Recently, we (Dean Belfield, Jeroen Venema and myself) released Agon light™, the fastest and cheapest 8-bit microcomputer ever made. Agon light™ also doubles as the world's only standalone, BASIC-programmed 8-bit microcontroller: it dispenses with a host PC and sketch compilation, allowing you to control your projects from the immediacy of an instant-on BASIC prompt.
The big Agon light™ demonstration video.
Lots of superlatives above, which may come across as arrogant to some. I do this because, in this day and age, quality doesn't sell itself, while dubious stuff often gets popular if hyped to large audiences. How will you know what Agon™ is if we don't claim it upfront? Moreover, and most importantly, the claims we make and the superlatives we use are factually true: we've measured things before making big claims, which you can check for yourself as everything is open-source.
A full design overview of Agon light™.
We developed Agon™ inspired by a particular vision, which I now want to share with you. Our community (retrocomputing enthusiasts on the one hand, and makers on the other), although considered niche by the mainstream, is in fact very large and rich. It thrives in diversity and explosive creativity. Yet, few threads tie us all together. Arduino is one. Passion and nostalgia are others. But could we also share a co-owned platform for both computing and control? Something that doesn't belong to any individual or group, yet brings together retrocomputing and microcontrollers?
Agon light™ build tutorial, including drag soldering!
Step-by-step tutorial for flashing Agon light™'s firmware.
To enable this, we have put in a lot of effort to document everything you need to know not only to use Agon™, but to build it, flash its firmware, and even sell it yourself, if you so wish. Agon™'s hardware is distributed under what is effectively a MIT license: anyone can use or modify the design files, have units manufactured, and sell them without requiring any explicit permission from me, or paying me anything. We encourage you to build your own Agon™ business, and are eager to add a link to your shop from Agon™'s official website. We would love to see a thriving community of sellers across continents, earning their deserved cash for their work. You owe us nothing.
A mini-demonstration of Agon light™ as a microcontroller.
The firmware in Agon™'s key ICs (the CPU and the video co-processor, or VDP) is written in C; no more assembly! Yes, even the functionality of the VDP is defined in C. There are free compilers and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) to allow you to write your own firmware or modify ours. This way, Agon™'s lowest-level functionality, as well as its look and feel upon being turned on, can be customised and branded by anyone who can write C. It is essentially a hardware canvas, with complete firmware serving as a reference or starting point, which allows you to create your own customised computer. And it is in this sense that we regard it as something that is ours as a community, even when it comes to the hardware itself. If anyone is going to make money from it, then that is all of us, potentially; we share in the effort and in the benefits reaped from that effort.
Mini-demonstration of Agon light™ rendering the Mandelbrot set.
Which brings me to my last point: as the fastest 8-bit microcomputer ever built, running no other than BBC BASIC (the best BASIC interpreter by most counts), Agon light™ delivers so much computing power that high-performance games and other applications can be written entirely in BASIC; no assembly required. Even graphics and sprites can be programmed in BASIC. Yet, the games will still run a lot faster than assembly-written games from back in the day. Hopefully this helps democratise the creation of games and apps in our community, making it accessible to anyone who has grown up in those golden early years of home computers.
A review of Agon light™'s PCB.
Anyone who contributes to this platform, whether by creating new hardware variants, firmware, selling units or writing games for it, can rest assured that they will be contributing to the whole community, and not helping enrich any particular person, group or company; for Agon™ is a shared platform that belongs to us all. The credit for what it might still become will be due to us all, too. So make it your own: make Agon™, sell it, develop for it. We would be delighted to help promote your work.