Hi everybody. I wanted to give you a quick update on the
Gigatron. This is the computer that has no microprocessor. I did a video about this around 6 months ago,
where I assembled the kit and demonstrated what it could do. And one of the things I complained about is
that there was no keyboard and no way to really do anything on it outside of the few programs
it came with. Well, that may change now. I’ve been sent a new ROM chip which promises
some much needed new features. And here is something called Pluggy McPlugface
and should allow me to connect a keyboard. So the first thing I’ll do is take a look
at this keyboard interface. As expected, I’ll need to assemble it myself. There’s just a few components, but I noticed
this note about mounting U1 to the other side first. I guess I’d better do that or it might be
difficult to assemble the rest. So, this is U1, it’s a tiny little micro
controller with only 8 pins and a socket. It’s amazing how small it is. I didn’t even know you could get micro controllers
with so few pins. So, anyway, I’ll go ahead and solder this
thing into place. And next I’ll go ahead and stick the DSUB
connector on there. And then I’ll turn that around and solder
that into place. And then I mounted the PS/2 keyboard connector,
and believe it or not, that is all there is to this particular device. This actually plugs straight into the joystick
or gamepad port on the rear. Of course, in order to make use of this, I’ll
need to remove this version 1 ROM chip. And then I’ll put version 3 down in here. I never saw version 2, so I guess we’ll
skip right over that. Now I’ll plug in my PS/2 keyboard. And let’s power it on. I notice there are a few more things on the
screen now. The good news is I can use the arrow keys
on the keyboard to navigate. Let’s try Tetronis. That sounds like a Tetris clone, and I hope
it is! And it is! I wasn’t expecting it to have a musical
track as well. There’s something really dirty about the
waveforms produced by the Gigatron. I know they are all software generated, but
they don’t sound like square waves, but not quite like sawtooth either. I’m not sure what the reason for that is,
but still it works. And considering the technical constraints
of this computer, it’s hard to complain about much of anything. And this Tetris game is very playable. I don’t know what I pressed, but I somehow
triggered an Easter egg. However, this would be a good opportunity
to show the new speed modes. So, as you know the Gigatron uses software
to generate the video display. So these blank scan lines you see is when
the software switches to allow the CPU to do other stuff. The new version has 4 different modes you
can access with page up and page down. This is the slow mode, but all scan lines
are used. And then you can speed it up like this. Each new speed sacrifices an additional scan
line. OK, let’s try bricks next. OK, it’s like a break-out clone. And it’s not half-bad, to be honest. I’m sure Steve Wozniak would approve. And next I’ll try the Tic-Tac-Toe game. OK, this looks like it was written in BASIC
and seems really similar to the version that is inside this old BASIC book from the 1970s. It’s clearly not optimized for the Gigatron
since it treats the screen like a plain text terminal. Well, speaking of BASIC, let’s take a look. So, it runs TinyBasic version 2, and you get
a little over 9K to work with, which isn’t bad. That’s 3 times what the VIC-20 had. The screen, of course, is very low resolution. And this has to do with the way the Gigatron
generates its video signal. So this means we get a text resolution of
about 26 by 15 characters. That’s actually less text that the Commodore
VIC-20 could display. So it takes some getting used to with such
chunky characters. BASIC works more or less like expected. I thought I’d try typing in one of their
example programs on the website that turns the keyboard into a piano. I printed it out to paper to make it a little
easier to type in. This reminds me quite a bit of typing in programs
from books and magazines back in the 1980s. OK, so here’s the program in its entirety. Let’s run it. OK, that was to be expected. Finding a syntax error is part of the experience
of manually typing in programs. Another odd thing I noticed is that the LIST
command doesn’t work like on other computers. I wanted to just list LINE 2 but it doesn’t
seem to recognize that. So to look at something I have to press control-C
at just the right time to stop the listing. Anyway, I finally found and fixed all of the
errors. So these are the keys on the keyboard that
I can use for playing music. Let’s see if I can play something else. Rats, not enough keys. OK, so here’s something I think you’ll
find interesting. If I type SAVE, it will save this program. No filename or anything. It’s kind of slow and saves one line at
a time. But the Gigatron doesn’t have any non-volitile
memory. So where is it saving it to? Well, believe it or not, it is saving directly
to the little micro controller on the keyboard interface. However, it doesn’t have much storage, only
about 500 bytes. So, that works out to maybe 20 to 30 lines
