The Colour Maximite 2

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bigsofty

It's a retro boot-into-Basic computer that you can build by yourself. Strictly a fun DIY project for the dark winter nights!  :D

Cheers,

Ian.

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC.  As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)

erico

Lovely! Can we get a GLB console already? :)

bigsofty

Quote from: erico on 2020-Jun-24
Lovely! Can we get a GLB console already? :)
We can but dream my friend, we can but dream...  :happy:
Cheers,

Ian.

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC.  As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)

Hemlos

Just a PEEK in, don't POKE my pixels.
Bing ChatGpt is pretty smart :O

dreamerman

Looks nice and showes the power of BASIC :D :nw:
one thing is strange:
QuoteThe CPU that powers the Color Maximite 2 is an ARM Cortex-M7 32-bit RISC processor running at up to 480MHz with 2MB flash memory and 1MB RAM
QuoteExtremely fast with 516KB of program memory and 5MB general purpose RAM
So how much RAM memory it has? or maybe CPU has only direct access to some part of it and rest is reserved for sprites or something, because from what I saw there are some nice demos like Final Fight that may require more than 1MB..
The market for such small form computer and emulation boards has grown so much in recent years, so many Pi-kind of devices, and handheld that are more powerful than old consoles.
Check my source code editor for GLBasic - link Update: 20.04.2020

bigsofty

#5
There's 1mb of ram for the basic code, it doesn't sound like much but that's enough for 170000+ lines of code (as the BASIC is tokenised behind the scene when you enter it IIRC).

There is 5MB of ram reserved for your graphics/sprites/sound etc. Again, retro graphics care very compact and there's more than enough for a full level of streets of rage + sprites too.

See here, for a rundown of the RAM after the guy in the video creates his own demo... youtu.be/lzrX72aB7zg?t=830

Again, this would be a monster 8bit/16bit micro back in the day, hell the interpreted basic runs 100x faster than pure 6502 assembly on the C64!  :blink:
Cheers,

Ian.

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC.  As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)

dreamerman

I watch most of that video but from some reason I missed that info about memory :D
Yeap that's enough for almost any kind of old school stuff, specially with limited color palette. Another great thing in such micro comp (and old machines) is that you were coding for one particular resolution, pixel perfect placement, didn't bother with scaling UI as so on, less code for that and always crisp graphic.
It can run even wolf3d demo :-)
Check my source code editor for GLBasic - link Update: 20.04.2020

erico

The maximite color, the one with 8 colors and 128k ram, is what I would be more interested. Anything above that and GLB+my comp do just fine.