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Mastodon server focused on game development and related topics.

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Bart Wronski 🇺🇦🇵🇸

The modern low-cost microcontroller ecosystem is just mindblowing. Arduino Nano and all the ESP32 devices are so cheap, so easy to program, have such a huge community, and so many low-cost peripherals. It's super fun, addictive, easy, and practical. :)
Or even cheap FPGAs and DSPs.
I love it, I wish it was so accessible 15-20y ago.

@BartWronski It was there, but it was a 68000 repackaged as a "DragonBall" microcontroller. I don't think they marketed it well enough - the ESP32 ate their lunch (eventually)

@TomF I never programmed anything with 68000. But I remember my college DSP class where the college bought some TI prototype boards. For 2 months, we, the TAs and the professor wasted time trying to program them because of some JTAG programmer and software incompatibilities and flakiness. 😅 It was in Poland, so ordering new programmers and getting them shipped had a few weeks of delay as well... Arduino was kind of a revolution with its "plug and play" no-BS ecosystem.

@TomF In another class, we programmed Z80-based boards; at least those worked. We got things done, and it was super fun, but without libraries, it was a non-obvious effort for many of us to configure stuff like GPIO or external I2C controllers, and then we treated this part as "do not touch" code.