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A New Vintage Computer ?

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leaknoil

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 14, 2008
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Central California
Anyone ever played with one of these ? It looks really interesting. I know its new but, its like vintage at the same time in many ways.

http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MKPP1

I did a little more research and its the result of http://playpower.org/ . The computers will cost $10 and be sold all over the world. What was old is new again. All you old 6502 Apple coders may actually be able to dust off those chops and contribute to the education of the underprivileged and feel useful once again.
 
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Cool and interesting. If it was $10 I'd certainly buy a couple, $40 I'm hesitant for whatever reason, but it'd be cool if I could do 6502 assembly or ML on it.
 
I actually wondered about that myself. I just emailed the powerplay people and they said the difference is going to the foundation to support to project after a smaller then normal profit for that website. Still $50 is enough to make me not buy until I hear of people doing stuff with them.

If it was $10 I'd buy one anyway. At $50 I think I'll wait for a english UI and some idea what tools they have. What it looks like is you do all the development on your pc, burn eeproms, and put them in a cartridge.
 
This is nothing more than a Famiclone with a NES-on-a-Chip with some customized software inside the keyboard. They have been around for over a decade. Not especially impressive or useable unless you want to learn how to program NES software.
 
Great Hierophant said:
This is nothing more than a Famiclone with a NES-on-a-Chip with some customized software inside the keyboard. They have been around for over a decade. Not especially impressive or useable unless you want to learn how to program NES software.
Click to expand...

I think the idea is for this to be like the OLPC project except it will actually be affordable to produce and work as a desktop. The fact it plays games is just to attract kids to learn the computer. Which most of us know from personal experience works well. From what I can tell the project started at MIT and is spreading to universities around the country with heavy CS departments. Its getting a mess of coverage on all the tech blogs and sites now.
 
There's a thread over at atariage about this, and after some thought, I like the idea. Yes, the type of thing (very close to this one) has been around a long time. But to make it programmable and have some sort of way to communicate, that's kind of new. I like it, and if I can get one I will.

Seems like a giant homebrew project, and I like that part even more.

Nathan
 
I remember reading about this about a year ago. It was going to be "Apple II like". The Apple II people were wanting a clone but that didn't happen. $50 might be a bit much.

Vince
 
Yeah, this is probably unlicensed as well, in Chin it probably sells for 400 yuan or less, the majority of the cost is definitely import taxes, kinda cool though, i'd buy one if it were cheaper, no good on a 6502 that is unsupported, now if it were running a 16/32 Mot68K with the 6502 as a coprocessor, and it's price stayed the same, i'd buy it for the heck of it. Probably will get bashed in a few years by Nintendo as an unlicensed clone of obsolete hardware that we so cling to...
 
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