Agon Light Is a New 8-Bit Single-Board Microcomputer and MCU Development Kit

We tend to associate larger data units with faster clock speeds — a 16-bit CPU is faster than an 8-bit CPU, a 32-bit CPU is faster than a 16-bit CPU, and so on. But that is more correlation than causation, as developers tended to increase their architecture data unit size as clock speeds also improved. In theory at least, there is no reason that an 8-bit computer couldn’t run at very fast clock speeds. Agon Light is a fast 8-bit single-board microcomputer and MCU development kit that takes advantage of that fact.

Agon Light isn’t a microcontroller development board like an Arduino and it isn’t a conventional single-board computer (SBC) like a Raspberry Pi, but rather something in-between the two. Like a Raspberry Pi, it is a complete microcomputer on a single board. But like an Arduino, it also provides low-level “bare metal” access to GPIO pins and more. Agon Light is an 8-bit microcomputer, but its modern eZ80F92 CPU runs at a blazing 18.432MHz clock speed. For ease of use, it has a 24-bit address bus.

Other specs include: 512KB of SRAM system memory, 8MB of pSRAM audio/video memory, and 640x480 VGA video output with 64 colors. Agon Light uses an Espressif ESP32-PICO-D4 module as a VDP (video display processor), which is a bit of a cheat since that has far more processing power than the rest of the system. That may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense given the low cost of the module and its utility for this application. That ESP32-PICO-D4 VDP also handles the audio output. Agon Light contains a PS/2 keyboard port and a MicroSD card slot for storage.

So what can you do with Agon Light? Well, it is a real 8-bit microcomputer that boots instantly into a BASIC programming interpreter. If you’re into retrocomputing, this is a bit like a vintage ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 and can do many of the same things as those computers. But thanks to the modern hardware and interfaces, it is far easier to use. For example, you can copy a game onto the MicroSD card instead of dealing with the headache of cassettes. It also performs much better than true retrocomputers.

But Agon Light is more than just a modern reincarnation of vintage 8-bit microcomputers. Through the GPIO pins, SPI and I2C interfaces, and UART, users can gain low-level control over sensors, motors, and much more. In this way, it is like a microcontroller development board. Except you don’t need a separate computer — you can do all of your programming right on the Agon Light. You can write and debug your code on the Agon Light in BASIC without another computer, because it is a computer.

Agon Light is not currently for sale through traditional means, but it is an open source project and is setup so that anyone can order boards from PCBWay or other PCB fabrication houses. You can either order a bare PCB and add all of the components yourself, or have the fabrication house add the SMD components. With the latter option, you receive a board that is mostly assembled and only need to solder the through-hole components yourself.

Update: Some sellers are offering assembled Agon Light boards.

If you're in the UK, check out this order form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1rR05a5SyB8TqMeXd0XyfiB-Sxv9m4oKr38ZgrZhpR0c/viewform?edit_requested=true

If you're in Australia, go here: https://form.jotform.com/222940310326849