[HN Gopher] Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation
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Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation
Author : celadevra_
Score : 613 points
Date : 2024-03-22 02:48 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lexaloffle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lexaloffle.com)
| tazu wrote:
| This looks similar to what the cool couple at 100 Rabbits [1] are
| doing with Uxn. Overall, I love to support anyone producing hobby
| / cute software (especially with Lua!).
|
| [1]: https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
| WD-42 wrote:
| The fact that they seemingly write all this stuff from a
| sailboat makes it even cooler.
| tazu wrote:
| Last I checked it was mostly solar-powered too. That's pipe-
| dream stuff.
| ajcp wrote:
| I want to thank you. Your comment sent me down an _hours
| long_ rabbit hole (pun intended) last night into their
| collective and I 've frittered away many more this morning
| pricing out sailboats I can't afford! Thank you so much <3
| lpribis wrote:
| Funny, the first time I read about uxn I went down almost
| the same rabbit-hole and was investigating local used
| sailboat prices within an hour.
| snvzz wrote:
| uxn is awesome, and the implementations I have looked at seem
| to be MIT licensed.
| James-Livesey wrote:
| Potato (which uses Uxn) is even more similar to Picotron in
| that it's like a little desktop environment:
|
| https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/potato.html
| CobaltFire wrote:
| Somehow having a Ranma 1/2 picture open in a window fits
| absolutely perfectly with my actual young life.
| PostOnce wrote:
| Pico-8 was and is one of the most pleasant pieces of software I
| have used. I can only imagine the wonders the community will
| produce for this thing.
|
| Of course, despite the machine itself (pico 8 that is, and this
| thing too) being proprietary, all the user-programs are source-
| available if not open source. It's really educational and I love
| it.
|
| There will be compatible implementations of this thing, but the
| pico-8 tools were so refined, and pico-8 was so cheap, that I
| can't imagine not giving the dude 10 bucks. (i.e. the open source
| implementations might just run the program but not come with all
| the cute tools like the IDE, the pixel sprite/map/etc editor, or
| the music tracker), that was well and truly worth the money.
| Pico-8 is one of the only pieces of paid-for software I haven't
| hated.
|
| Tl;dr: I think pico-8 is wonderful, I think the community and
| free programs are wonderful, and I think given that, this will
| also be wonderful.
|
| I'm a fan and have been for a while.
| Toorkit wrote:
| The Pico-8 is great, but https://tic80.com/ is really cool too.
| PostOnce wrote:
| TIC-80 is cool, but it's a clone of PICO-8, and like Doom
| clones, some of them are great, but they're still not Doom.
| blindluke wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree with you that TIC-80 is not as great
| as PICO-8 is, and I would never recommend it over PICO-8 to
| someone who wants to start their adventure with game
| development.
|
| But it is not a clone of PICO-8. It offers a resolution
| that's very similar to that of the Game Boy Advance, so it
| serves as a nice transition stage towards GBA development.
| You can then enjoy your games on a console like Anbernic
| RG351P that's optimized for GBA games (2x integer scaling,
| same screen ratio). It's a specific use case, but one where
| TIC-80 shines.
| dizhn wrote:
| Just for information. The Powkitty rgb30 is the current
| defacto pico8 handheld because of it's 1x1 ratio screen
| running at 720x720 pixels.
| blindluke wrote:
| Yep. I bought a yellow one with the intention of making
| it a dedicated PICO-8 machine, and it is wonderful. It's
| not as perfect as 351p is for GBA, as 5x integer scaling
| leaves you with some unused screen space, but still, an
| absolute joy to play.
| kqr wrote:
| Can you - or someone else - write about why Pico-8 is so much
| better than other fantasy consoles? In particular, I've been
| intrigued by WASM-4 recently, and someone else mentioned TIC-80
| which also looks good. I remember reading about Pyxel and
| getting inspired. All three of those have the benefit of being
| free, so why would I pay for Pico-8?
| tmountain wrote:
| Pay because it's inexpensive and you are supporting the
| development of a platform that brings joy to a lot of people
| (including children). It's hosted (splore for finding games),
| a community forum is maintained and is a wealth of knowledge.
| It's a hub for learning. Paying for pico-8 is like donating
| to Wikipedia. Basically, you are putting a few dollars
| towards a "good thing".
| kqr wrote:
| I don't buy that argument - why shouldn't I donate to
| TIC-80 instead, since it has the potential of reaching also
| children whose parents don't have $15 burning a hole in
| their pockets?
|
| I'm not trying to be contrary, I'm really just trying to
| find what the unique thing about PICO-8 is since nobody has
| been able to articulate it, yet many people appear to feel
| it.
| tmountain wrote:
| TIC-80 is heavily inspired by PICO-8. Supporting PICO-8
| enables the creator of the original technology to
| continue producing creative works that seem to inspire a
| lot of derivative projects. Whatever the case, if you
| don't agree, then don't buy it. It's pretty simple in
| that regard.
| igrekel wrote:
| I think you missed the point, I perceived the question
| (which I'm asking myself too) how do these differ? What
| makes one more fun or better than the other?
| LastTrain wrote:
| I use both pico-8 and tic-80. I like both of them, but I
| like pico-8 better. Why? Aesthetics pretty much - and
| isn't that enough? These aren't tools to get things done;
| they are more like songs you listen to.
| thesnide wrote:
| It feels a little like iOS vs android at that point.,,
| otachack wrote:
| Why not both? If you can afford it, of course.
| kqr wrote:
| That could make sense if both are equally good, or if
| it's down to personal preference and one has to try both.
|
| But GGP made the argument out to be altruistic, that
| paying for one over the other is because it's better for
| the world. If that is the motivation, I would want to
| donate however much I could afford to the one with
| highest impact!
| Marazan wrote:
| PICO-8 has a free online edition: https://www.pico-8-edu.com/
| jarvist wrote:
| This is super useful to know about! The sprite designer &
| waveform editor / tracker is a really good creative
| introduction to computers for small children. And you can
| jump straight in to doing this with the above web link.
|
| (For those new to Pico-8, hit 'esc' from the Lua console to
| bring up the editor tools, then click on the icon in the
| top right.)
| onemoresoop wrote:
| >Pico-8 was and is one of the most pleasant pieces of software
| I have used
|
| Indeed, but I have a gripe with it that I cannot get over, the
| editor's font is too damn hard to read, I tried get used to it
| but to no avail. The games however are very playable, fun,
| inspiring and the community couldn't be better.
| thesnide wrote:
| I now only use vscode to code p8 files. And only use the IDE
| for everything outside code.
|
| I'm too spoiled by modern text editors to accept the embedded
| one for any long time
| snvzz wrote:
| I'd rather one of the many open source alternatives to that
| ecosystem.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Do you have any examples? I'm pretty curious about Picotron,
| but would love to try an OSS alternative.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| TIC-80
|
| https://tic80.com/
| noman-land wrote:
| Picotron looks to be a different product from pico-8.
