just found out about the commander x16, which is a project to make an 8-bit computer close to the commodore 64 but made with all modern parts (so it doesn't rely on used or new-old-stock components), for hopefully less than $100, and I have to say we would enjoy playing with one of those

something that lets you work close to the hardware sounds fun in a way that modern computers... aren't

coding in C or Python or what-have-you is fine and all but being able to poke directly at memory and see results immediately sounds really good? an entire computer system simple enough for a single person to understand how every part of it works, which is an alien concept to us, who were born in 1994 and thus missed the era of the C64 and other 8-bit machines

...disappointingly the main resource for information and updates on the CX16 project appears to be a facebook group and well. we don't have an account there and certainly don't want one

the guy who's heading the project has posted a few videos explaining it on his youtube channel though ("the 8-bit guy")

the closest thing to the C64 experience that we had was learning how to program on a TI-84+SE graphing calculator, which while nice, only really supports TI-BASIC-83, which is a really, really bad dialect of BASIC

It was possible to run programs written in assembly but you couldn't write them on the calculator itself, you had to write them on a computer in an IDE then load them into the calculator which was too complicated for 10-year-old us to learn how to do

okay but this BASIC is really really bad, seriously

- You can't write the letters "P", "R", "I", "N", "T" to get the print instruction. just writing those letters would return the product of the variables P*R*I*N*T. Instead, you have to go into a menu and find the print command, which in memory is represented by its own unique token and is thus technically one character even though it's written as five (and instead of "PRINT", those five are "Disp "). Same for every other operation.
- You get 27 numeric variables and that's it. One each for the letters A-Z, plus θ. No multi-character variable names permitted.
- All of those variables are limited to 24-bit floating-point numbers, no other numeric data types exist. They can be complex numbers, though, in which case they're stored as a pair of two 24-bit floats for the real and imaginary parts
- you *can* use lists to represent things like strings and arrays so you can use more numbers than those 27 but lists are kinda limited. you can at least make your own lists with multi-character names
- instead of lines ending with a newline or semicolon or something, lines are defined as *starting* with a `:`
- you do not have to close parentheses under certain circumstances, such as at the end of a line, and in fact you're encouraged not to close parentheses under these circumstances because the entire calculator only had 24 kB of user-accessible RAM and that's it, and *all* of your programs and variables had to be stored in that, not just the currently executing ones (later models had flash memory you could move programs to but you had to move them out first before using them)
- entering anything other than numbers and some characters like * and + etc requires pressing a meta key before each and every keypress so typing on the calculator was awkward to say the least