On 21/03/2013 10:13 AM, scott wrote:
>> And there's the rub. It's got to be modern and powerful for anyone to be
>> interesting. But if it's modern and powerful, it's going to be far too
>> complex to tinker with at the level you would with the C64. If you have
>> a C64, it's *feasible* to write a short machine code routine which
>> performs a key-scan and pokes the video hardware in response to
>> different key presses. You could, given a month of Sundays,
>> realistically build your own micro-OS.
>>
>> *Nobody* is ever going to do that for a Raspberry Pi. It takes something
>> as complex as Linux to power it.
>
> Download RiscOS for it - far simpler than Linux (no protection or
> multi-user) and very simple to write assembler within the built-in BASIC
> interpreter.

It's still the case that powerful audio and video hardware is far more 
complicated to control than the comparatively primitive I/O hardware the 
C64 provides. I bet it takes a few hundred POKE commands just to change 
video mode, before you even *draw* anything...

> Also the whole GUI is
> ridiculously fast and responsive as it was originally designed for ARM
> processors under 50 MHz (the web browser is way faster than whatever the
> one included in raspbian, although not as feature-rich).

I do remember when I first installed Debian on my Amiga 1200, I was 
flabbergasted at how annihilatingly slow it was. Like, under AmigaOS the 
system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI 
responsiveness. But under Debian running X11, it takes *twenty minutes* 
for GNOME to load!! o_O

>> Similarly, with the C64 you can write a few POKE commands and watch the
>> screen turn green or hear a sound play or something.
>
> You can issue poke commands from BASIC directly in RiscOS - IIRC ?<addr>
> is a variable you can use to read or write a byte to that address, or
> !<addr> to read/write a 4-byte word in one go. RiscOS BASIC also allows
> you to drop into the assembler very simply and then obviously reading
> and writing to memory is easily possible. The assembly language is
> pretty easy to learn.

The hardware is still pretty complex to control. Writing a small 
graphics library for this thing would be a major undertaking, not a 
twenty-minute exercise like in the old days.

> AFAIK they haven't managed to get GPU access in RiscOS yet. If you
> wanted to do GPU stuff then you'd be better off with Linux, for example
> I use mine mainly with xbmc as a media centre, plays 1080p videos fine
> from an external drive through HDMI to a TV, so the GPU must be involved
> somewhere.

By the way... I take it you've got one of these puppies then? ;-)

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