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$12 MIT Computer Based On NES, Not Apple II
ericatcw writes "The $12 computer that a bunch of designers and grad students are talking up at an MIT conference this month as a potential, cheaper alternative to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) for Third World students is actually a knockoff of the original Nintendo Entertainment System gaming console released in the mid-1980s, reports Computerworld, and confirmed in a comment by the project's spokesman, Derek Lomas. According to Lomas' account and pictures, the Victor-70 is an 8-bit NES clone that accepts its cartridges and is wholly contained in the keyboard. It is also likely to be an unlicensed clone made in China, according to Lomas, though he notes that may not matter patent-wise in the US, due to the length of time that has passed."
why would you want to run linux on it?
It appears that this is essentially the same setup as those dodgy Chinese handhelds loaded with a bunch of hacked and remixed NES ROMs.
So why didn't anyone else think of this before? It's perfect; put together this ultra-cheap but still highly programmable hardware with some efficiently-designed educational software, and you've got something that can, despite having a tiny fraction of the OLPC's specs, still make a big, positive impact on kids in the developing world.
If this project is managed right, it could end up doing the OLPC's mission for it and then some.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Step 1: Rip off 20 year old patented technology
Step 2: Cram into smaller container
Step 3: Get MIT guys to give you free press
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit
I mean, what's the actual deal here? Some manufacturer in China is producing a miniaturized clone of the Nintendo skipping out on the licensing fees so they can get it to market in the $12 range, MIT students/alumni are smiling at it around a table. So what exactly is MIT doing?
Is it suddenly dawning on them that if you strip all of the patent protection and licensing from a project that a $100+ chunk of electronics is only $12 worth of components, shipping and handling, and Chinese labor?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The Apple IIe had some awesome Pac Man and Space Invaders clones that were decidedly illegal because they mimicked the arcade machines you put quarters in perfectly.
For one thing, companies like Atarisoft published plenty of authorized ports of arcade games on Apple II and other 8-bit platforms. For another, how perfectly? Not every aspect is copyrightable.
Older TI calculators have 16 bit 68020 class processors in them. I don't see the point of recreating the limits of the past with new silicon.
IINM you can scale Linux to run on anything from a supercomputer to a wristwatch. When you get down to the level of the bare silicone, there's nothing you can do in 16 bits that you can't do (albeit a lot slower) in eight bits.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Trying to get a TCP stack working on a 1.25Mhz 8 bit machine is no mean feat. I'd wager that you're likely to add more than $12 worth of parts to it before you get anything resembling a web browser (even a crappy text only one running at NTSC resolution) working, especially one that is optimized for moving a handful of sprites around the screen instead of displaying text.
I read the internet for the articles.
Copyrights should only last 20 years as well. Lets all just start acting like that is the case.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I just used Tuner Cleaner to revive my old NES back to life...
> but that doesn't mean Linux is. DSLinux and other uClinux
> distributions run on ARM CPUs.
Take a look at the specs on those ARMs and go lookup the quantity 1000 price on the chip. In a $39.95 router they are great but won't get you to $10-$15 products. The gadget I have in mind would need to be a total system on chip with sound, video, USB, etc all in the one chip that would wholesale in the $3-$4 range.. When you find out just how puny the CPU power on such a beastie will be you will realize that no Linux kernel is going to boot on it.
> Think again. There are BASIC compilers that run on a Commodore 64.
Yup, but that will just be a BASIC. Most apps would probably not be BASIC programs but C/C++ programs cross compiled on a PC. Just as in the day most programs for that C64 (I had one too) you mention were not written in BASIC, compiled or interpreted.
Democrat delenda est
Really?
How much time do you think anyone can or will sit in a computer lab that they are sharing with several dozen other students?
How much time do you think that someone can spend sitting in front of a video monitor at home?
The immersed, "deep" learning occurs when one has the luxury of forgetting where the time went. In a resource-strapped school in a developing country, that's not the computer lab.
There are those of us who learned to program in more primitive environments than these - and we learned to program a little "closer to the metal."
I constantly see older PCs in thrift stores for under 25 dollars, these are usually Windows 95/98 machines, but they are totally capable of connecting to the internet. CRT Monitors can be purchased for under 5 dollars, and keyboards/mice/etc can be purchased for under a dollar. Now you have a complete desktop for about 35 dollars, that can connect to the internet, run office software...use peripherals. I'm sure they can be found for far cheaper than that. Wouldn't it be more effective to sell refurbished PCs with Linux on them, instead of a pirated Famicom? I'm sure lots of people have old PCs just sitting in their garage they could donate to a cause like that. I'm also certain there already is a cause like that...but it would be neat to see a new use for NES hardware.
It shows what you can do if you don't depend on boat anchor like X Windows for graphics.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Copyrights should last for 7 years. Then renewal periods should exist starting at a fee of $100 plus a properly deposited copy of the work with the copyright office. From the 15th to 21st year, the fee is $1,000. From the 22nd to 28th year, the fee is $10,000. The 29th through 35th costs $100,000. The 36th through 42nd costs $1,000,000. The next period costs $10,000,000 and so on and so on.
Well, strictly speaking, by definition a $12 game console is a $12 computer as well.
Well, strictly speaking, by definition a $12 digital calculator watch is a $12 computer as well.
It may be all very ho-hum for you with your GHz PC and internet connection
No, I'm comparing it with the "$12 Apple ][" that it was originally rumored to be.
all MIT has to do is come up with a NES cartridge with decent software
And its own cartridge slot and some kind of removable mass storage so you can share what you've created with it. That's what made the personal computer revolution. That's why the Apple II and Commodore 64 and Atari 800 beat the technically superior but fatally crippled TI-99/4a.
Which ended up being nothing more than a console, in the end.
To sell for $12.00 you a parts list under $6.00. That means using a single-chip ARM7 with on-chip ram and ROM, and the ones I'm finding have less ram than an Apple II. You're not going to fit even a 1970s UNIX implementation in that, and you'll end up with the same problem the original Mac had: the system software took up so much RAM your 128k Mac had about 12k free for working space with even the simplest apps, and to make even that possible the OS design crippled them until they replaced it with OS X.
So you're going to have to bootstrap the whole OS and development environment from scratch, and what you end up with isn't going to have any kind of upwards growth towards an open source free unix environment.
To make an ARM-based design actually useful, you're going to have to target RISC-OS, not a new OS, and I have a feeling that even RISC-OS is going to push the limits of what you can run in $6.00 worth of parts.
I can visualize an Apple-][ clone fitting in that budget, but I think ARM is pushing it.