GoKawiilHosting a Bulletin Board Service on My Casio VX-4.
11–17 minutes
I love my Casio VX-4 so much that I made an AI-generated fake magazine advert for it! August 14, 2026.
About a eight weeks ago I had virtually no interest in calculators. Blank, dull, tedious-looking objects that remind me of long, arduous rainy afternoons in 1980’s/1990’s school maths classes.
Fast forward to August 14th, 2026 and I now own not one but two Casio Pocket Computer calculators (imported at great expense direct from Japan), have developed 4 pieces of software for them (one published to Github already, the rest will be open source for you to play with I promise!), made (AI generated) calculator fan art, and am now completely and utterly besotted with them.
So what changed my mind?
BASIC and RS232. That’s it.
Boeuf a la Mode!
It started quite simply with a post I read by Mark M5TEA on the SOTA Reflector. Mark had made mention that he had ported over a popular calculator emulator. Some sort of pocket Casio contraption that was able to write BASIC software as well as the C and Casio CASL languages.
I had a ‘curiosity click’ for the laugh, prodded a few buttons on the emulated calulator and thought little more of it. Later that day I went back for another look, curious to see how a calculator could run BASIC software, and moreto, how far could you push it?
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