[actionfromafar]

This Tesseract project is such an interesting study in what it takes to build a computer from scratch.

I think Amigas occupy such a cool middle ground between eminently discoverable - one can learn how everything works in them - while at the same time, with a heap of extra RAM and a faster CPU - you can run an almost modern desktop environment on them, including development environment.

[richardw]

And these machines were originally built at a time when everything was simpler. We’re like space aliens arriving from the future, applying our advanced tech to build an old human relic. A couple motivated people can do it.

30 years from now: “HardwareGPT, make me an Amiga but with ZX Spectrum keys”

[galangalalgol]

I think there is an opportunity to use modern microcontrollers to created a similar simplified environment. The lack of a virtualizing mmu constrains ram sizes, which in turn constrains the degree of abstraction level bloat that otherwise occurs. Like living in a tiny house, everything must earn its continued place. That enables the understandability we remember. And a modern microcontroller has about the same memory as an amiga 1k while using a tiny fraction of the power for several times the processing capability.

I suppose we could just use contikiOS, it has a browser of sorts even. But I think the thread model that allows premptive threads has some footguns to adopt as a general desktop system, and a browser for these systems needs a more elegant way to handle web pages that are several times its ram size than just grabbing text.

[actionfromafar]

We are like space aliens from the future :)

Still, it's amazing to me that we can build stuff which is vaguely comparable to our current commercial capabilities.

Another similar observation... I loaded an LLM (local llama.cpp) on a 2015 laptop, almost a decade old, and had a coherent "conversation" with it.

If someone had time-travelled back in 2015 and started for me that very same program on the same laptop in 2015, it would have been confusing and downright scary. I would have started looking for network connections to the remote super computer which surely must be running this thing...

[qingcharles]

"Yes, the rubber ones!"

[vidarh]

"I can't do that. My instructions prohibit me from doing harm."

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

I suspect that if I had the time, I could create a desktop from scratch, but I now believe it would take more years than I have left, and it would be less fun than I want anyway.

[tivert]

> This Tesseract project is such an interesting study in what it takes to build a computer from scratch.

But it's not really from scratch. IIRC, Amiga's used a lot of custom ICs, and it looks like those were scavenged for this project.

[flohofwoe]

The Amiga custom chips are still simple enough that their functionality can be easily understood and emulated in software or FGPAs (arguably, they're conceptually simpler than the C64 VIC-II and SID custom chips).

[sumtechguy]

Every time I read something like this I remember back to the alt groups and people talking about the impossibility of emulation at all (if ever) of an amiga. What I find interesting about emulation is the amount of 'slop' that many programs can endure. Where the emulation is not quite right or even downright missing or wrong yet the program chugs along and just sort of works. Now some stuff needs that but it is kind of rare. Which is interesting.

[hakfoo]

I hear that claim, but it seems like we're still on the fringes. I understand we finally got to the point where you can build a C64 free of Commodore-exclusive parts only like a year ago. Is there a full suite of FPGA replacements for the Amiga chipset?

There's definitely some tangible appeal of building a robust '80s machine. Even with a quality software or FPGA emulator, the "feelies" are missing-- there's no opportunity to slide in an expansion card or manually fit it with a bunch of DIP RAM, or load stuff of of physical floppies.

Building a solder-it-yourself XT clone was a lot of fun for me, but I've sort of balked at the Amiga-flavoured projects in the space. It seems like they all start with "first get these five chips that really only can be harvested from a dead Amiga and cost a small fortune, so you'd better pray you don't put them in the socket backwards."

Maybe the middle ground would be using a FPGA to replace the custom chips, but the board is still designed with the right slots and sockets to fit an A2000 (or ATX) case and it still takes commodity parts like the 68000. Or maybe some 680x0 project targeting EmuTOS-- I'd expect it, as an open project, to be more adaptable to differing hardware than "must run exactly 1987 Amiga software with zany copy-protection and timing gimmicks".