I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip

a1o

For a more capable but still underpowered computer, I found Antix can run well in almost 20year old hardware - I use it in an EEEPC 4G Surf, but I modded it to have more storage recently.

hyperhello

Black and white photoshop, yes.

retrac

I'm reminded that chips like the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 were not intended to be general-purpose computers, and were originally designed mostly to be embedded controllers and as building blocks for "real" computers like terminal and disk controllers. I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler. No MMU so no paging though.

joshuaissac

Caveat: 60p RP2350 microcontroller on a board that sells for $40 and has 8MB of RAM (as opposed to the 520K that the RP2350 comes with). But that is only needed for Photoshop. The 520K is more than enough to emulate the Mac 128K.

sieve

I am using the Xteink X4 as my primary e-reader now-a-days. Simple ESP32 microcontroller. Plastic+glass shell with an e-ink screen. MicroSD card works like a cache. Battery lasts for weeks. Works great. Don't get me wrong. I like modern CPUs with huge caches and incredible power, but you do not need this for most devices. Also leads to lazy programming practices and calculators consuming hundreds of megabytes of RAM.

vardump

"easily adds 4Mb RAM". A bit misleading way to say 512 kB RAM.

boznz

I'm currently building a RP2350 board with the HDMI/USB and I2S Audio I have also added the 16MB SRAM and higher vCore for overclocking which the RP2350 supports for a similar personal project to this. My first PCB had a few newbie mistakes which due to my lousy hand/eye coordination I wasnt able to fix so I am spinning up a V2 to go to JLPCB in the next week or two ( https://rodyne.com/?p=3999 ). Your post resonated with a lot of why I am doing it so keep up the good work.

tomcam

I am thrilled by this. While the world is understandably complaining about the price of RAM and CPU I keep thinking about the demo scene or people like this. In the worst case scenario, we could retool our lives to some extent using optimized version of older tech.

kbrannigan

This is wonderful and amazing. Computing can be very simple. I think constraints and hardware restrictions can unlock creativity. Imagine running an GPT-3 Generation model on a raspberry pi . This would be great

Markstar

I wish I had time to fiddle with stuff like this. sigh

yeahnigga

How long did Filter Gallery > Cutout with max levels and complexity take? Because this is how I fake vectorized images in 2005 and it took dayyyyys

Transformanshen

It's funny how we're all chasing power, and yet here's a 60-cent chip emulating a Mac that people actually got work done on. Not hating on modern devices, they're awesome and all. But it's still interesting. Also, kinda want to order a RP2350 board now too, but I know I'll probably end up having zero time to do anything with it and it'll just sit in a drawer somewhere...

winrid

You can get an early gen i3 for a couple bucks and it will run modern PS, too.

jherskovic

On the other end of the spectrum, today I needed to build a complicated piece of software on x86-64 Linux and all I have handy are ARM Macs. One qemu later, I have an 8-core “PC” building merrily. It won’t win speed records, but it’s entirely usable.

raphlinus

I have a Fruit Jam and several other board (including the Olimex). It's great fun and I'm enjoying programming it. The biggest delight is that it's actually possible to reason about performance, extremely difficult on larger computers because of all the complexity. That said, Photoshop doesn't feel like the sweet spot of what to run on this hardware. There's only 520kB of fast static RAM, and that's not enough to run a framebuffer with enough bit depth to hold a photo reasonably. I have invented a 4bpp compression scheme which opens up possibilities, but it's asymmetrical and in its current form compression is very slow, so it wouldn't be suitable for interactive work. As a general matter, emulation makes a ton of sense. You can emulate all kinds of computers up to the late 80s, including video subsystems. Of course Mac and PC don't really do anything interesting like tiles and sprites, they're pretty much just dumb framebuffers.

justinator

Sir, we standardized on DOOM.