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  • Hacker News
  • Is this in MAME?
    by AtlasBarfed
  • no, but i hope someday someone will make that happen. i provide enough info and reference material
    by dmitrygr
  • Yet again my plans for a productive morning have been derailed by an excellent new write up from Dmitry :)

    That hand rolled DAC for the touchscreen with the eight gpio lines is hilarious.

    by jcalvinowens
  • The "bad things" link is broken, the href attribute is mistyped as "haref"
    by LocalH
  • Spelling is not my forte. Fixed it, thank you.
    by dmitrygr
  • Wow great work and great post! love stuff like this on HN.
    by VladVladikoff
  • Thanks for the details :)

    I was half expecting you to find the Pixter Color VM to be a Forth like interpreter ;)

    by TruffleLabs
  • I was expecting either that or some lobotomised Java VM since everyone was crazy about it at the time
    by mghackerlady
  • Is there any dumb LCD console like that available these days for kids? (not those retro gaming consoles). I want to buy one for my kids. It looks so good, specially because it is a dumb and simple device.

    I found Pixter online but are there a little bit more capable systems like this for kids made today?

    EDIT: Looks like devices by LeapFrog and VTech are the closest alternative these days so far.

    by smusamashah
  • Nobody makes stuff like this anymore. You can vibecode your own using an Arduino and a pixel LCD.
    by joe_mamba
  • No, but realistically it wouldn't be hard to make something with a Pi and a touch screen of some kind
    by mghackerlady
  • What are you looking for them to be able to do? I feel like everything these days is just some form of an iPad
    by LetsGetTechnicl
  • Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but the playdate is pretty neat.
    by pta2002
  • Pimoroni Presto (https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/presto) + some firmware you can write for fun :)
    by dmitrygr
  • Check this out: https://play.date/
    by MisterTea
  • I still follow Dimitry on twitter for his technical talent, as I've done some palmOS software reversing as well, but man every other post is something along the lines of "we should let X group fend for themselves in a rattlesnake pit because they don't produce value".

    All to say it's a major bummer his cool work is tainted by his dehumanizing words and I wonder if he understands how he comes off to people.

    by MSFT_Edging
  • People who continue to use Twitter today have made their positions clear.

    Frankly, that includes you, too.

    You can't hang out at the Nazi Bar and complain about all the Nazis.

    by LeoPanthera
  • Any part you are referring to? I can't find any personal attack.

    I actually like his writing style. I think he just speaks his mind in full honesty and you should not interpret it as aggressivity.

    by harrouet
  • What's his x handle? It doesn't seem linked from his blog
    by seany
  • Meet him IRL, I will vouch for him being cynical and a pleasure to be around.
    by random__duck
  • This puts it rather lightly. I stopped following him when he started posting incredibly racist memes.
    by xyzzy_plugh
  • Dmitry was interviewed on the Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast[0] a few years ago. I didn't feel like he came off at all like that in that interview, at least.

    I don't interact w/ Twitter so I can't speak to anything he's written there.

    [0] https://unnamedre.com/episode/2

    by EvanAnderson
  • > In 2000, the famous American toy company Fisher-Price released a simple drawing-oriented handheld gaming console for kids called Pixter. It featured no brain-rotting social media and focused, instead, on drawing, sketching, and educational games.

    I fear that the future will increasingly be filled with people framing old/new cultural artifact X or Y in terms of whether or not it reminds them of social media.

    (Not a dig at the article or the immense technical skills required to accomplish all of this)

    by doright
  • > If that was not enough of crotch-punch, in a desire to cut more costs, they decided to save $0.000001 per device and used the cheaper BJTs instead of FETs.

    Having had coworkers who worked for Fisher-Price, using worse components to save a fraction of a cent per device seems their general MO.

    by mcphage
  • Always a pleasure to read your articles Dimitry, ever since I discovered your "Running Linux on an 8-bit microcontroller" project, back when I was studying electrical engineering in university. Your low-level hobby work is insane, specially on the palmOS side.
    by joe_mamba
  • Thank you. This is a spectacular amount of work and information.

    As someone who is interested in similar old hardware that occasionally lacks any kind of documentation (specifically cameras), I sincerely wish I had this level of patience and determination (and also understanding, I'm not really a software guy).

    by Uncle_Brumpus
  • I wish there was a law that all hardware vendors had to dump a sufficient amount of documentation if they discontinue a platform such that it can be emulated.

    The litmus test can be done by AI code generation in a sandbox during the period they don't have to make it open.

    by AtlasBarfed