I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip
A developer emulates a classic Apple Macintosh on the Raspberry Pi RP2350 chip, which costs about 60 pence. The setup runs Photoshop and WordPerfect, offering a surprisingly distraction-free experience. The author reflects on the price-performance ratio, noting that an equivalent Macintosh SE would cost £9,554 today, and explores the potential of such low-power computing for sustainable, minimalist devices.
Computers are vastly cheaper nowadays and this computer is much cheaper than a modern PC.
- sieve
I am using the Xteink X4 as my primary e-reader now-a-days. Simple ESP32 microcontroller. Plastic+glass shell with an e-ink screen. MicroSD card works like a cache. Battery lasts for weeks. Works great.
Don't get me wrong. I like modern CPUs with huge caches and incredible power, but you do not need this for most devices. Also leads to lazy programming practices and calculators consuming hundreds of megabytes of RAM.
- boznz
I'm currently building a RP2350 board with the HDMI/USB and I2S Audio I have also added the 16MB SRAM and higher vCore for overclocking which the RP2350 supports for a similar personal project to this. My first PCB had a few newbie mistakes which due to my lousy hand/eye coordination I wasnt able to fix so I am spinning up a V2 to go to JLPCB in the next week or two (https://rodyne.com/?p=3999). Your post resonated with a lot of why I am doing it so keep up the good work.
- raphlinus
I have a Fruit Jam and several other board (including the Olimex). It's great fun and I'm enjoying programming it. The biggest delight is that it's actually possible to reason about performance, extremely difficult on larger computers because of all the complexity.
That said, Photoshop doesn't feel like the sweet spot of what to run on this hardware. There's only 520kB of fast static RAM, and that's not enough to run a framebuffer with enough bit depth to hold a photo reasonably. I have invented a 4bpp compression scheme which opens up possibilities, but it's asymmetrical and in its current form compression is very slow, so it wouldn't be suitable for interactive work.
As a general matter, emulation makes a ton of sense. You can emulate all kinds of computers up to the late 80s, including video subsystems. Of course Mac and PC don't really do anything interesting like tiles and sprites, they're pretty much just dumb framebuffers.
- joshuaissac
Caveat: 60p RP2350 microcontroller on a board that sells for $40 and has 8MB of RAM (as opposed to the 520K that the RP2350 comes with). But that is only needed for Photoshop. The 520K is more than enough to emulate the Mac 128K.
- Transformanshen
It's funny how we're all chasing power, and yet here's a 60-cent chip emulating a Mac that people actually got work done on. Not hating on modern devices, they're awesome and all. But it's still interesting.
Also, kinda want to order a RP2350 board now too, but I know I'll probably end up having zero time to do anything with it and it'll just sit in a drawer somewhere...