£16 home computer to kickstart young developers

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Washac

Strange blunt reply.

Perhaps it is. Was just responding to the 'Amiga boys' part

[HenryCase]

Originally Posted by Dunny

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.

It's not a BASIC, but you may be interested in this:
https://github.com/antirez/load81
Load81 is basically Lua + SDL + a C64-inspired editor. As you can see here, the main dev wishes for it to become popular on the Raspberry Pi (N.B. Project used to be called Codakido):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3666076
"That's my target, I hope that when the Raspberry PI will be available enough, Codakido will be functional enough to be a good alternative to the BBC micro BASIC."

If you want to get your kids into programming, this article is worth reading too, to remind us of what a lot of us went through when starting out (hint: get them making games):
http://inventwithpython.com/blog/201...ow-to-program/

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by chiark

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.

Well then, hardware bashing, but using libraries for graphics and probably sounds.

No biggie

[Mequa]

Originally Posted by chiark

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.

I thought the purpose of assembler is to directly program the CPU, not the GPU (which incidentally is on the same chip). I've done a bit of ARM assembler but would not personally write a large program in it. Anyway, it should be straightforward enough to mix C code with ARM assembler to access OpenGL API, if doing OpenGL in ARM assembler is a nightmare.

[diablothe2nd]

I should be recieving my Rasberry Pi soon... This will basically act as a mediacentre and NAS for my home network.

When they are more available I plan on buying 3 more, 2 to use as media centres in other rooms (streaming from the main NAS Pi) and a spare.

So then I had this wacky idea. It looks as though there is a port on it for something. Looks like an IDE port but I doubt it. if this is an interface port so we can hook controllers etc up to it I was thinking of jacking in an amiga floppy drive and connections that are usually found on an amiga. if not I suppose this could be hacked into a usb device.
so yeah my idea is: Find a broken 1200 online (not difficult) strip out the hardware with exception to the floppy drive etc and interface it with the pi.

the plan is then to Dual boot between Aros (if there's an ARM port out there?) and a small linux partition that boots straight into an emulator (again needing an ARM version)

the end result would be a 1200 desktop case, functioning keyboard, floppy, joyports etc but running emulated hardware inside.

the question is though, I wonder how fast the Arm 700mhz with 256mb ram will handle emulating say, a 1260@50mhz with RTG

[KevG]

I personally think that the Raspberry Pi could be the 'New Amiga'.
Think about it.... most modern console manufacturers go to extreme lengths to stop
people running 'home brew' software on their consoles. The Raspberry Pi was designed as a learning tool so that anyone could learn how to program on it and create games - just like the Amiga.

Kev G.

[diablothe2nd]

you could be right there Kev!

I'm wondering what the Pi foundations plans are for the future of it though... it would be cool if they kept the hardware effectively the same for a good amount of time (5-10 years?) so there is unilateral compatibility. What I think will be more interesting is how much cheaper they'll get as cheaper components come to market and more efficient board designs are made.

i'm heading off topic though. for now i am just looking at how to turn it into an amiga physically

[skateblind]

The problem is, the cheaper the components, due to length of time in production, then the machine gets older and slower compared to other devices. This is basically, but not completely why things are always upgraded and always cost a certain amount.

Of course if they leave the design as it is, then it will get cheaper, but they still may not reduce the price due to wanting the increased profit, like the consoles have done.

[Mequa]

Originally Posted by diablothe2nd

the question is though, I wonder how fast the Arm 700mhz with 256mb ram will handle emulating say, a 1260@50mhz with RTG

It should be powerful enough for many (but not all) Amiga 500 games. This is an ARM11 700MHz which is no faster than a 300MHz Pentium 3, I expect AGA games will choke it. Basically it's similar to Amiga emulation on the PSP.

I tried emulating a R-Pi in QEMU and got its ARM Debian distro running, E-UAE built and ran fine, but hardware-banging games like Kid Chaos ran pretty slow. Stuff like a Workbench 3.1 desktop or AMOSPro should be fine though.
Just don't expect to use AROS ROM with usable performance in many apps, it's much too slow!

RTG might fare better if a modern enough version of UAE is available for the Pi (E-UAE is still a bit crappy there), but what it really needs for decent CPU emulation is an Amiga-compatible 680x0-to-ARM11 JIT-compiler, and nobody has written one yet.

[seuden]

Ouya is looking good. If we can get emulations apps on it then wow!