"So what is this?"

"I designed the personal computer."

"What's this little box?"

"This is a hand-held console that I designed." Looking at the various design drawings on the table, Guo Yifei asked this and that like a curious baby, Li Yixuan explained to her one by one.

"What is a handheld console?"

"A game console to play with in your hand." Li Yixuan explained the concept of the palm game machine, "To complete this game machine, there are two technical problems to be solved, the first is the liquid crystal display. At present, the LCD display on the market is produced by RB Sharp, but the LCD size is too small, and it is OK to make an electronic watch and a calculator, but it is not possible to do a handheld at present. In addition, the LCD production process is not mature now, and the yield rate is too low, resulting in the price of LCD is quite expensive. The second problem is that the game's cartridge capacity is too low. ”

Speaking of this, Li Yixuan is also very entangled in the problem,Now the cassette uses a DARM chip,The highest capacity is only16K,In the second half of this year, Intel will release a DARM chip with a capacity of 32K,Just this little capacity is not enough at all,Like "Tank Wars" and "Squirrel Wars" Any 8-bit game,The capacity is more than 160K,If you only rely on stacking chips,The cost of each cassette will reach more than 200 US dollars,No one will pay for such an expensive game。

But this is not the biggest problem, after all, he sometimes has a time door to cheat, the real biggest problem is that he can't find a place to produce chips, Hong Kong's industrial land is basically controlled by British-funded enterprises, the reason why Terry Gou set up the Foxconn factory in Taiwan instead of building in Hong Kong is because the rent of the factory is more than half of the cost, if the chip and LCD factory is located in Hong Kong, you can only rent a factory like a British-funded enterprise, once you see that your business is good, they will definitely increase the rent significantly, so you are equivalent to mentioning others to work.

Why not continue with the foundry model? First, Guo Taiming can only cooperate, but he can't communicate with him, if he cooperates with him to set up a factory in Taiwan, he can't control many things. In addition, liquid crystals and chips are currently high-tech things for Taiwan, and the Taiwan government will not be out of ideas about where to build the factory.

As for the mainland, it will not be open to the outside world until next year, but even if there are no policies for opening up, these two things are more attractive to the mainland, and he does not dare to guarantee whether his investment will be protected.

Li Yixuan said the concerns in his heart, and Guo Yifei drove him quietly, "You don't trust the country so much? ”

"The country is made up of people, and it is people who control the country, and people will have all kinds of ideas, and many things are not controlled by me."

"Are you so distrustful of people?"

Li Yixuan felt that Guo Yifei's words seemed to mean something, and looked at her and said seriously: "You are studying law, you should understand why a country should have laws." I am not a Confucian believer, I am a believer of Li Kui, and human nature is evil. In the beginning of man, I did not believe in what was good. ”

Li Yixuan rented a villa in the suburbs, the original rented hotel room had long been retired, the two returned to the rented villa, Guo Yifei went back to his room to rest, and Li Yixuan also went to bed.

But he can't sleep, this year is 78 years, this year is the year of the beginning of the big era, Jobs will soon launch their second generation of Apple computers, and Atari will also launch their first cassette home game console Atari 2400 this year. And Intel Corporation also launched the 8086 CPU.

This CPU is a watershed in the history of Intel CPU technology, the standard is the early formation of the X86 architecture, and it is from this year that Intel in order to cope with the fierce impact of Zilog's Z80, released the 8086 Blue Book, requiring that if Intel is not authorized, no individual or enterprise will produce the same architecture and compatible chips as 8086, marking the arrival of the CISC backward compatible era. What to do next, he felt that there was nothing in his heart.

If you make a computer, what CPU should you choose? It's easy to choose an Intel CPU, but it's hard to get involved in the desktop CPU space in the future, and Intel will put all kinds of obstacles in the way for you.

Using chips from other companies, like 6502, Z80 and 64000 or something, there are troubles about future CPU upgrades, Zilog will launch the world's first 16-bit CPU Z8000 next year, this CPU uses a completely different architecture from Z80, and is not compatible with Z80 at all. As a result, Zilog suffered heavy losses, and the Zilog company launched the Z8000 follow-up model Z8200 in 1981, although it was compatible, but it was only compatible with Z8000, and it was still not compatible with the classic Z80, which led to the fate of Zilog's final bankruptcy acquisition.

It's already three o'clock in the morning, Li Yixuan still hasn't come up with a clue, he wants to sleep but can't sleep. So I had to get up, pick up the tablet and look through it casually.

The planes here are unconnected, and they contain information that he thinks will be useful.

flipped through it so casually, and suddenly saw a piece of information introducing game consoles, which made Li Yixuan's eyes light up.

That's right, why don't you do this, Apple uses 6502, and Nintendo's red and white machine also uses 6502, so you can work hard in this regard.

MOS is licensing 6502 technology, and the restriction clause is the least, MOS does not restrict the company that has obtained the technology license can not change the architecture of 6502, and does not stipulate that the technology licensee cannot produce processors that can be compatible with 6502 in the future, so that it is just convenient for yourself.

You have to know how the later SFC came about, the processor on the SFC is the 65c816 CPU provided by Ricoh, which is a processor that can be perfectly compatible with 6502. From this point of view, the learning machine can be turned into a computer, and the bottom can be turned into a game machine.

And Americans do not reject learning machines, throughout the eighties, the sales of learning machines in the United States is even more than IBM's PC computers, the United States "New York Times" in 1995 did a survey, learning machines in the eighties in the United States sold a total of more than 60 million units, Canada sold more than 12 million units, Europe the most, more than 80 million units. This is a god machine comparable to FC. Even if all the PC compatible machines are combined, they may not be able to sell him.

Continue to make a fuss on FC, using China's learning machine frame program, not using the American learning machine program, the American learning machine is also using 6502 to complete the processor, but its function is too simple, the game function is too weak, and the game function of China's learning machine is just now. Because it's directly a copycat FC motherboard, put the keyboard and floppy drive together, it's the so-called learning machine.

Don't think that the United States has not swept the learning machine, you must know that the computer in this period is not cheap, and it can only be used commercially, and the DOS system used is also relatively complex, and the average family can't use it at all, and the learning machine is different. Not only is the price much cheaper than a computer, but it is also convenient for children to use.

However, there are still two technical problems to deal with, the first is that there is no 3.5-inch floppy drive yet, which will not be released by Sony until 1980. But don't worry, you can replace it with a 5.2-inch floppy drive.

The second technical difficulty, if you want to make it easy for children to operate the learning machine, the best way is to use a graphical operating system.

There is no problem with this technology, think about Wenquxing and Xiaobawang learning machine, isn't it a graphical operating system, the whole is simple, not so complicated, not so many functions.

What really decides the problem is that the capacity of the current memory chip is too small to fit the operating system.

Either you don't need an operating system, just insert a cassette or a floppy disk.

As soon as this idea came out, it was like a devil Li Yixuan's new was tightly grasped. Thinking is pouring in, and after repeated deductions, this method is indeed feasible. Even on this basis, Li Yixuan has also come up with new applications.