Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter
dmitry.gr212 points by dmitrygr 3 days ago
212 points by dmitrygr 3 days ago
Thank you. This is a spectacular amount of work and information.
As someone who is interested in similar old hardware that occasionally lacks any kind of documentation (specifically cameras), I sincerely wish I had this level of patience and determination (and also understanding, I'm not really a software guy).
I wish there was a law that all hardware vendors had to dump a sufficient amount of documentation if they discontinue a platform such that it can be emulated.
The litmus test can be done by AI code generation in a sandbox during the period they don't have to make it open.
Could be part of the FCC certification process, which everyone has to file.
It is vastly more likely, historically speaking, for the EU to pass such forward-looking legislation in the public interest.
Is there any dumb LCD console like that available these days for kids? (not those retro gaming consoles). I want to buy one for my kids. It looks so good, specially because it is a dumb and simple device.
I found Pixter online but are there a little bit more capable systems like this for kids made today?
EDIT: Looks like devices by LeapFrog and VTech are the closest alternative these days so far.
No, but realistically it wouldn't be hard to make something with a Pi and a touch screen of some kind
What are you looking for them to be able to do? I feel like everything these days is just some form of an iPad
Just play around and learn perhaps. My kid like drawing on his LCD drawing tablet. This is more fun than that. It's like Paint Delux but in physical form. And it has games too.
I think I am going to buy a Pixter itself. Everything else today is either too limited (vtech is buttons only and its screens are too tiny for example) or too powerful.
Pimoroni Presto (https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/presto) + some firmware you can write for fun :)
Nobody makes stuff like this anymore. You can vibecode your own using an Arduino and a pixel LCD.
> In 2000, the famous American toy company Fisher-Price released a simple drawing-oriented handheld gaming console for kids called Pixter. It featured no brain-rotting social media and focused, instead, on drawing, sketching, and educational games.
I fear that the future will increasingly be filled with people framing old/new cultural artifact X or Y in terms of whether or not it reminds them of social media.
(Not a dig at the article or the immense technical skills required to accomplish all of this)
Thanks for the details :)
I was half expecting you to find the Pixter Color VM to be a Forth like interpreter ;)
I was expecting either that or some lobotomised Java VM since everyone was crazy about it at the time
both forth and java would have made more sense than a custom vm. not sure why they went this way on ARM. on 6502 it makes sense though. small cpu -> custom work needed
Wow great work and great post! love stuff like this on HN.
I still follow Dimitry on twitter for his technical talent, as I've done some palmOS software reversing as well, but man every other post is something along the lines of "we should let X group fend for themselves in a rattlesnake pit because they don't produce value".
All to say it's a major bummer his cool work is tainted by his dehumanizing words and I wonder if he understands how he comes off to people.
This puts it rather lightly. I stopped following him when he started posting incredibly racist memes.
Yeah I was trying to keep it civil for HN.
The whimsy of the PalmOS work really clashes with the incessant racism and hate.
Unfortunately that general part of the world has a lot of ethno-religious conflict normalized from birth. Monotheistic zealotry, current conflicts, Greece/Turkey, former Yugoslavia, etc.
Dmitry was interviewed on the Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast[0] a few years ago. I didn't feel like he came off at all like that in that interview, at least.
I don't interact w/ Twitter so I can't speak to anything he's written there.
Meet him IRL, I will vouch for him being cynical and a pleasure to be around.
Any part you are referring to? I can't find any personal attack.
I actually like his writing style. I think he just speaks his mind in full honesty and you should not interpret it as aggressivity.
Took two minutes of reading his Twitter to find him comparing black people to chimpanzees.
I had a stroll though his Twitter. It's just a grab bag of strawmen being summarily beaten mostly by the fact that no one is replying to challenge him.
> I can't find any personal attack.
Your parent comment gave a paraphrased example of discrimination against a group, not a person.
> you should not interpret it as aggressivity
Your parent comment didn’t describe it as aggressive, they described it as dehumanising. There is a colossal difference between the two. Patton Oswalt demonstrates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkKo1_RP_0c
Note: I don’t have a Twitter account nor have I ever encountered Dimitry’s writing, so I’m not commenting either way, but if you want to refute/contradict/disagree what your parent comment said, it’s important to respond to the point they made, not different ones.
He tried to start a shit-flinging contest with me in an HN comment thread once. Accused Zephyr RTOS of being "bloat" or something.
As a fellow embedded dev, I smile every time one of his projects shows up on HN. He's really talented. But c'mon, dude.
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Thats.... not right? She's becoming more and more anti-trans every day. Harmless is a mischaracterization of her stances.
I’m not actively following the saga, but that seems like a gross mischaracterisation in all directions. I haven’t seen anyone seriously call her a Nazi¹ and her comments aren’t harmless either.
¹ Though I wouldn’t be surprised if it has happened. But then again that’s not saying much on the internet. Doing a cursory search, I found a post² on her own website where she complains someone said she has “uphold [Nazi] ideology around gender”. “Nazi” is between brackets, presumably meaning it’s a substitute for another word, and even then that’s not calling her one.
² https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/statement-from-j-k-rowlin...
Substituting a pronoun with its antecedent in brackets is normal when quoting in English.
The original quote:
“The Nazis burnt books on trans healthcare and research, why are you so desperate to uphold their ideology around gender?”
What's his x handle? It doesn't seem linked from his blog
The guy refers to social media broadly as "brain rot" in this article, and your first question is what his handle is on the most rotten social media site on the Internet?
I'd wager he doesn't use X.
People who continue to use Twitter today have made their positions clear.
Frankly, that includes you, too.
You can't hang out at the Nazi Bar and complain about all the Nazis.
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This comment is a good example of dehumanization.
To argue a group is unworthy of life or dignity is dehumanization.
It paves the path for policy that targets certain groups, to formalize violence against the groups as legal.
Always a pleasure to read your articles Dimitry, ever since I discovered your "Running Linux on an 8-bit microcontroller" project, back when I was studying electrical engineering in university. Your low-level hobby work is insane, specially on the palmOS side.
The "bad things" link is broken, the href attribute is mistyped as "haref"
> If that was not enough of crotch-punch, in a desire to cut more costs, they decided to save $0.000001 per device and used the cheaper BJTs instead of FETs.
Having had coworkers who worked for Fisher-Price, using worse components to save a fraction of a cent per device seems their general MO.
Is this in MAME?
no, but i hope someday someone will make that happen. i provide enough info and reference material
Yet again my plans for a productive morning have been derailed by an excellent new write up from Dmitry :)
That hand rolled DAC for the touchscreen with the eight gpio lines is hilarious.
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