We need a modern “codable console” in the spirit of the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum etc.
Something you can just unbox and start playing and programming on right away. The Raspberry Pi is not it, the iPad isn’t it, and neither is any Android. The remakes/revivals of the C64 etc. are not it either.
Something like a laptop that boots into a friendly GUI/CLI hybrid within 1 second, and doesn’t require the internet or signing-up or any other bullshit. Just a big fat blinking cursor.
The Spectrum Next seems to be the closest to the ideal, and obviously it's perfect for Spectrum fans including me, but it's missing:
• A built-in display.
• A platform not tied to imitating an older platform.
• A language not tied to an older language.
As for the others, despite being commendable efforts, they're also missing one or more of:
• Usable straight out of the box; no assembly required, and without need to connect and update the system first.
• A single official repository (not excluding others) for sharing and distributing user-made programs, accessible from the device itself as easily as the App Store.
• Standard keyboard AND standard game controller (most have only one or the other).
• No fragmentation: If you wrote a program for the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum, it would run on 99% of the C64s or Speccies (the only differences that I can recall were the 48K/128K versions, and things like "speech" packs etc. but we don't need separate "upgrades" like that today).
As "blondin" commented:
> i see people talking about the arduinos, raspberry pis, and all these micro devices for which you have to pick additional components among myriads and you will be very lucky if 10 more people have the same setup that you have. these people are missing an important point about platform and sharing here.
There have been many attempts but all were failures because they never got any traction or the people behind them couldn't manage what they were making or both. One of my favorites is GCW Zero [0], great little MIPS-based handheld running Linux and easy to port stuff to it (it has SDL, OpenGL and other stuff available out of the box), except... there was some Kickstarter drama or whatever (i think the original Chinese manufacturer screwed up) which had the maker (who was from UK i think) being attacked by everyone and he couldn't handle it so he disappeared from the internet from basically the beginning and only communicated updates, etc, very sporadically and only through others. And for pretty much the entirety of its existence it was incredibly hard to find units to buy (people were importing units from anywhere and they'd quickly sold out to the few distributors that managed to get units). Both of these basically killed the project despite being a great device.
And of course there was the whole OUYA circus - the device was ok (the controller had some connectivity issues but those were fixed later) but the company's communication was atrocious. OUYA was the first "android microconsole" and the last time developers actively targeted these "consoles" and used their branding as an official target, something that not even Nvidia (for Shield) and Amazon (for Fire TV) managed to do despite being much bigger companies, yet they pissed everyone and everything away with their incompetence.
But the main thing you need for any of these is to get it in front of people (or at their hands for the handhelds). You wrote that "Raspberry Pi is not it", but IMO it is by far the closest to "it" because of its sheer volume of sales. All it needs is some form of standard for developers to target and users to easily set up and perhaps some (optional) dressing from whoever comes up with the standard. I haven't seen anything like that though, the closest is RetroPie but that is for emulators and what i'm thinking is for running native ARM games.
Wow, while this is very cool (you can even play the games directly in the iPhone browser! [0]) it’s not a self-contained machine with built-in display and keyboard.
Maybe someone can make (or has made?) standalone hardware based on it.
Word of warning from someone who has a Pocket CHIP. As nice as it was while it lasted, the company is a ghost, now. They up and vanished, with outstanding orders, and problems with the OS.
Don't touch this.
Flashing, and reflashing, is a pain, and the OS itself requires some binary blobs that have made it incompatible with any modern version of Debian.
The people controlling the site are one of the third party resellers.
> We are one of the original third party retailers for Next Thing Co.'s amazing products. While we never received much of the bulk of our product purchased for our store, we are now offering up the remainder of our stock to interested customers.
It has it's own BASIC but also emulates a Spectrum too. It's not yet quite full speed. I think beeper i/o is slowing things down.
When it's ready it'll be sold in kit form, so kids build it from scratch with their parents. The plan is to eventually have a space for kids to share their stuff, but no way am I charging kids for being creative.
Yeah, the problem with crowdfunded hardware like this is that by the time the devices actually ship to backers and there's a wave of hype/excitement, nobody else is able to buy them.
And the original backers are probably bit less excited than they once were, after waiting years since the first wave of hype when they backed the project...
The companies making classic consoles really missed an opportunity with this. Instead of making them temporary specialty items, they could have added a basic API and way to browse and download community games. I know this would have needed moderation and warning messages for the normal user, but it could have been a "developer mode".
Right now the closest thing we have is a linux system running emulation station. It at least has custom apps called "ports", but it's missing a built in app browser/downloader for those, though.
Atari was the closest to realize that potential but completely screwed it up. They put in an actual decent system but it made it too expensive. (https://atarivcs.com/) If this was around the $100 price point, I could see it doing amazingly well even if it was less powerful But more expensive than a nintendo switch? wtf
The pi absolutely has potential to be a programmable game console with the right distro and applications, it just isn't quite there yet.
The Micro:Bit doesn't _have_ to use the Internet. It runs MicroPython just fine with upload of a local serial line. (I believe that the Scratch base, that I've never touched, also runs locally, and uploads over serial.)
this is why i was drawn to smilebasic since i heard of it. plus nintendo is such a good platform already.
i see people talking about the arduinos, raspberry pis, and all these micro devices for which you have to pick additional components among myriads and you will be very lucky if 10 more people have the same setup that you have.
these people are missing an important point about platform and sharing here.
i also love pico-8 and all the fantasy computers. they somehow just don't feel real. and they have a different sharing problem.
Raspbian was close to this last time I checked. You have to click the start menu, and pick the right development environment, but they have a few good looking options.
Something you can just unbox and start playing and programming on right away. The Raspberry Pi is not it, the iPad isn’t it, and neither is any Android. The remakes/revivals of the C64 etc. are not it either.
Something like a laptop that boots into a friendly GUI/CLI hybrid within 1 second, and doesn’t require the internet or signing-up or any other bullshit. Just a big fat blinking cursor.