PLAYPOWER

Remember Visicalc?

Priya Ganapati of Wired Magazine just posted an awesome article on Playpower. Check it out!  She really nailed the finer points of our mission, but also presented the project as a *lot* of fun.

ETech has been a fantastic experience so far.  There is such a variety of interesting people.  For example, here’s a picture of Jeremy and I talking to Bob Frankston, who developed Visicalc.  If you weren’t around in 1979, that’s the world’s first spreadsheet program, developed on the 6502 based Apple II. It turned the home computer into a useful business tool.

He said he’ll try to find the source code for us.  That’s so awesome.

Read the Wired Article

TV-Computer with Chinese GUI and mouse

Millions of clones of the Nintendo Famicom are being produced every year.  These are primarily distributed to “emerging middle class” consumers throughout the developing world.  Interestingly, producing and selling these hardware clones is now legal, as the patents have expired on the Famicom.

Many of the “Famiclones” are currently marketed as educational computers (”LERRN CIMPUTERS THE FUN WAY” proclaims one box) and contain a variety of not-so-effective educational games.  I suppose the margins on a $12 computer don’t encourage much R&D in effective game-based pedagogy!  So that’s why Playpower seeks to produce new “affordable, effective and fun” learning games, and distribute them directly to the manufacturers as a “market intervention”.  In this model, there is no cost for designing hardware, getting it manufactured, or distributing it to millions of kids in the developing world–we only have to design and produce effective learning games!

Therefore, in order to build our open-source developer community, we’re teaming up with Makershed.com to sell TV-computers to potential developers in the USA– and at the same time, raise money to support The Playpower Foundation.   If there is enough demand for these in the USA, we may even be able to start shipping versions that can directly play old NES cartridges!  (the current version requires a 72-pin to 60-pin converter, which is sold separately).

The first TV-computers available in the states will be sold at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, beginning March 9, 2009.

The Infamous Famicom Modem

Playpower wants to make “the world’s most affordable home computer” more accessible to developers.  Sites like Retrozone have done a lot to make it easier for people to develop their own cartridges.  Brian Parker has even made a fine set of tutorials for programming assembly code on the NES.  But if we really want to open up development, we need to use a more accessible language.

So we’ve been playing around with cc65, an open source C compiler for 6502 chips.  This has enabled our Hangzhou friend Newsclan to produce a framework for easily making “Choose your own adventure” style games.   Unfortunately, the compiler libraries for cc65 don’t currently support all the NES hardware, but Ernesto in Argentina is making headway on that, using the NES system documentation.

If we could get cc65 to fully support the NES, we might be able to fully port the operating system Contiki, which was designed for 8-bit platforms.  Contiki offers a TCP/IP stack, with IRC, Telnet, and the world’s smallest web browser.  It has been previously been used to enable an Apple II to surf the web.

Lest you think that internet access on a famiclone is ridiculous, here’s a picture of the modem created for the Famicom back in 1988.  Over 10 million were sold in Japan, mostly for betting on horse races or trading stocks.  Here’s an article about the Famicom Communicator, hardware that is also likely in the public domain due to expired patents.

…who sold me my first TV-computer!  This shop also sold loads of solar-powered flashlights, if I recall.

I remember plugging the machine into this little TV, there at the shop (I always recommend testing your electronics in the grey-market).  In just 2 clicks of the mouse, I was at a BASIC programming prompt.  I remember thinking, “hmm, what else could be done with a $10 educational computer?”

Talking with my friends at Srishti School of Design, and then later at Calit2 and MIT’s IDDS, we agreed that the best way to make this computer as powerful as possible would be to open it up to the world as a platform for open-source learning games.  That’s why Playpower is all about content–we’re trying to build better learning games, not cheaper computers.  While an 8-bit computer is a highly constrained environment, you’d be surprised at what it can do!

…but not always for $10.  These units were spotted in Nicauragua by Geoff Galgon, where they were briskly selling for about $25.  Notice the ridiculously scary light-gun?  Yeah, that’s what we call “pedagogically suspect.”  We’ll leave that thing out of our units, thank you very much!

The cheapest we’ve ever found 8-bit TV-computers? About $8, or 55RMB, in China (thanks Newsclan!).  All of these computers are mutually compatible with 60 pin cartridges, and all usually come with educational games and BASIC programming.

Speaking of China, Newsclan, who is leading the Playpower working group in Hangzhou, just translated our website into Mandarin- www.playpower.org/cn

Interestingly, the 8-bit TV-computer supports Mandarin Chinese text, which means it can handle just about any character set.  So, if you’d like to see the world’s most inexpensive home computer in your native language, let us know!