[K0balt]

I’d love to see something like this but designed to run on esp32 or raspberry pi 2530. Either can handle basic HDMI and USB. Or a little <$100 laptop with a 7” display.

Easy to think raspberry pi, but with a full Linux you won’t get that intrinsic understanding that you fully control the hardware, you never control the “bare metal” unless you are a much more advanced user.

IMHO the feeling of not being in full control of your computing device is not a good starting point. I’m very fortunate to have started out on my 8kb BASIC machine.

[alexisread]

There’s a wealth of retro machines out there that cater to this. A sample: https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/Neo6502/open...

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/AgonLight2/o...

Or with keyboards: https://wildbitscomputing.com/

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spectrumnext/zx-spectru...

Or you can go mobile: https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/picocalc

https://andywarburton.co.uk/post/gr3ml1n-a-compact-handheld-...

And if you want a real challenge, the one euro computer:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/RVPC/open-so...

[K0balt]

Something like the one dollar riscV but with an ESP32, hdmi, and an sd card slot. Pretty sure this exists somewhere. But it needs a good OS with a built in dev environment to be successful. I think I looked into if pico8 or something could work on the esp32, but it was too heavy iirc.

[Lerc]

I have been thinking along those lines myself.

I have been playing around with a per scanline generated display on a rp2350 outputting to a tiny LCD. I think there's potential for some pretty fancy stuff on HDMI. A 2350 with PSRAM, HDMI connector plus a MicroSD for bulk filesytem, and USB for input could be quite a fun micro PC.

I would be tempted to make somthing that had a second RP2350 with its own PSRAM sitting unutilized just as a temptation to users to figure out how to get more out of the gadget and learn about different multiprocessing architectures.

One of these https://www.waveshare.com/core2350b.htm

With one of these https://www.waveshare.com/rp2350-matrix.htm

Mounted on top, and an HDMI connector squeezed in somewhere,

I am a bit reminded of what GeoWorks Ensemble managed on a 640k 8086. Theoretically you could make a tiny system like this do even more.

[mysterydip]

> I am a bit reminded of what GeoWorks Ensemble managed on a 640k 8086.

I was looking at similar recently for a project, and came across FrankOS: https://github.com/rh1tech/frank-os

[cdcarter]

Check out the Adafruit Fruit Jam, its got pretty much everything you need.

[AstroJetson]

I really like the Fruit Jam. I was also excited about Frank's OS, I'm looking to see how hard it would be to port over.

[pjmlp]

Yes, they are more powerful than classical MS-DOS PCs, so there is plenty of juice in them.

[poyu]

There's PicoMite: https://geoffg.net/picomite.html

It's a BASIC interpreter/OS for the RP2040

[UncleSlacky]

You could just use RISC OS on the PI for BBC Basic.

[Tepix]

There‘s LEDmeplay https://mithotronic.de/ledmeplay.php

[jan_Sate]

Not sure on the performance but it might be possible to port this Mini Micro to those platforms.

[Narishma]

Doubtful. Isn't Mini Micro build on Unity? That has much higher system requirements.

[prmoustache]

why not just use a vintage computer or game console then?

[Lerc]

The main thing is video output. Even VGA is fading away now. HDMI is kind of what you need to be relevant to a lot of potenial users.

[LastTrain]

The machines were simple but the technology constraints of the day also made them very inconvenient. Lots of wires, bulky & slow storage, limited connectivity.

[joshu]

i haven’t seen hdmi on esp32. any example projects?