[geeks] Replica-1 done

[Dave Kimmel]

On Sep 30, 2005, at 1:32 AM, Bill Bradford wrote:

> The 4" LCD didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, so I'm looking for a
> tiny composite-input CRT monitor (mono or color)... but the kit is  
> done!
>
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/sets/1031279/
>
> I'm still waiting on the serial I/O board to arrive, which will let me
> load and save programs over a serial connection to another system..

That's pretty slick man!  I love how they've used a couple of AVR  
controllers to emulate/replace some of the ICs that are no longer  
available.

So when are you gonna get into designing your own stuff?  This kit  
looks like a fine starting point - it's probably hackable enough[1]  
that you could add your own peripherals without trouble, and having  
an interactive BASIC environment will make ad-hoc development really  
easy.

[1] Assuming that you even need to do any hacking.  The Commodore  
Vic-20, for example, had an 8-bit User IO port which was only a  
couple of PEEKs or POKEs away.  If this board has something like  
that, it would be dead easy to interface to some other circuitry and  
make it do even more interesting things.

-- Dave Kimmel
    crisco_kid at shaw.ca