of BASIC code. This piano program is about as big as can
fit. However, if you use one of the larger controllers
that are available, it has a larger storage space. OK, so once it’s saved, how do you get it
back after power cycling the computer. Well, you might think you type load. But that doesn’t work. So apparently, you press Control and F3 together
and it starts this up. What I think is happening here is the keyboard
controller is simply typing this code right back into the BASIC interpreter for you, rather
than loading it into RAM. Still, it works. Here’s something else cool. You can use POKE and PEEK. Memory address 43 contains the foreground
color. And zero is black. I think that may be somewhat easier to read. Oops. Typo. You can also change the background color with
address 42. I think white on black is much easier to read
than the default color. But speaking of colors, I wanted to write
a little program here to take a look at some of the colors. While the Gigatron has very limited screen
resolution it does make up for it somewhat by having 64 colors, and all of these can
be displayed simultaneously with no limitations. So in that regard it is better than most 80s
computers. Here’s another little program I wrote to
play around with colors. And while I was thinking about it. If you remember the episode I did on the Maximite
computer a while back I wanted to see how fast it could draw random lines on the screen. Turns out it was pretty darned fast. And I had compared it to a similar program
on the Commodore 128 which ran at about this speed. So I was curious how the Gigatron would stack
up. It took me a bit to figure out how the line
commands work, because it isn’t like I was expecting, but I managed to get it working. And the speed is in the same ballpark as the
Commodore. But, keep in mind we have 4 different speed
modes here on the Gigatron. So if we put it in the slowest mode that uses
all of the scan lines, then it is painfully slow. And so let’s try going to the next mode. OK, that’s quite a bit faster. And the next. OK, even faster, And here’s the fastest
mode. So, what other neat things can you do? Well, the screen-RAM location can be moved. And if you type this command, you’ll actually
be able to see what’s in other parts of RAM. In fact, you’ll notice as I type, you can
see changes over here, which I think is the command buffer. Also, remember the blinkenlights? You can modify those too with address 47. Apparently a 9 is the default delay time,
but if you put something like a 2 in there, you’ll see the lights speed up a lot. And if you change it to a bigger number like
20, you’ll see it slows down. Using address 46, you can stop the animation
completely and control the LEDs manually. So, if I wanted to turn them all on for example,
I could put in a 15, which in binary is four ones. Or a zero to turn them all off. Or if I just wanted two of them on, I could
put in a 3. Again, you have to think binary to know which
lights this will affect. Of course, you could incorporate that into
a BASIC program and create your own custom blinking patterns. So, what is the final verdict on the new Gigaton
update? Well, don’t throw away your X-box or your
gaming PC just yet, but I think it’s a really fantastic update compared to the one I reviewed
6 months ago. I mean, now it’s interactive and there’s
a lot of neat things you could do. And I could probably spend a lot of time writing
little neat programs for this. For example, one program I thought would be
really cool would be to create an art program in BASIC. And I think it would be perfectly capable
of running such a program. You could create pixel art and stuff like
that. I think it would be really well suited to
that. The only reason I didn’t do it is because
there’s no real way to save the program just yet because my micro controller that
it goes into wouldn’t hold a program that big. But, it could be done. And that would be something that would be
fun to do with it. Anyway, so that about wraps it up for the
Gigatron, but I had a couple of other things I wanted to mention. In fact, quite a coincidence. The last time I did a Gigatron video, I mentioned
something at the end of the video about what my dream computer would be. And I posted an article on my website and
a link to it. And a lot of people went and looked at that
and discussed it and I got a lot of feedback on it. Well, I’ve actually updated a new article
which I’m putting a link to in this description. Because things are moving in this regard! So, I’d be curious to see what you think
of the new ideas and the progress being made in that front. So, check that out. And, speaking of updates. A while back I did a review on the C64 mini. A little modern version of the Commodore 64. Well, I just actually received a new version
of this which is the release for North America and it’s got a lot of new updates and supposedly
fixes and improvements on it. So, I’m going to be doing an update on that
here next and well see. I’ll run it through it’s paces and we’ll
see how much it’s better or if it is any better. So anyway, stick around for that, and thanks
for watching!
