Nostalgia for the days of assembling your home computer.<p>My first home computer was a Sinclair ZX81. With the 16K RAM Pack which crashed the machine if it was wiggled even slightly - and now I have horrible flashbacks remembering a time when I spent a couple of hours typing in row upon row of hexadecimal (plus CRC check code for each line!) from the pages of a magazine to get a Space Invader type game on the ZX81. And then the RAM Pack crashed the machine before I could save to cassette tape - BOOM!<p>A high school friend of mine had a Compukit UK101 [0] which he assembled himself. Quite a quirky and bulky machine that was.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8099/Compukit-UK101/" rel="nofollow">http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8099/Compukit-UK101/</a>
I sense that more projects will come where similar microcontrollers will be simulating the machines from the 8-bit golden age. I wish I had the time to do it but I can’t wait for someone to do a tandy color computer/dragon32/zx spectrum/bbc/c64/etc. running on an off the shelf cheap adafruit/sparkfun/arduino board.
There's a demo scene for the ZX80:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DFJnzSCtdg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DFJnzSCtdg</a><p>And a pretty cool game:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2N5k4kKxE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2N5k4kKxE</a>
The popularity of the Raspberry Pi and Arduino makes me wonder why there wasn't more exploitation of the I/O capabilities of the simple PCs of the early days. I suppose there must have been some I/O breakout devices, but they were very niche. I guess it was a combination of cost (too expensive to dedicate a pc to a single task), and lack of cheap but useful electronics to connect to (though relays and switches could do many useful things).
Microcontrollers are usually Harvard instead of Von Neumann architecture, and this one is no exception, which makes executing arbitrary code a little more difficult; the EEPROM is only rated at 100K cycles too.
The ZX80 screen flashed when you pressed a key. Yet they still managed to make games for it by doing cycle accurate delays to account for key processing.