A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on a project to build a computer affordable by Third World families is basing its design not on the Apple II, but on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which used the same processor chip.

Several Mac Web sites noted yesterday a Monday Boston Herald article describing the Educational Home Computing Initiative, part of this month’s MIT International Design Summit. The goal is to develop a rudimentary computer that will cost only $12.

Though one of the designers, 27-year-old graduate student Derek Lomas, said in the Herald story that he hoped to give Third World schools “Apple II computer labs like the ones I grew up with,” the machine he and his team are working on probably will not be able to run Apple II software without considerable effort.

“The machine we are using is not the same as the Apple II,” Lomas explained to me via e-mail. “It is actually based upon the Nintendo Famicom [known in North America as the Nintendo Entertainment System], which also used a 6502 [processor].”

Because it was much less expensive than other processors available at the time -- primarily the Motorola 6800 and the Intel 8080 -- the MOS 6502 chip was a popular choice for several early personal computers and video game systems of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The NES, however, used a customized version of the 6502; hence the difficulty in adapting Apple II software to an eventual eHCI machine.

“We’d still love to use old Apple II games, because there were a lot of great ones,” Lomas said. “This would require some significant porting. We’d either try to acquire the [intellectual property] from the old game developers, or just adapt the games for different regions.”

For that matter, intellectual property questions could create problems for the eHCI project down the road.

Although most if not all of the NES hardware patents are past their 20-year expiration date, the project’s Web site notes that Nintendo still holds all the copyrights to the NES. It describes the legality of producing any kind of clone as an “open question.”

Lomas conceived the idea for the ultra-cheap PC during a recent stay in India, where he noticed people using inexpensive keyboard and console units hooked up to TV sets. He believed he could add a bit more functionality without increasing the price.

The project Web site lists two main goals: to add flash memory to the game cartridge and to find a way to provide Internet access, possibly via a cellphone using short-range Bluetooth wireless technology.

Legal and technical challenges aside, I wish Lomas and his team all the best. Even a low-functioning computer could help teach large numbers of people in developing nations economically valuable skills.

As Lomas told the Herald, “If you just know how to type, that can be the difference between earning $1 an hour instead of $1 a day.”