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That's the intent but most people know it's not true. It's right up there with "woke" and "progressive" as generic, shapeless, boogeyman words. No real meaning besides "something bad".

It would destroy the Z80. It's a 32bit, dual core CPU running at 133MHz. Even single cored it'll thrash a Z80. Heck, I bet you could create a drop-in replacement board for the Z80 using an RP2040.

Note it was possible to use a Z80 to function as a display controller, people used to do it back in the day...

https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancast...


The Galaksija computer used it's Z80 to help generate the video signal. I'm not sure how its implementation compares to your link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_(computer)

https://media.ccc.de/v/29c3-5178-en-the_ultimate_galaksija_t...


The Z80 was a very powerful CPU for the day. Its still used here and there.

Apparently the Zilog Z80 just stopped being produced in 2024: https://www.techspot.com/news/102684-zilog-discontinuing-z80...

Yes, there was considerable HN discussion, and I chose it for the example specifically because of its long reign.

Crazy what you can buy nowadays like the Teensy 4.0 with 600MHz base clock

Granted that's $20 not $1


My sweet spot of choice between power and price is the ESP32 S3 (2x core @ 240mhz) at ~$6 per board, but yeah, the power to dollar ratio is crazy these days, across the board. And they are absolutely tiny and sip power if you write the code well.

The key here is the "PIO" which you won't find on a Teensy. It lets you do extreme "bit banging" tricks including generating video. People have even implemented Ethernet on it. I've used it for some custom serial protocols ("Weigand") used by alarm panels.

Really I guess I don't know what that is then as I buy the Teensy since it has so much IO, multiple UART, multiple I2C busses, sd card reading, etc...

edit: interesting

(Teensy | Pico)

Special Features: CAN Bus (3x), SDIO, S/PDIF | PIO (Programmable I/O) (8 SMs)


The Pico PIO has an instruction set and can be programmed.

You write PIO assembly that runs autonomously on a state machine, with explicit timing (e.g., out, in, set, mov, jmp, wait) and cycle‑accurate interfaces. The CPU communicates via small FIFOs, and interrupts are optional; the PIO can be “fire‑and‑forget” for many protocols.


That's cool, I'm not at that level right now, side note I bought an FPGA like 5 years ago and still haven't used it.

Yes, I understand that, but I wonder about the multiple (obviously there is more to it than clock speed). I chose the Z80 because of its long-standing reputation.

I know, I 'm just saying the RP would dominate the Z80 in literally every way. You could design a Z80 replacement with the RP as the CPU and it'd blow away everything.

Any source for this?

Yes but thank-yous are always good. Making sure the project sticks around is just smart.

Yep. I used SoftICE to do a few of these dongle-workarounds. Amazing and terrible software. :D

Haha yeah. It was mostly just fun for me as a nerdy child who spent way too much time on Astalavista forum.

Cracking and RE were just gateways into a career in (defensive) security for me.


I honestly can’t recall how I even found SoftICE, but my uncle gave me a floppy with LJPEGViewer and the license was written on the disk. Eventually I lost the original but I’ll be dammed if I’m going to use Paint. I fired up SoftICE, managed to break before the “invalid key” dialog, and just did a cute little “return true” and that was that

Yep, it's all just a shell game. He used xAI to move the Twitter debt so it couldn't be taken away for failure to pay debts. He's already been using SpaceX to buy Cybertrucks to prop ups sales and Tesla. Using SpaceX to generate revenue to pay off the xAI debts is just another step in the shell game.

What debt?

Most of the money to buy Twitter came from investors. They were not loans.


He took out $13 billion in loans.

He's not even vaguely close to getting margin called.

Not now, no, he shuffled it around. He was quite close beforehand, however.

> He used xAI to move the Twitter debt so it couldn't be taken away for failure to pay debts.

Exactly. I think it was obvious he was shifting the debt around when xAI merged w/ X right after xAI raised a large funding round and had cash in the bank (which it could use to pay down the X debt).


> How can the transition be rationally justified? Let alone the valuation.

Musk seems to have successfully decoupled investors from results. The stock price seems to move far more based on what he says and does than what the company says and does. It's completely irrational. Tesla is a huge bubble.


Doesn't matter if it was or wasn't, it was a failure that GM never followed up with. Why it was a failure is also irrelevant, because whether you feel it was a technical failure or killed by GM, GM never did anything with the project or knowledge. Effectively it was a curiosity.

If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding, then there is massive precedent to never reuse the tech. In fact, their NiMH battery patents were sold to Texaco/Chevron who held them close and never let anyone use them. From that point, they couldn't follow-up without dumping even more cash into it, effectively burying it. Until new lithium battery tech matured, there was no way to do it again.

>If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding

They didn't, and this is just absurd.

Not only were electric cars available since the very beginning of cars, but they've always been available as niche options. There are tens of electric cars that postdate the EV1 and predate the Tesla. Do you even know their names?

We have stupidly cheap gas. An electric car has only ever been a curiosity for America. Even now, the primary driver of people buying electric cars is ideological, and a mild convenience of never having to go to a gas station.

Pre-lithium battery electric cars are a huge hassle, for very little gain, even outside the US. The history of cars is a global one, and no amount of conspiracy theory about GM can counter the fact that nobody else made electric cars either, even in places with drastically more expensive and unreliable gasoline.

They have always been a novelty, like hydrogen and LPG and compressed gas engines.

Hybrids were the closest anyone got to making older battery chemistries meaningful for car-style transportation, and even that was extremely limited.


About compressed gas, they have so much cheaper fuel that they are the norm here in Brazil for Uber drivers. So, not a novelty

Brazil also pioneered flex engines that work with either alcohol and gasoline, and gasoline in Brazil is sold with high alcohol content


I agree with this.

Cheap gas, car culture and the incredibly long distances makes America a very different place from the urban centres of the Netherlands, China and Korea.


Exactly. The battery tech the EV1 had was never going to be a big seller in the US.

Modern F150s are also bloated and oversized.

Exactly, this is why it failed. Suddenly in every Whole Foods is an Amazon device saying "give me your hand print!" Uh, no.

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