this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Some of mine maybe aren't that niche anymore, but:
Retro computing: no one needs more than 640k. Maybe no one needs more than 64k. Those old systems were the last time a single programmer could have control over the entire machine at a low level.
Ham radio: Oftentimes called a dying hobby, but a great foray into electronics in general, and also a pretty nice community (save for a few curmudgeons).
Analog audio: often thought of as a boutique thing, but really isn't. Lots of old equipment ready to be restored that can give you really unique auditory experiences.
Plastic modeling: especially if you start from a kit but add things to it, or if you build from scratch, or hell, even if you just build a kit as intended, there is a huge amount of personal expression and creativity.
I'll always have a place in my heart for my first computer, the TI-99/4A. (If you really need more than 4k, you can get the 32k expansion!) I eventually progressed to writing programs in 9900 assembly and even sold a few, it was fun.
I got one a few years back. Such a unique machine! The CPU is 16-bit iirc, but the rest of the system is set up as 8-bit. And some kind of strange scheme with shared RAM that makes the whole thing ultimately very slow.
I never got too far into it since I didn't have a disk drive for it. I hear there are kits available now, since the originals are somewhat expensive.
Yes! They were originally going to use an 8-bit CPU but had to change the design for some reason. It had 64k of addressable memory space, some of which was mapped to I/O and video and whatnot, I'd guess the memory scheme you're talking about is how it took two clock cycles to read or write a 16-bit data byte on the CPU.