| chawyehsu wrote:
| There are plenty of alternatives you could find on [1] in the
| context of fantasy console, almost all of them, oss or
| proprietary, active or dormant. And honestly many of them
| were inspired by PICO-8.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm one of the contributors of the list of [2].
|
| [1]: https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy
|
| [2]: https://github.com/pico-8/awesome-PICO-8
| PostOnce wrote:
| However, TIC-80 only exists because PICO-8 does, and without
| money, presumably PICO-8 couldn't've been made, the dude would
| have had to be doing other work to live.
|
| Previously this guy made Voxatron, which I imagine paid for
| PICO-8, and that presumably paid for Picotron, so if I don't
| buy Picotron, then perhaps I'll prevent his next work of art
| from coming to fruition?
|
| Yes it bothers me a little bit that PICO-8 itself isn't open
| source, but I can't see the alternative, otherwise how can the
| dev afford to be spending time thinking about and working on
| these new things?
|
| It's not as though this is a huge company, or that there are
| alternative means of generating income from it (no Enterprise
| wants PICO-8 support, for example).
|
| I don't see an alternative to giving the dev a few bucks to
| keep making art projects that I love.
| noman-land wrote:
| The pico-8 is very reasonably priced and for a few extra
| bucks you get Voxatron. I'm a huge advocate of open source
| but the pico-8 is just so lovely, and the community so
| creative and accommodating, that I didn't mind contributing.
| I have yet to check out the TIC-80 but I plan to after
| getting a little more fluent on the pico.
| jhbadger wrote:
| But TIC-80 just is so much better than PICO-8. Not just the
| resolutions (which people can argue are an aesthetic choice
| for PICO-8) but the fact that you aren't limited to lua but
| have a variety of languages (some Lisp inspired) in TIC-80.
| presbyterian wrote:
| Having such specific limits is exactly the point of
| PICO-8 though. If I wanted a variety of options, I'd be
| using a more traditional engine or library.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| looks delicious. just bought one. Mac binary is not signed, is it
| intentional? (I'm fine w it not signed but just ask
| devjab wrote:
| Don't you need an Apple developer account to get certificates
| to sign your stuff? If so that might explain it since that
| would be... what $300 a year? On top of likely having to go
| through the whole Apple Store acceptance process.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| you don't have to submit apps for them to be signed by you,
| but you do need to pay 99$/yr, tbh i think it's fair
| considering xcode is free
| pjmlp wrote:
| I consider XCode's price to be included in Apple's margins.
| devjab wrote:
| I'm too unfamiliar with Xcode to know much about it. Do you
| need it to release software for macs?
|
| I'm not sure how Apple gets away with forcing people to pay
| $99/yr to be able to let people install software without
| getting a warning. I guess it's a minor issue. I have added
| a few installs to my "yes I really want to use this
| software" list on my m1 air, but I still think it's a
| little bit silly. It's obviously some sort of security
| feature, but Apple isn't my mother.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| It's an effective "barrier to entry" to level up software
| quality, or rather, to keep poor publishing out.
|
| Apple gets away with it because Mac users tend to be much
| higher software payers than those on other OS.
|
| Not saying it isn't some sort of business extortion
| cubefox wrote:
| Does anyone also think these "is a" headlines violate commonly
| accepted headline rules? Arguably it should read: "Picotron, a
| Fantasy Workstation"
| pvg wrote:
| It's 'representative text from the article' in this case plus
| it probably doesn't matter in most other cases.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| What rule?
| cubefox wrote:
| AEsthetics
| fortyseven wrote:
| Slow night?
| rideontime wrote:
| Apparently not.
| bitwize wrote:
| It's a sign of the fact that personal computing has gone way, way
| off the rails that we make pretend computers to run on our real
| computers just to have fun ways to compute again. I really really
| appreciate work like this, but why aren't our actual operating
| systems "cozy" enough to support creative work anymore?
| rob74 wrote:
| Remember the days when all home computers came with a BASIC
| interpreter preinstalled, and that was the first thing you saw
| when you started the computer? Later generations (Amiga, Atari
| ST) also had BASIC included with the OS. Not that familiar with
| the original Apple Macintosh, but from what I read that was the
| first computer to ship without programming tools. Windows then
| followed suit, and today all OSes ship without developer tools
| by default. Of course they're just a download away, but those
| are mostly tools for professional developers, so not really
| beginner friendly.
|
| Also, the limitations of 8 bit (and 16 bit) computers also made
| them more approachable. I "designed" some cool-looking sprites
| (actually they were called "players") on my Atari 800 back in
| the day, although I'm not good at drawing, so I would be
| hopeless at producing something more hi-res...
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Linux comes with Python included. (Python is the new BASIC,
| and explicitly designed to be so.)
| p_l wrote:
| "Classic" Windows usually came with DOS which included BASIC,
| with the main difference being that in Windows 95/98/Me it no
| longer had an editor, IIRC.
|
| Original IBM PC in absence of other drive would attempt to
| boot from cassette and then drop you into similar BASIC
| interpreter - the "GW-BASIC" included in DOS was the same
| except it was shipped completely as file on disk drive
| instead of being ROM.
|
| NT didn't have included programming language before NT 4.0
| SP4, when WSH was added, it was also part of Outlook 97 and
| IE 3.0.\
|
| The original computer to ship without any programming tools
| that was targeted at general population was Apple Lisa, I
| seem to recall mention of at least one loud consumer
| complaint if not lawsuit based around expectation that
| general purpose computer should have _some_ tool included.
| Narishma wrote:
| > with the main difference being that in Windows 95/98/Me
| it no longer had an editor
|
| It was on the CD but it wasn't installed automatically.
| livrem wrote:
| I like to start up Dosbox-X or one of the virtual Amiga
| environments that comes bundled with Amiga forever. Definitely
| cozy.
|
| More often I use some old application, like the nowadays BSD-
| licensed ex-Autodesk Animator. It is fun to figure it out and
| more fun than modern applications in many ways. I even bought
| an old used book about it and read cover to cover. Limited
| compared to modern graphics software, but "cozy" is a great way
| to describe the experience.
|
| https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro
| kqr wrote:
| Because a computer is a general-purpose tool. A computer is not
| a box made to be cozy and support creative, limited programming
| work.
|
| If you're looking for specific use-cases, that's exactly what
| userland software is for. Userland software takes the general
| computer and converts it to something specific. If you are
| looking for a cozy environment that supports creative, limited
| programming work, you run userland software for that!
|
| It's like software-defined networking except software-defined
| creative environments. Some people prefer Photoshop, and others
| Picotron. The computer gives you the choice, and userland
| software is the mechanism by which it does so.
|
| If anything, I'd like to turn your observation around: isn't it
| marvellous that the same machine allows one person to run
| Photoshop and another Picotron, with almost no change required
| to switch between the two environments?
