turn a $5 toy into a serious-looking instrument with integrated effects! all you need is a decent thrift store, $200 of guitar effects, and a garage-sized workshop kitted out with >$13,000 worth of fab equipment...
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/11/a-casio-toy-synth-is-ready-to-rock/
@mdhughes just busy, will respond more fully later. Answer is yes.
Main motivation is--Arduino nanos are so cheap, but have 2K RAM...
@vidak Have you played with either Atari VCS BASIC, or Odyssey^2 Computer Intro! ?
VCS BASIC is barely usable for anything, hard to enter with. Just not enough RAM.
O2CI had a thick ring-bound booklet that taught assembly language, with 99 bytes storage. Kinda cool, really, tho when I got it I was already programming real computers.
https://odyssey2.info/library/manuals/us_computerintro/Computer%20Intro%20(USA).pdf
Trying to think what can be done in 2K RAM...
The computer would have to be more like a programmable digital calculator...
It could be like a little game console?
My kids asked me if I could bring them to a local punk show tonight. I thought they'd never ask 🥲🥲🥲 the kids are alright.
A command-line tool to copy a thread to a Markdown file and save all the media attachments in a directory. I use this to get a copy of my travel toots into a blog post. https://src.alexschroeder.ch/toot-to-disk.git/
i made a thing with some other people and im not entirely sure how to explain it but the website tries to do that
Still thinking about systems with tiny amounts of RAM...
You need about 2K to hold a 80x25 page of text.
A few of the text editors I have unearthed come in at around 5K.
I am still very inspired by CHIP-8, what it does in such limited constraints is very impressive.
I bought one of the cheapest USB mice on eBay. Unsurprisingly it felt really light and flimsy.
Through the magic of hot glue and metal nuts it now has some weight to it and feels pretty good.
I have been thinking about text editing in BASIC quite a bit lately.
Quite often my thoughts move on to word processing.
The actual practical need I have for a Tiny BASIC computer would be word processing blog posts, and browsing gopher.
The board I have ordered, the TTGO VGA32, has WiFi capabilities, and Stefan's Tiny BASIC supports internetworking.
Perhaps it is time to write a word processor and gopher client??
where can you get serial/I2C memory for cheap?
the kind that you can attach to an arduino microcontroller?
@AmenZwa I was thinking about your https://amenzwa.github.io/stem/PL/FortranModernisation/ . In my small experience, research labs at at least some universities have been deeply opposed to fortran, and supportive of writing what should have been and almost was fortran in python or non-fortran-using matlab. Switching to Fortran being above their paygrade, and inimical to their business community besides.
Though, I do agree with you that if you want to write some algebra, writing fortran directly is suitable language for that.
I was discussing book publishing with a person who has been writing a really interesting book about making retro games for old computers.
Their problem is that to very a nice print (as opposed to epub) the screenshots have to be high resolution. And here's the question:
Is there a nice way to upscsle a small screenshot from an emulator and add CRT effects so that it looks like it has been photographed off an old monitor? Preferably something that can be run in batch mode?
Please boost for a bit better reach, since I don't think this is a very common need.
"we decided to nix that idea"
"you mean painstakingly enumerate every one of its dependencies to ensure that it will work consistently in other contexts?"