[rcar]

As someone who has done a fair bit of tinkering with stuff like Arduinos, NodeMCUs, ESP32s, etc. along with Pis and similar, what sort of itch does this scratch for people that those wouldn't? From looking at the Rosco version, it doesn't seem like it's a cost savings or anything, and the hardware is certainly much weaker than modern options.

[rcar]

To be clear, I'm genuinely curious - this isn't intended as an insult to any of the folks who have worked on these projects.

[kiwidrew]

Most of the "modern" embedded stuff comes as a complete system-on-chip these days, i.e. all the peripherals and memory are integrated into the CPU on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It's also rare for chips to offer an external parallel bus interface (the classic A0-A15 and D0-D7 pins), which means that any extra peripheral devices need to hang off an I2C/SPI port where the CPU core can't access them directly.

And the available chips (AVR, ESP32, LPC2xxx, etc.) are all proprietary designs with a single manufacturer. Even the ARM chips, which generally use some variant of a Cortex-M core, have wildly different peripherals. So migrating between families is difficult/impossible.

In contrast, "classic" chips like 8051, 6502, x86 and 680xx all have external parallel bus interfaces and are (or were) produced by multiple manufacturers (often as part of "second source" agreements).

So when building a system using these chips, the designer has a large degree of flexibility and freedom to design the system architecture. Whereas building something using modern embedded chips is mostly an exercise in parametric search trying to find an existing chip which offers exactly the right set of peripherals for the intended design. It reduces the system designer to a mere consumer of off-the-shelf SoCs instead of being a true builder/architect.

[rcar]

That's helpful; thanks. I guess coming from much more of a software background, having the ability to write C code (which feels like an acceptable veneer over the hardware to me and works well across chips) and having programmatic access to the pins feels pretty empowering and all-encompassing. However, it does make sense to me that someone coming from a hardware-first view of the world would feel those barriers to direct hardware access much more acutely and recognize the limitations that I don't.

I appreciate the thoughtful and detailed response.

[noone_youknow]

This. Well said.

[renewedrebecca]

Compared to Arduino & other microcontrollers, a 68k has more capabilities- you have the real system bus available to you, which I don't think you do on an Arduino (or a rasPi for that matter.)

Compared to a raspberry pi, a 68k SBC is more "knowable". There aren't any proprietary blobs there... You can still wrap your head around the whole computer- it's simpler.

[erik]

Nostalgia might be a factor.

But I think the bigger appeal is that a system like this can be understood in a much more complete way than what you can achieve with a Pi or even an ESP32.