| newswasboring wrote:
| > A computer is not a box made to be cozy and support
| creative, limited programming work.
|
| That's a pretty hard line you have drawn there. There is no
| reason why it cannot be that. There are several open source
| window managers which tried to have a vibe. KDE had a cozy
| vibe. We have a Hanna Montana Linux, which was definitely
| awesome as a kid. I find it obnoxious that society has
| decided these infinitely flexible machines will have the
| personality of an iron smelter.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Well it's for the same reason that Twitter is popular:
| intentional limitations that cut everyone down to the same
| height make something approachable and feel friendly. Nobody
| can excel on the Picotron, so it's inviting to try because you
| won't be comparing your work to someone else who did something
| so much more impressive. Likewise in classical Twitter nobody
| could write a truly great tweet due to the character length
| limits, and that set the tone and encouraged everyone to get
| involved. Compare with blogging on something like Substack
| where people who might otherwise publish something end up
| comparing themselves to Scott Alexander or Matt Taibbi and
| concluding they can't compete.
|
| I think in computing there's the other issue that modern
| programming has a big focus on safety and security which was
| absent in the 8-bit era. If you sit down to make a Mac app
| you're not only going to compare your work to Apple's own, but
| you're also going to be constantly distracted by things that
| aren't "fun" like slow compilers, type systems, notarization
| and code signing etc. These are all important for people who
| use computers as end users but if you just want to hack about
| and make something they suck away the energy.
| mncharity wrote:
| > intentional limitations that cut everyone down to the same
| height make something approachable and feel friendly
|
| I wonder if generative ai might someday have a similar
| effect? Imagine a "make me a game" tool, with LLM-like
| "Fortnight, in space, with cute animals, and classical
| music". Ok... "the default music sync with action is fine,
| but as health declines, make the tone darker. And give my dog
| an oboe theme." Removing design-space cliffs, scattering
| defaults and highways, adding exoskeletons, as alternatives
| to shortened horizons. Kids today finger paint with pigments
| that would be the envy of painters past who ground their own
| - "use only charcoal" still has a role, but... there's also
| neon pens with sparkles for diaries, stamps in kid paint
| programs, and ... . Imagine a future coloring book, with
| speech to text to outline image, collaborative coloring, and
| "ok, now make that a 3D rigged avatar, skinned in the style
| of an oil painting". Making it easier to fly around the
| space, rather than lowering the ceiling.
| bitwize wrote:
| > Nobody can excel on the Picotron,
|
| Uhhh... have you _seen_ Pico-8 development. People can excel
| on that thing. The limitations make the achievements even
| more remarkable. If you want to see the excellence in coding,
| combine the two and check out the people who wrote BBC BASIC
| raytracers in a tweet. If anything, we 're in a glut of
| shitty code today partly because our comparatively powerful
| machines, combined with a race to the bottom in terms of
| churning product out quickly, make writing and shipping
| something extremely unoptimized far, far easier than taking
| time to polish the end product.
|
| I think you're onto something, in that the Pico-8 and
| Picotron are going for the "vibe" of retro home
| computer/console programming but are not capturing the true
| essence of it. With 8-bit home computers, you started off in
| BASIC and could build simple games and stuff -- but if you
| wanted to write anything performant then you had to drop down
| to assembly and there was a _significant_ difficulty spike
| there. So even back then we were dealing with "unfun" stuff.
| (In general, the enjoyment you got out of such work was
| proportional to the effort you put in.)
| richardjdare wrote:
| I agree, why do so many think that an immersive computer
| environment that makes the full power of the machine
| ergonomically ready-to-hand is some kind of retro thing? It
| sounds like a futuristic improvement to me. 40 years ago we had
| bicycles for the mind. Today I want a Kawasaki h2r for the
| mind, but the tech industry wants me to ride the bus.
| drchickensalad wrote:
| Limitations and difficulty are the foundations of creativity.
|
| Our current devices are almost unlimited.
| mncharity wrote:
| Others have mentioned a limitation-creativity link. But I
| wonder if there's also an implicit... "impedance match", to the
| current state of interface devices? "We'll make it more
| creative and popular by requiring physical punched cards! Think
| of the lovely chunkchunk-chunkity-chunk sounds!", or "You have
| to hand punch holes in paper tape!", would seem unlikely. On
| the other hand, decades-old ux is well matched to decades-old
| current keyboards.
|
| When I wanted my own laptop more "cozy", without the silliness
| of "you can only press two keys at a time, so no chords", and
| "most of it isn't a touch surface, and can't even tell which
| finger pressed were on the cap", and "it's oblivious to hand
| pose and gestures above the surface", and "the screen is only
| 2D and can't even tell where you're looking", I had to kludge
| the entire stack from hardware to apps. If you could sculpt,
| dance, and sing code, perhaps 8-bit might have less appeal?
| Like the appeal of entering programs with faceplate bit toggles
| instead of a keyboard?
|
| Maybe. Counter argument: pico-8 mobile/tablet. Counter counter,
| historical state of pico-8 mobile/tablet??
| RetroTechie wrote:
| > Others have mentioned a limitation-creativity link. But I
| wonder if there's also an implicit... "impedance match", to
| the current state of interface devices?
|
| No, it's a software (& hardware) design issue. Computers just
| aren't made to be tinker-friendly anymore.
|
| Eg. back in the day, I had a trio of
| editor+assembler+debugger on MSX2 (often running from
| RAMdisk). For many programs, edit-assemble-test cycles were a
| few minutes at most. With nothing loaded, machine would boot
| into BASIC seconds after power-up.
|
| So: develop _on_ target device, even with that being Z80
| based machine with ~256 KB RAM (which was already
| comfortable). Several vendors of these MSX machines would
| send you a full schematic / service manual for a nominal
| fee. Hardware mods were commonplace. Youngsters who'd never
| _touched_ a computer could be tweaking BASIC programs within
| an hour. With patience you could wrap your head around the
| whole machine.
|
| Nowadays: boot computer, wait, click on fancy icons. No
| default programming environment(s) in sight. 'Poke' some
| hardware port? Not happening. Modify _any_ of the built-in
| software? Forget about it. Or at best: first download
| multiple GB 's of development tools, spend the next week(s)
| buried in documentation. Not for the faint-hearted. Let alone
| newbies.
|
| Yes, computers have become faster. But also more complex.
| Some of that complexity is justified. Or even necessary. Much
| of it is not, and is just heaps & heaps of technologies /
| abstraction layers & legacy cruft.
| esbeeb wrote:
| When I use Raspberry Pi OS in a Raspberry Pi 4, 8GB of RAM - I
| feel I _already_ have an excellent, _refreshingly stable_ ,
| late-90s-era experience. It scratches that strange nostalgia itch
| for that more innocent experience - of early-times WIMP
| computing.
|
| I can surf the web, edit LibreOffice files, record audio in
| Audacity on my nice Rode microphone, watch video files in VLC,
| remotely VNC in, transfer files in and out over SSH's SFTP, etc.
