How far could you push a machine with an 8 bit processor?

I know a couple guys that got a drone going with an 8-bit processor. You can pretty much do anything with it if you are good enough to do it.
A fancy RC quadcopter isn't much of an achievement.

>oh look, extra slots on my c64
Can you actually use that with multiple devices without issues? Also, were those even remotely common?

>inb4 serial bus interface, which allows device chaining
And is a serial bus (with a theoretical maximum bit rate of 50 Kb/s), which is massively slower than internal parallel buses used for expansion cards.

I understand what can be done with any Turing complete machine. I'm talking more in a practical sense. I know there have been 8 bit Unix ports such as UZI that are actually meant to be usable and basic internet utilities.

>multiple two 64 bit integers on a 64bit system

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Parallel computing? Though this doesn't use the expansion slots. They're linked via the 16-pin Game I/O connector; the red wires you see running down the left next to the LEDs.

Way back when, there were boards that would let you run MSDOS software.
ae.applearchives.com/all_apple_iis/pc_transporter/
youtube.com/watch?v=4F3tupizgeo

And here's an Apple II ethernet card you speculate about
a2retrosystems.com/index.htm

Attached: mahon_crate.jpg (2592x1944, 1.26M)

>Also, were those even remotely common?
What has this anything to do with your question? Are you trying to move the goalpost?
It's stupid to ask theoretical questions if you're going to shoot every answer down.

>And is a serial bus (with a theoretical maximum bit rate of 50 Kb/s)
6.25KB/s? Are you retarded? It's 4x as much.

You faggots are forgetting IEEE-488, something that allowed daisy chaining also and the C64 is capable with a simple adapter, much faster by the way.
Not that it's a huge of a matter on a 8-bit system with 64KiB of RAM, bus bandwidth was the least of worries.

>Way back when, there were boards that would let you run MSDOS software.
CPU accelerator boards are just entirely new CPU boards that you make bus master in place of the original CPU board. Those in particular feature an 16 bit x86 processor and up to 640 KB of RAM. You can't really call it an 8 bit computer anymore if you aren't even using the 8 bit processor in the machine any more because you've installed a CPU accelerator card.

>What has this anything to do with your question? Are you trying to move the goalpost?
I'm asking because I've neither seen nor heard of one before and I'm wondering if they rare or if they're just not talked about these days. Are you just here to act offended?

>6.25KB/s? Are you retarded? It's 4x as much.
Source on it being 4x that? The 50 Kb number is what I found as a theoretical maximum on a quick search.

>Not that it's a huge of a matter on a 8-bit system with 64KiB of RAM, bus bandwidth was the least of worries.
>what is bank switching
If we're talking about pushing the limits, it would be stupid not to consider bank switching. Especially since it was even used in some 8 bit home computers (such as the MSX line, Commodore 128, and Apple IIe).

If you're just going to build accelerators for everything you're not really going to get an idea of what an 8-bit could really do.

But then again, that's what most people did anyway because 8-bits were never really all that useful on their own, even as new products.

>If you're just going to build accelerators for everything you're not really going to get an idea of what an 8-bit could really do.
But extra hardware for certain tasks is nothing new for computers. 8 bit home computers had graphics chips to speed up certain tasks and old 16 bit x86 machines had a separate FPU you could add. IIRC, there were cards for more efficiently decoding MP3s way back when that was CPU intensive as well.

There's definitely a place for ASICs and accelerators for tasks like that but I'm just saying that if you start basically just stringing together a shit ton of them to the point that your CPU is just there to boot the system and route things while everything else does the real work it's kind of a poor assessment.

Either way it would probably be totally strangled by the shitty bus anyway.

>if you start basically just stringing together a shit ton of them to the point that your CPU is just there to boot the system and route things while everything else does the real work it's kind of a poor assessment.
>Either way it would probably be totally strangled by the shitty bus anyway.
I figure the second point would serve as a limit to keep you from going completely overboard and using accelerators any more than sparingly and where they'd make the most difference.

I'm pretty sure I could do anything with it if the right accommodations are made. We're gonna find out for sure when the mega65 is complete.

I bet I could scrape twitter semi-efficiently even if a page is like 30MiB now.

a lot of things you can get by with 8 bits. like sprite movement velocity might only move 3 pixels per frame max, so that's still a lot of subpixel precision.

the main concerns are;
- how fast does it need to do a job for it to count?
- how much memory is available?
because given enough time and memory, you can make it "do" anything, just that at some point, it becomes too time-inefficient to be worth it

for example, here's someone running ubuntu on an 8bit microcontroller
hastebin.com/ixemeqoxom.apache (link was considered spam)
normally linux needs a 32bit cpu with an MMU, so his solution is to just emulate one.. on the 8bit micro, yes, you can do that, it's just ridiculously slow

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would it be cool to have just in time assembly for a primitive machine, distribute your apps as file archives with a linker configuration script inside? Then it can automatically link differently depending on platform configurations or user preferences...

Have this on like a 1 GHz 6502 but with a huge 32-bit address space...

>t. never taken a microprocessors class

This was already posted, you might want to read threads before posting, newfriend.

Not an issue. Keep in mind the first microprocessor based digital calculators used 4 bit processors, and those weren't limited to the numbers 0-15. Also, the TI-83 and TI-84 graphing calculators use 8 bit processors.

>how much modern utility could one get out of such a design?
Probably quite a bit. Internet usage really isn't that resource intensive if you're restricting yourself to terminal browsers and text based clients and not trying to mess with JS. If you could get an encryption accelerator working to deal with SSL/TLS and had multiple banks of memory you could probably get a full terminal browser that doesn't have to request the page repeatedly as you scroll to work. If using a video card with separate memory rather than depending on the system's normal RAM you could even deal with images, though that might require a separate decoder to do quickly with modern compressed image formats.

>How far could you push a machine with an 8 bit processor
how heavy is it?

why couldn't some limited css be implemented in text mode browsers, like div tags and shit

people don't know what carry is apparently

so basically break all websites except for reading wikipedia, stackoverflow and a few 90s relics. k'
probably wouldn't even be able to use libgen
why are you people wasting your time on this fucking question? yeah, you could do your taxes and send messages to your sweetheart on irc using an 8 bit computer. the question is, why would you want to?

>so basically break all websites except for reading wikipedia, stackoverflow and a few 90s relics. k'
A lot of sites work fine in a terminal browser. Jow Forums being one of them (though lacking JS support breaks the catalog).

>probably wouldn't even be able to use libgen
On a quick check libgen works just fine without JS and CSS and does work in a terminal browser, though support for all the files you can download from there wouldn't be guaranteed on an 8 bit machine.

>the question is, why would you want to?
Because they can. Because they want a challenge. Because implementing your own hardware is actually reasonably possible for the average hobbiest with 8 bit processors, so the potential capabilities of such hardware is interesting.

write apps that use their web api shit

>why are you people wasting your time on this fucking question?
because I hate you people, I want to slaughter people who make slow websites that should run on a calculator

why do we still even have websites? web developers desperately want to make applications. Typing in a website should just download an executable with root access to your computer. It's not like you're losing any privacy.

get on with the times grandpa
nobody cares if a website runs on your ti-83

I use TI-NSpire you nigger. Fuck you and anyone else who wants money.