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A Unique, High-Tech (Family) Computer

50 pointsby zdwyesterday at 4:13 PM7 commentsview on HN

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OhMeadhbhyesterday at 5:40 PM

I bought one of these a couple decades ago. The story I got was they were mass produced in Shenzhen and sold (cheaply) to poorer sections of China, India and SouthEast Asia. As for the "educational" aspect... The one I got did come with an English vocabulary program, and a few other games in what looked like simplified Chinese (couldn't tell for sure, I don't read or speak any of the Chinese dialects.)

But it looked very similar... I'm guessing some of the old fab equipment was completely depreciated and picked up for a song and stuffed in the corner of someone's warehouse and was cranking out 6502 clones by the thousand.

I remember some of the limitations: zero networking (not even RS232), no mass storage (not even a cassette port), 8-bit sound (no voice samples for language lessons) and something like a 252x240 screen resolution.

I've often wondered how (in)expensive you could make something with a better built-in screen, the ability to play VP9/AV1 video and opus samples and Bluetooth to connect to mouse / keyboard and PC as a net and storage device.

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bitwizeyesterday at 6:12 PM

I remember some sort of OLPC/Raspberry Pi-like initiative in India to build a "teach the kids how to program" type computer based on a Famiclone. The idea was that "famicoms on a chip" were readily available in a way that would make it cheap enough even for the dirt-poorest of Indian families to afford, and the software could theoretically be ported to the more bootleggy famiclones already out there on the market.

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