|
| Pretty much all that's really missing, to fill it out, is Zoom
| (or some such functional equivalent) with a fast-enough frame
| rate on video calls. And this is not, strictly speaking, the
| fault of Raspberry Pi, et al.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| I used 8GB RAM till recently and I've found it more and more
| untenable. The primary issue is the browser. Even now on 16GB I
| restart Firefox every couple of days. But other things also eat
| RAM like crazy
|
| Running Emacs/Cider I'd have to kill other apps and reboot my
| REPL a couple times a day. Emacs would also leak memory and
| need a restart every couple of days
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Really? I can only hold one firefox session at a time in 8GB
| of RAM, but I've always assumed that's because I keep an
| unreasonable number of active+background tabs open.
| grimgrin wrote:
| i wish firefox had more granularity with its tab unloading
| feature. one method is restarting browser. but by default
| it'll unload tabs if you're low on memory. you can force em
| in about:unloads (hint- about:about if you ever forget)
|
| i wrote a simple firefox extension that unloads em all with a
| button click, but it's no different than restarting ff or
| spamming clicks in :unloads
| sitkack wrote:
| We already know the solution. We run the browser in Wasm
| inside the browser. That way it only has one tab open and
| that tab is doing 99% of its work inside of a wasm env. I
| thought firefox would ship new versions of firefox inside
| of firefox at some point. I guess that point is still in
| the future.
|
| This of course is how electron should work as well. A
| canvas only frame that loads whatever rendering system you
| want, which could be a browser, or it could be Unreal
| engine.
| ale42 wrote:
| Isn't this what SDL (https://www.libsdl.org/) is for?
| Some cross-platform (and pretty light) hardware
| abstraction where you can have a canvas, do 3D, audio,
| whatever...
| imiric wrote:
| I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, but assuming it's
| not...
|
| How many levels of abstraction do we need to run software
| reliably? The fact that browsers have effectively become
| operating systems should be worrying enough.
|
| No wonder we have all these fantasy projects that take us
| back to when our computing environments were actually
| pleasant to use. I would partly blame the invasive
| tracking and needless complexity of modern OSs for that,
| but the ever growing software layers around hardware
| makes no sense at all. We should question any such design
| decision, and strive to simplify this ball of complexity
| instead.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Try Sidebery extension.
| beagle3 wrote:
| There's AutoTabDiscard which lets you set a timeout and
| other rules for when to discard.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Is AutoTabDiscard still helpful/necessary with whatever
| automatic stuff Chrome/Firefox does nowadays? I run a lot
| of tabs (100s-1000s) and this sounds potentially very
| helpful if it does something beyond what the browser
| automatically does.
| beagle3 wrote:
| I think Firefox will delay loading on session resume
| (that is, if you restart Firefox, tabs will not load
| until you actually switch to them),but will not unload
| anything automatically - so if you open 200 tabs between
| restarts and keep them open (which I sometimes do, for a
| week or two until I close them) it makes a difference.
| persnickety wrote:
| 12GiB and copious swap. 4 profiles open with 50-100 tabs
| loaded at any time.
|
| The only problem is the accumulation of CPU use from web
| apps.
|
| Consider adding more swap space so that older tabs have an
| out-of-the-way place to stay.
| cabby wrote:
| 'Auto Tab Discard' was a game changer for me using firefox. I
| was about to upgrade to a 64gb laptop.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| it helps but strangely doesn't eliminate the problem
| entirely
| cabby wrote:
| Perhaps I don't see it on 32gb but can relate with
| cider/emacs.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I guess the primary issue is the chair-->keyboard interface.
| The fact that browsers can open unlimited number of tabs
| doesn't mean you don't have to do a little housekeeping.
|
| Plenty of people still use systems with 4GB and lower and it
| works fine as long as the number of tabs they open is
| limited.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| The primary issue is that browser developers are people
| that can afford kitted out Macbook pros so the system isn't
| designed to scale to small/weak systems :))
|
| I don't believe a browser couldn't be designed to have a
| small RAM footprint. All my tabs could be suspended and
| saved to disk when in the background (and not spinning any
| tasks). They can be read back into RAM near instantly when
| I tab back to them
| nolist_policy wrote:
| No, Firefox and/or raspberryos just not well engineered
| for this usecase.
|
| My Chromebook with 8Gb ram has dozens of tabs and web
| apps open in Chrome, runs one VM with Android and another
| VM with Linux in turn running Firefox and more. All
| without breaking a sweat.
| layer8 wrote:
| I run Firefox on 8 GB without any trouble whatsoever. But
| I also rarely open more than a dozen tabs.
| beagle3 wrote:
| I use Firefox on an 8GB, early 2013 MBP, with hundreds of
| tabs and an extension, AutoTabDiscard that
| unloads/suspends them after a couple of hours.
|
| Works beautifully. I have to restart the computer about
| once a month because of Catalina bugs, but Firefox is
| super stable.
| GTP wrote:
| > I have to restart the computer about once a month
| because of Catalina bugs
|
| I shut down my laptop at the end of the day and turn it
| back on the day after, regardless of bugs. Why do you try
| to reboot it as little as possible?
| Folcon wrote:
| I mean nominally that sounds like his preferred
| experience?
|
| I'm similar, I prefer maintaining state with things until
| I'm done with them, which makes the current models so
| frustrating, for all Apple talked about skeuomorphism,
| for me it's always felt so fake, it's only ever skin
| deep, I open a webpage and until I'm done with it, it
| should stay that way.
|
| I've navigated down a third of the page? I've partially
| filled in a form field? Keep it! There's probably a
| reason I put that there!
|
| It's not like when I put a piece of paper down on my desk
| it resets to it's original appearance and orientation
| every morning. It retains the scribbles and notes! Maybe
| you like someone else tidying your desk every morning,
| but I hate it!
|
| Real things exist, our memories exploit these properties
| so well and what do we get, software that's all about
| returning to some pristine state that makes it harder for
| me to recall and use.
|
| I'm curious if they're going to do this same thing with
| their spatial os, or whether they'll work out that
| persisting things until people are done with them is a
| feature.
| GTP wrote:
| I wasn't complaining about someone else's experience, I
| was just curious to see why he preferred it that way.
|
| Sometimes I also use stand-by or, if it is to keep the
| state up until the next day, hibernation. But that's
| rare. In most cases, I just use Firefox's function to
| restore my previous browsing session. That would not
| restore half-filled forms, but I rarely deal with forms,
| especially long ones. As for reading or editing
| documents, most software will open the document at the
| point you where when you last closed it.
| beagle3 wrote:
| It's my home computer. It's there to be used
| intermittently when needed at random times. It sleeps
| drawing almost zero power. Why should I shut it down?
|
| Shutdown takes 20 seconds. Startup requires the FileVault
| password, then 20-30 seconds, then a login, then another
| 20-30 seconds until desktop is usable (and a few more
| until Firefox is).
