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There are still some developers who work on microcontrollers and the like. Also a lot of the embedded world still has MMUs and caches but there's not a whole lot of software between you and hardware.



I have a few problems with that, though. For one, I don't really care about the vast majority of projects that kind of stuff is used for, and for another they often have closed proprietary toolchains.


Really? Because it's used in so many fields there should be something interesting there one would think. Of the top of my head:

Defense, agriculture, home automation, industrial automation, finance, automotive, oil&gas, space resarch, robotics. The list goes on!

I think the proprietary toolchain stuff is also changing, but slowly.


If nonproprietary is #1 issue for you, you could design your own CPU or emulate an existing one using a hardware design language and FPGA.

Although there's no way past proprietary chips, at least the open-source toolchains for them are coming along.


> Although there's no way past proprietary chips

Yeah, see, that's a hold up for me. If I'm going to go through the effort of building something completely non-commercially viable than I want it to at least be completely open. And before you say anything, no, I'm not at all interested in making anything commercially viable.


As long as you get something with an ARM, you don't have to worry about a proprietary toolchain.


ARM itself is proprietary though, and also I'm not sure there are ARMs as simple as I'm describing.


All the retro platforms were proprietary, though? Can't get much more proprietary than Nintendo.

Cortex-M0 is very comparable to a 68k with 32-bit registers. http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....


Many old Nintendo systems are now well documented and you can potentially make a fully non-proprietary hardware clone and software tools.


Retro platforms were current technology. If I'm going to use technology with several orders of magnitude less power, then I'd at least like it to be open, is all I'm saying.


I mean, everything is propeitary then. Even SiFive has issues publishing their preboot code. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5127

And a ARM CortexM0 is about 12k gates, it's hard to get much simpler than that.


> I mean, everything is propeitary then.

Yeah, that's precisely the problem. Though you're right, the M0 at least does fit what I'm talking about pretty well, in-order, no-MMU, etc.


So what, you just don't code for hardware at all?


If I'm going to use technology with several orders of magnitude less power, then I'd at least like it to be open, is all I'm saying.




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