£16 home computer to kickstart young developers

[rue]

Interesting interview on gamesindustry.biz focusing on the Pi. I thought the claims of the GPUs performance impressive - up to x2 that of that of the iPhone 4S which is pretty beastly itself. That said I'm not sure how they managed this since the BOMs I've seen for the iPhone have put the cost of the SOC alone in the same region of the Pi as a whole. Pretty shiny.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...erry-pi?page=1

[Mequa]

Now that is a powerful little thing. Port UAE to it (already there for ARM/Linux) and get that baby to run AMOS!

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by desiv

I like the concept..
But it has to be simple to get into and use..

I did a LOT of BASIC programming on the C64..
Why, it was easy...

When I got my Amiga, I loaded BASIC right away...
No line numbers?? Hmmm.... More structured???

I will totally agree that it's "better" from a programming perspective but I did almost NO BASIC programming on the Amiga..

Now, I eventually did some programming on the Amiga, but I decided pretty early on to go with C. I didn't know it, but if I was going to "work" at it, I decided to work at C..

I accept the fact that BASIC on the Amiga probably wouldn't have been difficult to learn or use..
But it wasn't as easy as BASIC on the C64, at least not to me and not initially.
And that's all it took...

BASIC on the C64 was just so simple to use that it made me "want" to use it...

desiv

+1

[imigger]

if you want your kids to learn something interesting then go and download "KUDO"

its ace and you wont get bored kids and also you can play the games u make on your 360 ,now lets end this raspberry pi rubbish, hail to the microsoft king with KUDO..

my kids love it and now make there own games there 6 and ten so even you amiga boys maybe able to doit lol.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by imigger

if you want your kids to learn something interesting then go and download "KUDO"

its ace and you wont get bored kids and also you can play the games u make on your 360 ,now lets end this raspberry pi rubbish, hail to the microsoft king with KUDO..

my kids love it and now make there own games there 6 and ten so even you amiga boys maybe able to doit lol.

Roffle :-)

You're funny.

D.

[mfletcher]

Would be nice to have some bare bones OS included. No graphics. Just a command line with basic.

Can they code in assembly on this or is the device too complicated?

Regardless, hopefully it will kickstart a new generation of bedroom coders.

[seuden]

Originally Posted by imigger

if you want your kids to learn something interesting then go and download "KUDO"

its ace and you wont get bored kids and also you can play the games u make on your 360 ,now lets end this raspberry pi rubbish, hail to the microsoft king with KUDO..

my kids love it and now make there own games there 6 and ten so even you amiga boys maybe able to doit lol.

Do you mean Kodu?

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by seuden

Do you mean Kodu?

That's not the worst part, by far :-)

His location claims to be "england" but I'm fairly certain English cannot be his mother-tongue. If it is, I suspect his kids will have greater disadvantages than anything they may gain by learning to re-arrange game-maker tiles in a microsoft product :-)

D.

[imigger]

lol im german and my kids will learn thats the german way, but we only learn whats worth knowing thats why we rule the world.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by imigger

lol im german and my kids will learn thats the german way, but we only learn whats worth knowing thats why we rule the world.

Nice comeback ;-)

What part do your kids play in ruling the world? Are any of them responsible for the economy?

D.

[Mequa]

Well well well...

I haven't been able to get hold of a real Pi (yet), but I was able to run its ARM Debian Linux image in QEMU. I ran several tests and performance seems pretty close to what a real Raspberry Pi will give, only it lacks graphics acceleration and sound.

I managed to compile latest E-UAE on my emulated Pi. (I have binaries if anyone is interested.) It runs just fine on my virtual Pi. The next step I thought would be to try AMOS Professional.

First thing, with AROS ROM it is extremely slow, which is to be expected. So to use AMOS on a Raspberry Pi you are going to need real Amiga ROMs.

Using Amiga Forever Kickstart 3.1, however, it runs very well indeed. Performance is comparable to a real Amiga 1200, so AMOS will definitely be usable on a Raspberry Pi!

I haven't been able to test sound however (it may have a performance hit), and I needed to disable E-UAE's OpenGL when running under QEMU.

Is anyone interested in a Raspberry Pi emulation pack for AMOSPro? This will require a Kickstart ROM to be usable, so I can't legally do one "out-of-the-box" - it absolutely crawls with AROS ROM. But for a dirt-cheap machine tailored for programming, this is a small price to pay. I'll see if I can maintain Kickstart 1.3 compatibility so it can be legally used with the cheapest edition of Amiga Forever.


P.S. I attach E-UAE binaries for ARMv6/ARM11 Linux, which should run on a Raspberry Pi. (Also added to The Zone!)

On the Pi's Debian you need to install some dependencies to run E-UAE, try this from a Terminal:

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-debian-all
sudo apt-get install libglu1-mesa

[gunni]

good work!
had an email from RS that I had successfully "registered interest" in the commotion that was the launch, don't think I'll have a pi anytime soon to try it on though!

[chiark]

I've preordered with Farnell - delivery in 54 days and counting

I'm most interested in this as a centralised hacking platform for... well... everything! First project is in-car related, then onto home automation.

Rather than push this at my kids, I'll try to gently build their interest. WIll see how that goes.

[Mequa]

Well, AMOS might run fine, but Kid Chaos crawls at around 40% original speed. It would be pretty difficult to get that one full-speed on a Pi.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by imigger

my kids love it and now make there own games there 6 and ten so even you amiga boys maybe able to doit lol.

Why would I even want to?

[Washac]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Why would I even want to?

Strange blunt reply.

Way back in the days of the ZX81s and Spectrums, one of the first things lots of us did was to program something, I seem to recall messing with a simple animation in basic. That was as far as it went, for some it lead to bigger and better things, they become progammers. That is the idea behind this device to teach show our youngsters programming, and most kids love it. They like it because they create something it is theirs they made it, and kids love that sort of thing, even some adults will enjoy it with the "Look what I made" statement.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Mequa

I was able to run its ARM Debian Linux image in QEMU.

Ooh! I'll have to get this, the Raspberry PI needs a decent BASIC environment for the kids and SpecBAS will fit the bill nicely :-)

D.

[Galahad/FLT]

Wonders if coding in ARM Assembler is a viable option on these things?

[wilshy]

Originally Posted by imigger

if you want your kids to learn something interesting then go and download "KUDO"

its ace and you wont get bored kids and also you can play the games u make on your 360 ,now lets end this raspberry pi rubbish, hail to the microsoft king with KUDO..

But I thought your kids were better off learning a sport than sitting in front of a screen? Seems they chose the IT life over sport.

Jog on... oh hold on wait, they don't want to.

[chiark]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Wonders if coding in ARM Assembler is a viable option on these things?

Yes... But the only slight issue will be the GPU, which will only be accessible through an API rather than at the lowest of low levels. I don't think that's a show stopper though.