|
| If this was my work computer, it wouldn't be so
| inconvenient to restart / shutdown once a day. But for
| what reason?
| GTP wrote:
| I guess that the main difference then is that I have to
| wait less to boot my machine. Did you consider
| hibernation? It would be a bit slower than sand-by, but
| then it would draw exactly zero power.
| beagle3 wrote:
| The startup/shutdown time is possibly explained by being
| an 2013 machine, but I have little reason to replace it
| right now - it's only 8GB, old slow CPU (by modern
| standards), old slow SSD - but it does Firefox,
| thunderbird, the occasional Python script and a few more
| things perfectly well.
|
| I'll replace it when it breaks.
|
| With respect to power draw - there is no simple way to
| force hibernation on Catalina AFAIK, but the power draw
| in sleep is minuscule - it hardly registers on my
| wattmeter (and e.g. it loses only 2-3% percent per day of
| battery while sleeping).
| graemep wrote:
| NoScript and only turn on JS when required, and only for the
| site itself. Hugely reduces memory requirements
| cxr wrote:
| > 8GB of RAM [...] late-90s-era experience
|
| Not even close.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| I started my studies on 2003 and highest I could do was 768MB
| of RAM. I remember this amount exactly, because my LL(1)
| grammar compiler was leaking memory on my pre-presentation
| test, and I had to present it to pass the course. Every MB of
| memory counted, and it started swapping. I was praying to
| make it pass but when the amount of swap increased above the
| amount of RAM I gave up. However I was last in the queue to
| present, and the teacher told me he needs to go, as it was
| too late. I was so happy I barely could hold my laugh. Came
| to my dorm and fixed it next day. Core memory. That's how I
| also fell in love with my wife :D She was doing the extreme
| programming with me
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Moat of us had about 16 or 32mb at the time IIRC
| toddmorey wrote:
| Unless you had RAMDoubler(TM)! Remember that?!
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not even close, if you told that about a ESP32 based system
| then I would have agreed.
|
| My 2003 bought multimedia Athlon XP desktop had 512 MB!
| ale42 wrote:
| The PC I was using in the late 90s had probably 32 MB of RAM
| after an upgrade... when I built a PC (2001?) with 512 MB it
| was looking like an infinite amount of RAM...
| rvense wrote:
| I remember just laughing when I heard that Adobe had fixed
| a bug that occurred when running Photoshop in more than 1GB
| RAM on Mac OS 9. It seemed like such a theoretical thing to
| have that much memory.
| esbeeb wrote:
| Zoom alone takes 2.4GB of RAM, just after being launched and
| starting a meeting - and no-one's even joined the meeting
| yet.
| prmoustache wrote:
| You weren't born in that late 90's era right? :D
| esbeeb wrote:
| Correct. 70's
| seanc wrote:
| While all those pointing out that 8GB of RAM was mainframe
| stuff in the 90's are absolutely correct, I would offer that
| the software bloat between 90's software and modern software
| does make the _experience_ roughly comparable.
|
| Except for the built-in HDMI video and the seamless plug-n-play
| networking that is...
| ggm wrote:
| QR codes on cardboard slid under a cheap reader slot? cannot go
| past the 8 bit feel demanding some phsicality behind the thing.
| Lo-fi screen and giant buttons to mash..
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > CPU: 8M Lua VM insts / second
|
| Is that ballpark, or throttled for consistency? The FAQ has a
| "How Fast is the CPU?" item, but that just discusses being fast
| and faster than PICO-8.
| kaoD wrote:
| I bet throttled since PICO8 does that
| https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/CPU
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| It is throttled, although we're still working out the exact
| details.
|
| Practically, it's not significantly more headroom than PICO-8
| had because the screen is so much larger. You'll have to use a
| low resolution screen mode if you want to do CPU-heavy things
| that wouldn't fly in PICO-8.
| exitb wrote:
| It's a bit of a shame that it's apparently not fully compatible
| with PICO-8. I'd imagine it to be a perfect environment to create
| PICO-8 games.
| sitkack wrote:
| In what ways? Maybe there is a chance to change it!
| exitb wrote:
| Don't know the details, but apparently "[it's] not designed
| to run PICO-8 carts out of the box". PICO-8 has a really low
| resolution, lower than a Game Boy, which makes it a bit
| difficult to write code in.
| sitkack wrote:
| That would be really cool and a fitting level of meta if
| the Picotron could be used to develop PICO-8 games. I guess
| you could bolt a PICO-8 onto the side of the Picotron like
| one of those 90s console devkits.
| AlanYx wrote:
| One of the big differences is that Picotron supports floating
| point math whereas Pico-8 is all fixed point.
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| See https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php?page=faq
|
| > Picotron supports PICO-8 style shorthand syntax, almost the
| whole API, and other compatibility features that make it
| relatively easy to port PICO-8 cartridges. However, it is not
| designed to run PICO-8 carts out of the box, because the
| underlying machinery is quite different. For example,
| Picotron uses floating point numbers, and so can only
| approximate PICO-8's fixed point math behaviour.
| crq-yml wrote:
| I had a good time with PICO-8 - and I think it retains its core
| appeal - but I've moved on to "genuine" retro hardware with the
| new crop of machines like CX16, Mega65, or my personal choice,
| Agon Light. The specification ends up being tighter when there's
| a board design, chips and I/O ports, and these new machines, like
| Picotron, are relatively uncompromised in what they can achieve
| within the I/O spec. You can emulate them, talk to the hardware
| directly, run BASIC or C or Forth or whatever other language.
|
| Lua might be too slow to run interpreted on real 8-bits as in the
| Pico series, but it can be used as the base for a cross-compiler
| instead, and that presents a different spin on the specific
| coding challenge: Why not create an ultimate development
| environment, something that generates the precise code needed for
| that type of project? That's the direction that the highly
| optimized PICO-8 games took, and it is likewise seen in new demos
| for C64, Spectrum, A800 etc. - the "big hardware" is leveraged
| towards the old stuff in a way that can ignore the assumed
| paradigms of both.
| vintermann wrote:
| > Lua might be too slow to run interpreted on real 8-bits as in
| the Pico series
|
| Would it necessarily be all that much slower than Basic? It's a
| very small and othogonal design.
| benob wrote:
| There are efforts to port pico8 to microcontrollers, but the
| real problem with lua is memory (easily requires 4MB of
| memory which is only available on high-end microcontrollers).
|
| https://github.com/DavidVentura/PicoPico
| vintermann wrote:
| Ok, but which language feature(s) of Lua is it which
| inherently requires so much memory? I understand you
| wouldn't exactly get a 100% standards compliant
| implementation, but what are the hard parts?
| deivid wrote:
| With Lua's design, each bytecode operation requires a
| bunch of memory accesses, these microcontrollers only
| have a limited amount (~500KB) of SRAM, so you need to
| place this memory on PSRAM (RAM over SPI) which has
| "significant" latency for these microcontrollers.
