This system is quite amazing. Peek and poke! Extremely limited pallet! An integrated development environment. The restrictions make for some very interesting design choices and force you to limit the scope of your designs -- super important if you ever actually want to finish a game.
I highly recommend this system to anyone. It's great and I've been having a tonne of fun with it. It's no Amiga 500, but boy it has that feel.
Built on Silicon-on-Sapphire process, it was radiation and EMSEC tolerant plus low-power. Used in Galileo space-craft. Highly reliable. It's still sold with a spec that you can fully understand and that documents every state:
So, not just a toy, Octo or CHIP-8 could be used to prototype applications that just run and run and run in the field. Heck, even a retro-gamer might appreciate a system that never freezes past game logic errors.
Eventually I would like to equip Octo with an optional 1802 emulation mode and the necessary mixed-mode assembler for producing 1802 machine code. Probably won't be available any time soon without strong demand, though.
That's understandable. I doubt the demand will show up but it was cool to see them connected in the write-up. Few even know 1802 exist much less why it's worth copying.
Not sure how far you like to push yourself on low-level coding, reading on or doing it. I'll end with these links for your entertainment:
Note: Really wonder what best retro games would look like on 4-bits, esp after hardware acceleration tradeoffs. I always challenge the demoscene to show us. ;)
Note: Manual and source code are attached to comments on that page. Would be amazed at seeing people do anything useful in modern applications with these. They'd win by default on memory/power/area efficiency haha.
I highly recommend this system to anyone. It's great and I've been having a tonne of fun with it. It's no Amiga 500, but boy it has that feel.