2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

My first computer was a BBC Micro. I'm not sure what the first thing I coded was - probably the classic

  10 PRINT "Fred is cool!"
  20 GOTO 10

I remember doing lot of strange stuff with that PC such as... Printing out the 6502 assembly language dump of the Disk Operating System chip to see how it worked. Soldering two 8K EPROMs on top if each to make a 16K one as it was more expensive. (Used a 7400 series chip to invert an address line to go to one of the CS pins.)

My final act was trying to build an EEPROM programmer which needed a higher voltage. Not knowing back then that the ground lead from the school oscilloscope was earthed meant I sent 30V AC through the ground plane and blew it up. My first magic smoke.

Perhaps one thing that the BBC Micro lacked was some LEDs to flash. There's just something about hardware and a physical "blinky" that is just so satisfying.

I've got my boys started with the micro:bit and they've taken to it to some degree. I'm waiting for them to want to rather than actively persuading them to take an interest in coding and electronics. They'll be far more motivated if it's their idea. Having said that, they have their own cheap multimeter for checking batteries and were asking what the display on my oscilloscope was yesterday. My youngest (9) was amazed that a picosecond was a thing and that a square was wasn't square when you look that closely.

Coincidentally, just after writing this I ended up going out to Rome to work at the Ryder Cup. One of the first things I was asked to do was to code up a news ticker to run along the bottom of the 15m wide screen presenting data to the press in the media centre. (Guy walking in front of it for scale.) Straight away it reminded me of this!

They say that men are just boys with bigger toys. It seems it's true. I'm still scrolling text on a screen - just a slightly bigger one. I was tempted to add "Fred is cool!" but thought better of it. 

What 8-bit video game do people think would work best on that size of display ?

What 8-bit video game do people think would work best on that size of display ?

Zaxxon