|
| It's definitely possible to use standard Lua and run
| _some_ of the Pico8 games, but not all.
|
| Lua itself does not require a lot of memory, but PICO-8
| guarantees 2MiB of usable RAM
| lioeters wrote:
| There is a Lua implementation for microcontrollers called
| NodeMCU.
|
| > Lua based interactive firmware for ESP8266, ESP8285 and
| ESP32
|
| https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware
|
| A big difference I see between this Lua and PICO-8's is
| that the former is compiled, whereas the latter is
| interpreted.
|
| How it manages to run Lua with such limitations, the
| documentation of Lua Flash Store (LFS) goes into detail.
|
| > The ESP8266 has 96 Kb of data RAM, but half of this is
| used by the operating system, for stack and for device
| drivers such as for WiFi support; typically 44 Kb RAM is
| available as heap space for embedded applications. By
| contrast, the mapped flash ROM region can be up to 960
| Kb, that is over twenty times larger. Even though flash
| ROM is read-only for normal execution, there is also a
| "back-door" file-like API for erasing flash pages and
| overwriting them..
|
| > Lua's design goals of speed, portability, small kernel
| size, extensibility and ease-of-use make it a good choice
| for embedded use on an IoT platform, but with one major
| limitation: the standard Lua RTS assumes that both Lua
| data and code are stored in RAM, and this is a material
| constraint on a device with perhaps _44Kb free RAM and
| 512Kb free program ROM_.
|
| > The LFS feature modifies the Lua RTS to support a
| modified Harvard architecture by allowing the Lua code
| and its associated constant data to be executed directly
| out of flash ROM (just as the NoceMCU firmware is itself
| executed).
|
| > This enables NodeMCU Lua developers to create Lua
| applications with a region of flash ROM allocated to Lua
| code and read-only constants. The entire RAM heap is then
| available for Lua read-write variables and data for
| applications where all Lua is executed from LFS.
|
| https://nodemcu.readthedocs.io/en/release/lfs/
|
| That's still such a tiny amount of RAM, not nearly enough
| for PICO-8.
|
| ..Oh I see, the project PicoPico mentioned up-thread uses
| ESP32 Wrover with 4MB PSRAM - instead of Raspberry Pi
| Pico which it started with but didn't have enough RAM.
|
| Well, having just seen the entrance of the rabbit hole, I
| can imagine the attraction of PICO-8 and working with
| such constrained systems - what a challenge!
| deivid wrote:
| The constraints fuel creativity, but it also pushed me to
| start writing a Lua compiler for PicoPico, which shows
| promise but is also a massive scope creep and mostly the
| reason I've not worked on PicoPico for a while
| gjadi wrote:
| Nitpicking, according to Wikipedia, PSRAM is Pseudo-
| SRAM[1]. The fact that it's accessed through SPI is an
| implementation detail.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random-
| access_memory#P...
| boffinAudio wrote:
| As much as I love Lua its very difficult to shoe-horn into an
| 8-bit CPU, especially with limited RAM... but there are other
| efforts to bring more modern languages to these platforms,
| and one that strikes me as interesting is dflat, from
| 6502Nerd:
|
| https://github.com/6502Nerd/dflat/wiki
|
| (See language description here:
| https://github.com/6502Nerd/dflat/wiki/2.-Language-
| Descripti...)
|
| Maybe something like this could evolve/be adapted for
| continued modern development needs?
| thesnide wrote:
| I dream of a pico8 clone, but with forth instead of lua....
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| There are some forth WASM compilers, right?
|
| The Pico8-inspired TIC-80 project can use WASM, although
| it's a pretty heavy fantasy console too. The WASM-4
| project might be another option to look into.
| kelvinquee wrote:
| +1 My kids and I had a lot of fun with Pico-8, building simple
| games and learning basic geometry.
|
| The community (inherited from Pico-8) is already implementing
| cat/wget/grep[1] and, of course, Minesweeper[2] in Picotron!
| Whatever Joseph White/zep is building brings back the early
| days of Internet and IRC where the everybody builds and shares
| unashamedly while having a ton of fun!
|
| Thank you zep for making computing fun again for more mere
| mortals!
|
| [1]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=140771 [2]:
| https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=140678
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I'm curious how old your kids were when they started hacking
| on PICO-8 code?
|
| My son (7yo) likes block-based programming (using Scratch,
| Scratch Jr and Octostudio) and Minecraft, but I'm wondering
| what a smooth on-ramp might be for PICO-8 or similar.
|
| I got my first computer when I was about 10yo, so I was
| content to read through the books that came with it to learn
| the basics of BASIC and a little 6502 assembly. But I don't
| think that will work due to age, availability of other
| devices etc.
| krumpet wrote:
| My kids are 12 and 14 and I can't get them interested in
| coding beyond what they might do at school. They showed an
| interest in Scratch, but I believe I introduced it WAY too
| early. Moreover, it moved them too quickly past the
| creative aspects and into writing code. Also, years later,
| I showed them PICO-8 and they weren't terribly interested.
|
| In hindsight, I would recommend working with them at a
| young age (<10) to design game art and ideas. Then, the
| parent implements it and ports it to a portable platform.
| The child sees the creative aspects and the final output,
| but is shielded from the coding side in the early days. I
| imagine a child playing a game they designed on paper with
| crayons would be really satisfying. It would almost be like
| magic!
|
| Then, let the transition to the coding side happen more
| organically or through a school program or some such. Maybe
| when they finally ask, "So, parent, how do I actually code
| these games?"
|
| Just my non-data backed opinion...
| AlanYx wrote:
| That's what I've been doing with one of my kids. They're
| designing the sprites and maps in the PICO-8 sprite
| editor and I'm taking the lead on showing them how to do
| the rest.
|
| They've also enjoyed tweaking the sprites of existing
| PICO-8 games.
| otikik wrote:
| Yep. My 7yo son is the graphics and gameplay designer, I
| am the implementor
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Agon Light looks awesome! I like my ZxSpectrumNext a lot, so I
| appreciate these dedicated machines.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > but I've moved on to "genuine" retro hardware with the new
| crop of machines like CX16, Mega65, or my personal choice, Agon
| Light.
|
| I just wish these would move on from the same crop of retro
| CPUs (z80, 6502, _maybe_ 8080) and clone VDPs on FPGA. I want a
| retro- _style_ 2d /blit-based machine, but with more advanced
| hardware. Maybe a Cortex-M, z8000, 68000, low-end Risc-V, etc.
| Still give it BASIC in a boot ROM, but some more 90s style
| headroom to grow into.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is, I totally get that all these people
| grew up on Commodore 64s and are trying to recapture that
| magic. However, the Amiga/Atari/BeBox/etc hacking days shine
| way more with me.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I would love to see the alternate world in which the z8k or
| 68k were finished in time for use in the IBM PC. Intel is
| dominant today almost entirely due to the 8086 being
| available 6-12 months earlier than competing 16- and 32-bit
| processors.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I have to imagine that this is the purview of embedded 2D
| microprocessors / OSes like Linux4SAM.
