/shameless necro
Has anyone ever tried mining on a Sinclair ZX 81 or ZX Spectrum?
As these actually have an ASIC-chip onboard.
The initial ASICs used gate array technology. Ferranti produced perhaps the first gate-array, the ULA (Uncommitted Logic Array), around 1980. An early successful commercial application was the ULA circuitry found in the 8-bit ZX81 and ZX Spectrum low-end personal computers, introduced in 1981 and 1982. These were used by Sinclair Research (UK) essentially as a low-cost I/O solution aimed at handling the computer's graphics. Some versions of ZX81/Timex Sinclair 1000 used just four chips (ULA, 2Kx8 RAM, 8Kx8 ROM, Z80A CPU) to implement an entire mass-market personal computer with built-in BASIC interpreter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuitOh, you can mine on pretty much any CPU. An old Z80, Motorola 68000 series, an Intel 8088, etc.
You just have to find a way to communicate back and forth from the network and ofcourse you will need some way of compiling the miner code into a binary that will run on the target machine.
small edit: Oh and in the case of gaming consoles, you would usually need to find a way to make it run code that didn't come from an official licensed disc or cartridge. In many cases, the usual methods of making a console run a copied disc should suffice for this.
However, your comment about ASIC doesn't really make sense.
The title of the page you quote specifies exactly what an ASIC is. It's an application specific chip.
It's internally hard wired to do something the creator needs it to do. In the case of a ZX Spectrum, it's function is to providing I/O and graphics.
An ASIC for mining would need to be designed for hashing SHA256.
It's pretty much like a spoon and a knife. Both are utensils, but they are not exchangeable for eachothers tasks.
