designed mostly to be embedded controllers and as building blocks for "real" computers like terminal and disk controllers.
I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler. No MMU so no paging though.
> I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler.
With two cheap PSRAM chips and a bit of trickery, you can upgrade that to 32(.5) MB, which is certainly enough to run a small OS.
In principle you can add even more memory with bank switching, but 32 MB is the limit for a flat address space.
uCLinux was a real thing for a good long while, though I think at this point real microprocessors are cheap, simple, and widely available enough that there hasn't been much need.
> I'm reminded that chips like the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 were not intended to be general-purpose computers, and were originally designed mostly to be embedded controllers and as building blocks for "real" computers like terminal and disk controllers.
While the proposed use cases were things like that, I'd push back on saying that they weren't "intended to be general-purpose computers". I have the original 8080 manual in front of me, and it's very clear they considered them computers to be applied to problems (the first chapter is literally "The Functions of a Computer"). Oh, and the 8080 manual clearly identifies it as the "Intel 8080 Microcomputer Systems" and the 6800 calls it the "Benchmark Family for Microcomputer Systems"
For a more capable but still underpowered computer, I found Antix can run well in almost 20year old hardware - I use it in an EEEPC 4G Surf, but I modded it to have more storage recently.
I am using the Xteink X4 as my primary e-reader now-a-days. Simple ESP32 microcontroller. Plastic+glass shell with an e-ink screen. MicroSD card works like a cache. Battery lasts for weeks. Works great.
Don't get me wrong. I like modern CPUs with huge caches and incredible power, but you do not need this for most devices. Also leads to lazy programming practices and calculators consuming hundreds of megabytes of RAM.
I'm currently building a RP2350 board with the HDMI/USB and I2S Audio I have also added the 16MB SRAM and higher vCore for overclocking which the RP2350 supports for a similar personal project to this. My first PCB had a few newbie mistakes which due to my lousy hand/eye coordination I wasnt able to fix so I am spinning up a V2 to go to JLPCB in the next week or two (https://rodyne.com/?p=3999). Your post resonated with a lot of why I am doing it so keep up the good work.
Caveat: 60p RP2350 microcontroller on a board that sells for $40 and has 8MB of RAM (as opposed to the 520K that the RP2350 comes with). But that is only needed for Photoshop. The 520K is more than enough to emulate the Mac 128K.
How much does the monitor cost?
These are only $10 and you get a screen https://www.waveshare.com/rp2350-lcd-1.47-a.htm?sku=30557
You can use XIP to run code from Flash, so you can be get away with that in lieu of a decent amount of RAM.
The screens are really fragile, I've stuck my fingernail through three and broke one with an inadvertent tap from a screwdriver.
But they're only $10 and still work as a microcontroller.
How long did Filter Gallery > Cutout with max levels and complexity take?
Because this is how I fake vectorized images in 2005 and it took dayyyyys
This is wonderful and amazing. Computing can be very simple. I think constraints and hardware restrictions can unlock creativity.
Imagine running an GPT-3 Generation model on a raspberry pi . This would be great
I am thrilled by this. While the world is understandably complaining about the price of RAM and CPU I keep thinking about the demo scene or people like this. In the worst case scenario, we could retool our lives to some extent using optimized version of older tech.
I'm reminded that chips like the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 were not intended to be general-purpose computers, and were originally designed mostly to be embedded controllers and as building blocks for "real" computers like terminal and disk controllers.
I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler. No MMU so no paging though.
Which “old days” would those be. Sounds like it would be 50 years ago
64k was acceptable 40 years ago.
> I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler.
With two cheap PSRAM chips and a bit of trickery, you can upgrade that to 32(.5) MB, which is certainly enough to run a small OS.
In principle you can add even more memory with bank switching, but 32 MB is the limit for a flat address space.
Window 95 ran on 8mb of ram.
The first Amigas had 512k of ram. Both had much less processing power.
With 32mb you could probably run some kind of Linux.
Well, the first Amigas had only 256KB of RAM. Doubling that to 512KB (via a memory expansion card) was a luxury!
Even better, 8MiB was recommended for Windows 95 but it minimally required just 4.
When I first ran linux you could boot it off of a 1.2mb floppy. The 486 I ran it on had 4mb of ram at the time, later upgraded to 16mb.
Yep, there is a project tiny386, Win95 on ESP32, $1.85 chip.
https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386/tree/master https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/11/14/windows-95-made-to-r...
uCLinux was a real thing for a good long while, though I think at this point real microprocessors are cheap, simple, and widely available enough that there hasn't been much need.
> I'm reminded that chips like the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 were not intended to be general-purpose computers, and were originally designed mostly to be embedded controllers and as building blocks for "real" computers like terminal and disk controllers.
While the proposed use cases were things like that, I'd push back on saying that they weren't "intended to be general-purpose computers". I have the original 8080 manual in front of me, and it's very clear they considered them computers to be applied to problems (the first chapter is literally "The Functions of a Computer"). Oh, and the 8080 manual clearly identifies it as the "Intel 8080 Microcomputer Systems" and the 6800 calls it the "Benchmark Family for Microcomputer Systems"
For a more capable but still underpowered computer, I found Antix can run well in almost 20year old hardware - I use it in an EEEPC 4G Surf, but I modded it to have more storage recently.
"easily adds 4Mb RAM". A bit misleading way to say 512 kB RAM.
I wish I had time to fiddle with stuff like this. sigh
Black and white photoshop, yes.