|
| https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-
| tool/linux4sam.o...
|
| With well made compute modules:
| https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-
| technol...
|
| And open reference designs that fit on 4-layer boards (!!!!)
| despite using DDR2. Though I think most people would be more
| comfortable with 6-layer boards (which is possible with
| OSHPark today).
| rjsw wrote:
| I would start with the MIT CADR CPU in an FPGA and add modern
| hardware round it like Ethernet, USB host, 2d blitter, etc...
| qooiii2 wrote:
| Something like an STM32 Discovery board is a good option for
| recapturing the mid-90s magic. You can get a ~200-MHz
| Cortex-M4 or M7 with a few MB of flash, external SDRAM, and a
| display for less than $100. They have really basic hardware
| 2D accelerators.
|
| The on-chip peripherals are well-documented, but off-chip
| peripherals require some digging to figure out how to program
| correctly.
|
| You can debug with GDB surprisingly easily, or find a Forth
| to throw on there and just start poking registers.
| fgh wrote:
| As there are several available, is there one in particular
| that you would suggest for this use case?
| qooiii2 wrote:
| I liked the 32F746GDISCOVERY which is $56 at Digikey. It
| has a Cortex-M7 CPU, 1 MB built-in flash, 8 MB of SDRAM,
| and a 480x272-pixel touchscreen. Games can go on a
| microSD card. There's a USB OTG port you can use for
| input.
|
| A low-res screen like this works well because the chip
| can't rescale its video output.
|
| ST provides libraries for all the peripherals so it's
| pretty easy to jump in if you know C. I think microPython
| works on a lot of these boards, too.
| dragontamer wrote:
| No. Microcontrollers are the improper solution for this
| problem.
|
| You can run full blown Linux efficiently at 500MHz or
| 600MHz processors like STM32MP1 processors, powered by AA
| batteries or other small battery packs.
|
| There's also SAMA5D2, and a few other competitors in this
| space (both above, and below, the STM32MP1).
|
| When we're talking about "consoles", that's "plug-and-play
| executables", meaning you now want a proper compile /
| library -> ELF + loader == Linux kernel, security, etc.
| etc.
|
| Besides, a DDR2 chip gets you like 512MB of RAM for $4 and
| easily fits within the power-constraints of AA-batteries.
| There's very little benefit to going to the microwatt-scale
| devices like STM32 Discovery.
|
| ----------
|
| Microprocessors for the win. Entry-level MPUs exist for a
| reason, and there's a ton of them well below Rasp. Pi in
| terms of power / performance.
|
| There's many at the 2D level of graphical performance, but
| 500MHz is still a bit low for this. You'll probably want to
| reach into faster 1000MHz / 1GHz MPUs and push into
| STM32MP2 if you're reaching into 3d levels of performance.
| (Which is beginning to look like a cut-down cellphone chip
| really)
| qooiii2 wrote:
| I guess it depends on which part you think is fun. Using
| a big microcontroller is more about pushing the hardware
| to its limits. Using a small Linux system is about taking
| advantage of existing libraries. The Playdate has an
| STM32F7 and it seems to do pretty well as a console.
| Avshalom wrote:
| it looks like the agon light actually runs an _ez80_ which
| runs pretty fast and can address the whole 512k of ram
| without paging which does give you that sort of late-80s
| /early-90s headroom
| crq-yml wrote:
| The eZ80 is indeed quite fast, and the 24-bit space is a
| comfortable size for values as well as addressing - I've
| been working with it in Forth and haven't felt deeply
| constrained by that size(occasionally needing the double
| number operations, but nothing more than that). The
| graphics spec is a little bit below most 16-bits in terms
| of color depth, since it's VGA 2-bit per channel, but the
| screen resolutions also go quite high, so I expect a lot of
| 640x480x16 or 800x600x4 games.
|
| Meanwhile, the ESP32 acts as an ultimate co-processor
| through the VDU protocol inherited from the BBC Micro.
| That's a part of the architecture that I really appreciate,
| because it positions software design around the serial I/O
| and how effectively you delegate your tasks to the VDU.
| Early reactions from people who are used to 8-bit coding
| were a bit perplexed because they couldn't push a lot of
| stuff down that pipe, but as the firmware has developed,
| the ability to define complex, shader-like programs has
| also built up. Nothing stops you from describing, e.g., a
| tilemap engine in terms of a program that stores map data,
| tiles, and sprite assets in VDU buffers, and then launches
| a program to do all the array processing needed to blit the
| tiles and display the sprites when given a camera position.
|
| That's cool because it means that your graphics engine is
| decoupled from the CPU language. The same VDU sequences
| will work in Basic, assembly, Forth, C, etc.
| ikari_pl wrote:
| Mega65 is on FPGA exactly
| flykespice wrote:
| Enough already with retro hardware that reproduces the early
| 2d games aesthetic. We need to step up the game and make
| retro hardware that reproduces the early 3d aesthetic.
| the_af wrote:
| This is completely my subjective opinion, but I find "early
| 3D" ugly. In my opinion, pixel art has aged better. In
| fact, some of it still looks beautiful to me. But early 3D
| I find almost completely unappealing.
|
| About the only exceptions I can think of are some
| flightsims like SSI's Flanker (which had very complex
| graphics for being simply flat-shaded 3D) and the games
| that emulate this nowadays, like Tiny Combat Arena.
| qwery wrote:
| The development cost -- of the tooling and the games, let
| alone hardware! -- is too high. Additionally, 3D games
| aren't products of their host hardware as much as (older)
| pixel art games are/were.
| niutech wrote:
| You can run Commodore VIC or IBM PC wigh CP/M, MS-DOS,
| Windows 3.0, Linux ELKS on ESP32 using FabGL.
| jdboyd wrote:
| I think this is less people who grew up with C64s and more
| people who didn't trying to capture the magic without having
| to learn assembly or making sprites with graph paper and a
| hex editor.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Sure, but there was a whole other magic era that followed
| that. That also got to work with low-level assembler and
| direct framebuffer/video access. But wasn't constrained to
| 320x200x8 screens with pictograph fonts ("petscii") and
| POKE/PEEK.
|
| It had other limits to explore other than shoving as much
| as you could into 64k of memory and 1Mhz of processing
| power.
| klelatti wrote:
| Maybe check out the Colour Maximite 2 with a Cortex M-7 [1]
|
| Very much in the spirit of the early home computers (inc a
| decent BASIC) but with a lot more oomph.
