The Colour Maximite 2

[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! 

[erico]

Lovely! Can we get a GLB console already?

[bigsofty]

Lovely! Can we get a GLB console already?

We can but dream my friend, we can but dream... 

[Hemlos]

Just a PEEK in, don't POKE my pixels.

[dreamerman]

Looks nice and showes the power of BASIC
one thing is strange:

The 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

Extremely 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.

[bigsofty]

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! 

[dreamerman]

I watch most of that video but from some reason I missed that info about memory
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 :-)

[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.