Any way you could send me an SD Card image? I want to do some testing with how SmileBASIC works internally, and since the disk image has an SB interpreter, I want to see if the parser is the same as SB 3DS
I got a Pasocom Mini
As I guessed, it is indeed based on a Pi 1.1 A+.
Its performance is better than the original 3DS but worse than the new 3DS.
One thing good though is it has almost exactly 64 MiB of memory to work with, which is a lot more than the 3DS.
The "XSCREEN" command now is used for changing the resolution of the screen. It's by default 640x360. But you can change it to as high as 1280x720. You can even change it to the 3DS's resolution for compatibility.
It isn't just SmileBASIC. The case of the thing is designed to resemble the Sharp MZ-80C, which is a model from the Sharp MZ-80K line of computers made by Sharp in the early 80s of Japan. This computer has a mode called "HAL-MONITOR" that you can emulate MZ-80K games on.
Like the NES mini or the SNES mini or the Genesis mini, this is an MZ-80C mini, and so it can emulate MZ-80K games.
You can also control the emulator through SmileBASIC.
This code will clear the Z80 emulator's memory, inject some code into it, run it, wait until it finishes, then display the results.
There's also a disassembler in here, so you can convert Z80 machine code back into assembly.
Since this is a Pi, there's also new commands to interact with the GPIO pins. This means you could make external hardware for it and program the drivers in SmileBASIC. It has I2C commands as well.
It supports several USB devices, including keyboards, mice, controllers and surprisingly, even drawing tablets, which it has commands for handling all of them.
You also don't need any complex hacks to get files on and off this thing. You can simply copy regular text files with SmileBASIC code onto its SD card and it will recognize them. There's no "SmileBASIC file" with this. It just uses regular text files that you can easily transfer between your computer and the machine.
They also redid the file system. It's now a traditional file system with folders. You have a "CHDIR" command to move in and out of folders and such.
Audio is handled very differently. You now have multiple channels in which you can use to play waveforms. (BGMPLAY and WAVESETA don't work.) It's quite confusing actually, I've not figured it out yet.
Anyways, it's pretty cool! I found it easy to start coding on and quickly ported some software I made to it without too much struggle. Most things will need some modifications to work, but it shouldn't be too hard.
I ported Ringman to it which you can see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DhhRJvg4xQ
Any way you could send me an SD Card image? I want to do some testing with how SmileBASIC works internally, and since the disk image has an SB interpreter, I want to see if the parser is the same as SB 3DSDone. It is encrypted I believe, though, so I'm not sure how you will get anything out of it. Good luck trying, though.
I was thinking about buying one but I couldn't really find out how, plus it was expensive and slower than normal SB. And I doubt it will ever get updates from smileboom.Wasn't that hard, I just bought it off of Japan Yahoo Auctions. I used a package forwarding service called Zenmarket. Yeah, it definitely feels overpriced, cost me quite a bit. It is a cool device, though, I like it not only for the SmileBASIC aspect but I love Z80 assembly and retro computers, so I find the MZ-80K emulator aspect of it to be really fun to play around with. It's very unlikely it'll get updates, but not impossible. There's a folder for you to put your SmileBASIC code and your MZ-80K software in, and right next to those is an "UPDATE" folder. It's possible they have a system to allow you to update it by placing the update in this folder. Doesn't mean they'll actually release any updates for it, though.
Could you please explain your claim about the 3ds' GPU aiding performance? I thought it was all done by the CPU.A very large amount of SB's advanced graphics features (sprites in particular) are quite obviously handled by the GPU to some capacity. Otherwise, the stereo 3D effect would run too slow (and why would you remake it yourself?). Yes, SB runs in an interpreted sandbox, but the sandbox can still just use the GPU do to all the heavy graphics work. Sprites, for example, seem to just be textured quads; the GRP page being a texture atlas that the sprites uv-map their textures from. Not only are sprite transforms extremely efficient, but the internal pixel format of GRPs is one of the pixel formats supported for textures by the 3DS GPU, the DMP PICA200.
Why is the video feed quality so low?Because I don't have a rig or capcard capable of capturing clean HD footage. That's really expensive.
It has a 24 GFLOPS BROADCOM Videocore IV, which is about 5x as powerful as the 3DS's PICA 200.Oh? Well it's likely just not using the GPU then because it is slower when it comes to graphical commands, and all commands in general, than the new3DS.
I believe the CPU is quad-core though.This only matters if SmileBASIC is parallelized. Do we know if it is parallelized or not?
...is the builtin keyboard just for show?Yeah, the screen is just for show, too. It really is just a $25 Raspberry Pi 1.1 with a fancy case. Although, the screen is modular, so it's possible to install a real screen, which a lot of people have done. The keyboard, though, it's so dang tiny you wouldn't want to type on it anyways. It's not modular so there's no hope in replacing it with a working keyboard.