Some updates on the project that has been mostly dead for a few years.

The mini keyboard
More or less as originally planned, but I printed the keycaps in resin at JLCPCB. Filled in the engravings with gouache water-based paint, wiped off the excess and fixed it with a transparent acrylic spray. The legends look legendary, especially for their tiny size.

The switches are the same as originally planned, SKPMAME010. They feel squishy but for a little toy keyboard they are very nice, they even have pretty decent travel. There is some binding between the caps, but I'm sure it can be sorted  out by filing the edges.

The computer
part of it is giving me more trouble. I was having high expectations from the kit commonly named

5.0inch ESP32-8048S050, it's available in China for around $35. I liked it because it uses a very nice 800x480 LCD panel that can do 50Hz, which is very desirable for v06c, and ESP32-S3, which has its own LCD panel controller which is flexible enough to do just what I need. It also has most things already in place so I don't have to bother with my own board, rare connectors, SD card slot.. It's all assembled here in one very pretty package, which I can only recommend -- just probably not yet for the purpose of Vector-06c emulation.

The reality of using it is a bit harsh. While I was able to make it scale v06c picture at 50Hz using crude integer nearest-neighbour interpolation, I've been struggling to make v06c emulator work at the required pace. Vector-06c has a programmable palette, which makes it finicky to emulate and these details consume CPU cycles in the main emulation loop. They also don't let the scaler use the bitplane buffer directly, so I can't offload the palette work to the scaler core without losing compatibility with various raster and multicolour effects.

Pictured above, it is running Vector-06c emulation at 50Hz though so there is some promise. There's no I/O and no sound. I can push it to 53Hz. That's some headroom, but not enough to squeeze in 8253 timer/counter. ESP32 was shown to be a good emulation platform previously, but with v06c it could be that it has met its match and we need more power.

Speaking of more power, there is an interesting bit of kit called Tang Nano 9K FPGA Development Board GOWIN GW1NR-9 RISC-V HDMI https://aliexpress.com/item/1005004147687144.html -- it's an FPGA of strange Gowin variety with its strange set of tools, which makes me reluctant to try it. But it seems to have all the oomph needed to run vector06cc (my Vector-06c FPGA emulation project). What makes it really attractive is that it also has a 50-pin RGB panel connector and even ships with a display. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

I think the mini-keyboard part could be valuable on its own. I'll be publishing the design files after I verify that it maybe actually works. Stay tuned.