Fat, but the ‘t’ is silent… it is either Kim Fat, or Kim Phuc…
so Fat suddenly looks good
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@RandomJesseLau I know Chou Yun Fat…So I guess it is not an uncommon name.
But yes. Let there be more Jesses!
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He is badass, but only in the 80s and 90s. There are not many good movies in recent years.
You can ran into him in Kowloon, that is where he lives.
take the subway around Sung Wong Toi, Kowloon Tong and Kowloon Bay several times and you will probably find him.
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Makes me wonder what exactly makes CpiOS special compared to regular RaspberryPi OS other than possible hardware drivers and some packages being pre-installed for convenience. More importantly whether or not you can get similar feature set with custom OS such as NixOS.
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Hmmm… What makes Clockwork’s Raspberry Pi OS special? It’s got a chock full of emulators and games preloaded. That’s it.
I wasn’t interested in that, so I bought the kit with the adapter and the 4G module (which leaves out the SD card with the OS). My mind was set that I wanted to run my uConsole with a community provided distro. Right now, I’m running Arch Linux ARM, but I hijacked it with Bedrock so it can double as Alpine. It’s not perfect, but I managed to make it work really well for me.
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Ah, yeah that does make things easier for new users. I am interested in doing a little bit of gamedev myself - the screenshot of someone running godot engine on the thing was what brought me here in the first place. The other reason is the form factor. I wanted to have pocketCHIP, but since that was discontinued, this is easily the next best option.
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@Zeth I wanted the PocketChip so badly too, right after watching the ad video.
Apart from the price, it has gpio header and a smaller form factor, light and pocketbale… advantages over uconsole
But I heard that the company took people’s money and didn’t deliver the last batch.
And some say they dumped the last batch on ebay instead of sending to customers who already paid. But it is not confirmed.
There was a moment I thought ClockWork is gonna do the same, but I got mine really fast and am happy with it!
You all didn’t miss much, really, beyond the novelty. I got a PocketChip back in the day. I didn’t do the initial kickstarter run, but I got one shortly afterward. There was a time where they actually delivered them. There was even a short time before they disappeared and ran off with customer’s money where they put the extra hats/boards on sale for the Chip devices, and I picked up a couple of those for cheaper that the regular price. I got an HDMI one and also an extra Chip, both of which they delivered (and at the discounted price). A few months later, all the drama started online and it was clear they were not delivering anything anymore.
I still lost money to them though. They were working on another device (on kickstarter) called the Dashbot or Voder. I backed that, and they blatantly stole all the money from that project and never delivered anything or even offered an update, apology, or anything.
They definitely made some nice hardware and unique tech, much like Clockwork Pi. And I was very skeptical of the Gameshell at first, but ended up being happy with it, and also the Devterm.
NextThing’s hardware was as good. It wasn’t a “kit” though, so it was all pre-assembled, but solid. Their software was also quite solid, with a nicely customized desktop, and some optimizations for the less powerful CPU in those Chip devices. As cool a concept as the PocketChip was, the keyboard was absolute trash, since it was those cheap dome button things. It was functional, and didn’t feel like it would break, but it was a chore to type on because it was almost like popping bubblewrap for every key you pressed. The screen was excellent for the time though. It was also the only device for the longest time (way longer than it should have been!) seemingly made for running Pico-8. But the horrible keyboard made that a worse experience. Some clever community folks created 3D printed overlays that added a gamepad and buttons, which helped, but was still a bit clunky.
Really, PocketChip was just ahead of its time. I’m guessing it helped get way more people interested in Pico-8 though, at a time early enough in its life to actually help it grow and become what it is today. The hardware was just enough to run Pico-8 at the time, though as Pico-8 grew (and amazingly continues to support the PocketChip, even to this day) some newer games don’t run full speed. Outside of the plastic PocketChip case, the Chip itself was a nice little device for projects. It’s probably more like an original Raspberry Pi, or maybe a Pi2 than a CM3 or CM4. But it was great almost as a tiny, ESP32 style device, long before such things existed, and the battery life was incredible.
Flashing the device was a pain though, as the only way to do it was using a web app, which was the only part of the whole package that was often unreliable, fiddly, and just annoying. Much later, some more reliable command line tools were created, I think made by community folks.
I’ve been meaning to dig mine out again at some point, as I read that more recent versions of Debian had been made to work on it. The original OS hit a point where upgrading was impossible, but clever folks figured out ways around it and set up other locations for apt, etc.
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@Rex @mterencelao Tried it and loved it!
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Yikes, I wasn’t aware of that.
But yeah I do remember it being presented as pocket Pico8 handheld. Speaking of Pico8, lexaloffle is now working on Picotron. He calls it “Fantasy workstation” rather than fantasy console, and I’d say it’s the next logical step where you can take what you learned when creating games for Pico8 and use that to design GUI apps and slightly bigger games with similar set of limitations being fantasy hardware and all that.
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