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Re:The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video] by Jupe on Saturday January 16, 2016 @12:02AM (#10914324)
Actually, I learned 68000 assembly by hex-dumping a freeware assembler to find the full set of OpCodes and some reverse engineering. That, combined with some trial and error (and a few magazine articles that actually had a little bit of ASM {} C), and I was able to do some very cool stuff pretty quickly).

Boy, I miss those days :(

Re:The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video] by pekk on Saturday January 16, 2016 @12:12AM (#10914349)
You aren't the only one. I always wonder what we could do today to synthesize new environments which capture some of that feeling and will actually be interesting to people who aren't just suffering a fit of nostalgia.
Re:The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video] by camperman on Saturday January 16, 2016 @07:11AM (#10915079)
For me, the Raspberry Pi comes close. It's a limited machine, the specs are the same for everyone with your model and there's plenty of scope to make it do impossible things if you apply yourself.
Re:The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video] by Flow on Saturday January 16, 2016 @12:32PM (#10915948)
Is the hardware of the Raspberry Pi really fully documented? The GPU too? How about WIFI chips?

I've tried several times to make a tiny kernel for x86, but always feel it's either too old interfaces like the PIC, TIMER, VGA, IDE etc, or chip specific. I can't give my friend a bootable USB because he/she might have a different hardware setup.

Re:The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video] by Narishma on Saturday January 16, 2016 @07:02PM (#10917489)
Everything that's needed to make an OS is documented, either directly or (like USB) in the Linux kernel's source code. Even the GPU is much easier to support than on a PC because the OpenGL ES driver is running on the GPU itself. You just talk to it through a mailbox interface.
Re:The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video] by camperman on Saturday January 16, 2016 @03:26PM (#10916684)
No, there are plenty of closed components with only binary blobs and header files for the programmer. But bare metal coding on it is still very doable and popular.