Re: If you could design a $300 homecomputer today, what would you choose?

[graham@aledrinker.co.uk (Graham)]

> I would go for something very simple: a very compact hand held or palm
> pilot type machine with a 6502 or 65816 CPU, 

Or for $10 more, you could have a 200MHz StrongARM processor or
similar in the device, along with easy, cheap support for the
interfaces you list below.

I like ARM processors, and really want a fast XScale based laptop or
computer. Not much chance of getting one soon though.

> either 4 or 8 megs of RAM,

For a handheld device, low power memory is essential. Hitachi just
this week released an 8MB memory chip that uses 30% less power and is
even faster. Given the cost of memory, it makes sense to hit the sweet
spot in price rather than the cheap spot, and I imagine that could be
16MB or 32MB. Which is a lot for a handheld device unless you run
WinCE. Which I wouldn't want at all. So lets spoil ourselves anyway.

> 320x200 / 640x400 LED display,

If you have a keyboard on the device (like a Psion palmtop) then a
640x240 half-height display (Psion 5) or 640x480 display (Psion 7)
would be great.

Without a keyboard you would have a conventional palmtop display of
320x240.

> a GEOS or Palm OS type operation
> system: it would include both a kernal layer and a GUI layer so that
> the GUI can be shut down by a program. It would be a machine that
> could be used for something like a Gameboy

Palm do have a very good frontend for launching software on a palmtop
device. The software choice is very good as well. The underlying OS is
a bit didgy though, but they are moving to ARM, so hopefully they will
sort these things out and get a solid OS in there under their GUI
stuff.

> or a Palm Pilot but would include lot of IO ports for external extras
> like keyboard, mouse, TV/VGA output, disk drive, hard drive or CD-ROM,
> printer ect. and can be used as a simple home computer or web browser
> as well as a control module for other hobby projects.

Yikes, where to put the ports on the device! I suppose it could have
one of those laptop bay-extender thingies, which could have a DVD/CD
drive, HD, etc in it.

Wireless ethernet would be a very useful feature.

Mouse wouldn't be necessary with a touch-screen system. A small
portable printer for the device would be neat though - an A5 printer
:) Still "neat" is not "needed"! Audio recording and playing is
necessary, as is decent video, which palmtops really need. How about
some 80's style graphics hardware trickery! Sprites, hardware
scrolling, block mode graphics, etc, but with a 16-bit screen :) -
then again, the GameBoy Advance has that and more now... maybe some
lowend 3D hardware instead!

> I would also include a built in assembler and another simple high
> level languge like BasicX (which will allow inline asm like Turbo
> Pascal does).

That would be fun.
 
Graham