|
| [1] https://geoffg.net/maximite.html
| mrspeaker wrote:
| I've been playing with this for 30 minutes, and I'm still smiling
| my head off. It's just so much fun. I have used Pico-8 a bunch in
| the past (so it was easy to jump into making stuff). Pico-8 is
| one of four bits of software that I put it in my basket of
| "software that sparks joy" along with Aesprite, Blender, and
| Propellorhead's Rebirth.
|
| Pico-8 had so much care put into its goals and intentional
| limitations: and so far Picotron seems to have that same level of
| love and thought. It's delightful, and I don't want to stop
| making things with it.
|
| I've used many of the clones of pico-8 and they all feel like
| they miss the point. They "improve" on the limitations, but are
| just... not satisfying. Funnily enough, I've tried _three times_
| to make my own JavaScript version of what Picotron is ( "what if
| I made a more feature-rich version of Pico-8 to use for
| prototyping in game jams?") and each time abandoned it because it
| felt like the Pico-8 clones: adequate, functional, but not
| inspirational.
|
| I don't know who makes Pico-8 and Picotron, but hats off to you
| amazing person/people for making such likable software!
| auto wrote:
| > "software that sparks joy"
|
| I too put Aesprite in this category, but the big one for me is
| Godot. After years of from-scratch OpenGl projects and dabbling
| with Unity, I leaned into Godot 100% around 2020, and ever
| since it has been my #1 joy-sparking piece of software.
| ilkke wrote:
| Around 2016 or so I had concluded that game dev has just
| stopped being fun, but luckily a friend talked me into trying
| pico-8. It's hard to describe what this little piece of
| software did for me, pure white magic! Just around New Year
| Godot finally 'clicked' for me and once again I am super
| excited to tinker and prototype. I'm almost too scared to try
| out Picotron now. Almost.
| xmonkee wrote:
| idk, i love Tic-80 way more. For me, the better aspect ratio,
| ability to use a different language, and not having to use a
| custom lua stdlib wins out
| olivier5199 wrote:
| Seems like this would be awesome on one of these Clockwork
| devices: https://www.clockworkpi.com/shop?page=2
| jabbany wrote:
| The uConsole advertises support for pico-8 so it seems like
| they had this in mind :)
| vinc wrote:
| It's not open source but it's really good looking, nice work!
| Quiark wrote:
| I'm just wondering if there's a toy project for implementing the
| operating system for a sci-fi spaceship. Would it run on
| Kubernetes?
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| About ten years ago, Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft,
| was working on a game called 0x10c which was going to be a sci-
| fi spaceship game where the various functions of the ship were
| controlled by 1980s-era computers, leaving the programming
| parts to the player to build. There was a community that spung
| up that wrote code, device drivers, etc. An interesting idea
| that died on the vine.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c
| https://github.com/lucaspiller/dcpu-specifications
| lenerdenator wrote:
| luv me 80s/90s computing aesthetics, 'ate 'aving to deal with the
| 'ardware to run software that 'as them, simple as.
| btreecat wrote:
| > luv me 80s/90s computing aesthetics, 'ate 'aving to deal with
| the 'ardware to run software that 'as them, simple as.
|
| Late shaving cardware Roombas
| twoquestions wrote:
| Man this feels great to me. The Pico-8 feels a bit too old-school
| and janky to me despite being a great bit of software, the
| picotron feels a lot more like my childhood. I'm excited to start
| playing with it!
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > Picotron apps can be made with built-in tools, and shared with
| other users in a special 256k png cartridge format.
|
| I'm noticing a trend of newer indie software distributing assets
| in png files, what's with that?
| lynndotpy wrote:
| it's fun and easy to share :)
| corytheboyd wrote:
| In a world full of SERIOUS BUSINESS ALL THE TIME it's nice to
| see something decide to be fun for the sake of it. It's a
| cool digital homage to cartridges, which are basically also
| rectangles with cool graphics on them that run a game.
| acomjean wrote:
| I would be fun to be able to take a picture of the png and
| have it load up the application. I know it's more of desktop
| thing.
|
| But even emailing scripts for work got flagged. This png
| format would probably avoid that.
|
| Also good thing it's lossless. Other wise those multiple save
| jpg artifacts could cause interesting bugs.
| binarycrusader wrote:
| _Other wise those multiple save jpg artifacts could cause
| interesting bugs._
|
| There's a whole subculture that embraces glitches in
| gaming, graphics, etc. Folks run around collecting
| screenshots and videos of these ephemeral artifacts. It's
| fairly complementary to speedrunning gaming culture.
| packetlost wrote:
| Picotron is by the same person as PICO-8 which is, to my
| knowledge, what made fantasy consoles popular.
| lioeters wrote:
| Aside from the fun factor of an image containing a runnable
| game/program, the PNG format is lossless, uses the same
| compression algorithm as ZIP, with encode/decode libraries in
| various languages. That makes it a good candidate for an
| application data format.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| It's fun, mostly. Also, PNG has a handy alpha channel you can
| use to store data. I believe the previous console from this
| developer, PICO-8, started the trend.
| ListeningPie wrote:
| Are there any apps made for pico (other than games) that have
| broken through to the mainstream?
| tomku wrote:
| Depends on your definition of "mainstream" I guess, but
| picoCAD[1] got some attention outside of the PICO-8 world.
| Edit: Including here on HN[2]!
|
| [1]: https://johanpeitz.itch.io/picocad
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101251
| mrpf1ster wrote:
| I believe the game Celeste started as a PICO-8 prototype
| drcode wrote:
| I like the idea of using constraints from hardware to drive
| software design, but the thing that always bothered me about
| pico-8 is that a lot of the model isn't fully constrained: As far
| as I could tell, the amount of memory available through the
| pico-8 lua interpreter is unbounded, controlled by the host OS.
|
| Anybody know if the picotron is more tightly bounded in this way
| when it comes to memory usage in the programming system, and
| elsewhere, to turn it into a "true" constrained environment?
| Taikonerd wrote:
| Minor quibble about this screenshot:
| https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/wip/picotron_desktop2.png
|
| The wallpaper is named "triplane," but that's a biplane.
| dohello1 wrote:
| PICO-8 I think has it's place still
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Looking at this page makes me wonder if Mario Paint could be
| considered a "fantasy workstation".
| TeaDude wrote:
| It's a fun little thing but BEWARE! It's still a bit buggy and
| crashy* and rough around the edges. You can _kinda_ see what Zep
| is going for but a lot of it is quite mysterious and there 's
| little in the way of API docs (as-in, people are having to print
| all the global lua tables to figure out how to do stuff)
|
| *Not as much as 0.1a but there's still kinks to be worked out for
| 0.1c.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I stopped reading fast once I realized they don't know what the
| relevant (and multi-decades-old by now) terms mean, or, simply
| didn't care if they abused them or confused people. Time too
| precious to waste on this.
| tombert wrote:
| I'm a bit confused. I was about to buy this, but when I logged
| into my account, it looks like I already own it? At least the
| alpha.
|
| I already owned a legit copy of Pico-8 and Voxatron...do I get it
| automatically?
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