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Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

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Re: Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

#21

Post by derefr »

mntmoss wrote: post #13
derefr wrote: post #6

I'd love a PICO-16: a fantasy console almost-but-not-quite like a GBA, extended in some ways (e.g. resolution, sound channels) and reduced in others (e.g. palette, maximum ROM size.) There are tons of these little "retro console" devices lately—the Bittboy, LDK-game, etc.—that people just treat as emulation devices, when they actually have hidden potential for running native game software as well, with more power tha…

I'm working on something like this, but as time has gone on I've made technical constraint less of a priority and focused more and more on the I/O and "bus" model itself, because that's where the ultimate bottlenecks lie. If you have all the processing power in the world but only a 256x256 space to draw in and a limited number of commands to draw with, you still have an interesting constraint. One of the things I fou…

Very cool! Have a page or repo up to follow your work?

Re: Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

#22

Post by WorldMaker »

mntmoss wrote: post #13
derefr wrote: post #6

I'd love a PICO-16: a fantasy console almost-but-not-quite like a GBA, extended in some ways (e.g. resolution, sound channels) and reduced in others (e.g. palette, maximum ROM size.) There are tons of these little "retro console" devices lately—the Bittboy, LDK-game, etc.—that people just treat as emulation devices, when they actually have hidden potential for running native game software as well, with more power tha…

I'm working on something like this, but as time has gone on I've made technical constraint less of a priority and focused more and more on the I/O and "bus" model itself, because that's where the ultimate bottlenecks lie. If you have all the processing power in the world but only a 256x256 space to draw in and a limited number of commands to draw with, you still have an interesting constraint. One of the things I fou…

Neat. Obviously swappable cores in cartridges were a big part of the longevity of the NES and SNES consoles, and it will be interesting to see what sorts of trade-offs you decide to make for the various cores (and their interactions).

Re: Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

#23

Post by sjs382 »

derefr wrote: post #6

I'd love a PICO-16: a fantasy console almost-but-not-quite like a GBA, extended in some ways (e.g. resolution, sound channels) and reduced in others (e.g. palette, maximum ROM size.) There are tons of these little "retro console" devices lately—the Bittboy, LDK-game, etc.—that people just treat as emulation devices, when they actually have hidden potential for running native game software as well, with more power tha…

Panic, the mac app development group, is making a custom handheld console for original retro-ish games: https://play.date/

Re: Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

#24

Post by pjc50 »

michaelbrave wrote: post #10

this might be childish wishful thinking, but I'd love to make something like that but with a physical console also. Share the software created between the physical console and the fantasy console, maybe allow alternate software evolutions (imagine an internet that diverges with something other than html). It's a fun little daydream at least

There's lots of possibilities with Arduino or similar hooked up to small LCD displays. Unfortunately HDMI output makes a system no longer simple.

Re: Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

#25

Post by tcbawo »

David Murray (The 8-bit Guy) and others are building an expandable, C64ish computer with sourceable parts and modern I/O connectivity (eg. VGA). They're calling it Commander X16. It's very early, but it looks promising as a retro gaming/educational platform. Due to hardware limitations (eg 6502-based CPU), it will probably be fairly limited to Basic and assembly programming and w/o networking capability. But, it will be expandable, so who knows. I think they will eventually have a Kickstarter. Should be a lot of fun!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ayh0qebfD2g

Re: Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

#26

Post by Impossible »

I'm a huge Pico-8 fan and suggest that anyone that is interested in Pico-8 watch Joseph White's (the creator) Practice (NYU game designer conference) talk about the design philosophy of Pico-8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jfTIWosBw. The TLDW of the talk is that he explicitly tried to built a "cozy" game development environment with enough constraints in place to encourage creativity without the stress of starting from a completely blank canvas.

At the end Scott Hanselman has a footnote about building or buying a physical Pico-8 console. One thing that is missing is most Pico-8 consoles focus on the play aspect of Pico-8, not the creation aspect of Pico-8 which is just as important to me if not more so. I own a PocketCHIP and the device is a decent handheld computer, but there are many aspects of it that make it painful to use, not due to the form factor but due to the quality of various components. The keyboard is bad although there are a variety of solutions, including 3D printed covers (https://www.thingiverse.com/glitchpudding/collections/pocket...) or rubber feet (https://androidarts.com/Amiga/PRBOOM.jpg). The quality of the screen and touch is also not great, so it was hard for me to draw pixel art on the device.

I'd like to build a custom handheld computer primarily for Pico-8 development built around this display https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/hyperpixel-4-square, probably using a Raspberry Pi Zero. One of my issues with Pocketchip was that the entire system felt kind of slow\high latency and more compute might be one of the only fixes for that, so rpi zero might not cut it. I'd probably have to print my own case and I still haven't found a great keyboard solution. The best option I've seen is Teensy Thumb keyboard (https://www.pjrc.com/handheld-tactile-switch-keyboard/), but I might go with a standard bluetooth thumb keyboard. If anyone on HN has built a handheld computer or has good resources I'd love to hear about it. My goal is to get something that feels like a Nintendo handheld (Switch, DS, GB) with good feeling physical thumb keyboard and can also be used to draw pixel art.

Re: Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

#27

Post by derefr »

sjs382 wrote: post #23
derefr wrote: post #6

I'd love a PICO-16: a fantasy console almost-but-not-quite like a GBA, extended in some ways (e.g. resolution, sound channels) and reduced in others (e.g. palette, maximum ROM size.) There are tons of these little "retro console" devices lately—the Bittboy, LDK-game, etc.—that people just treat as emulation devices, when they actually have hidden potential for running native game software as well, with more power tha…

Panic, the mac app development group, is making a custom handheld console for original retro-ish games: https://play.date/

AFAICT the Playdate is actually an instantiation of a less powerful abstract machine than even the PICO-8; closer to an Arduboy.

Re: Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

#28

Post by Impossible »

Moru wrote: post #19
xahrepap wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish you could configure your constraints. I understand why you can't. But I just want unlimited tiles and map sizes. :)

When I was looking around the fantasy computers, I found one that was configurable. It had presets for different popular machines. I saved the link and closed the rest but when I was about to start I realised I saved the wrong one and I haven't been able to find it again. Did I just dream it? The one I started on instead was tic-80.

PixelVision8:

https://www.pixelvision8.com/

Found it via this list https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy.

Re: Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

#29

Post by brianpgordon »

derefr wrote: post #6

I'd love a PICO-16: a fantasy console almost-but-not-quite like a GBA, extended in some ways (e.g. resolution, sound channels) and reduced in others (e.g. palette, maximum ROM size.) There are tons of these little "retro console" devices lately—the Bittboy, LDK-game, etc.—that people just treat as emulation devices, when they actually have hidden potential for running native game software as well, with more power tha…

The open-source TIC-80 is a less-constrained fantasy console if you're not aware:

https://tic.computer/

Re: Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

#30

Post by derefr »

brianpgordon wrote: post #29
derefr wrote: post #6

I'd love a PICO-16: a fantasy console almost-but-not-quite like a GBA, extended in some ways (e.g. resolution, sound channels) and reduced in others (e.g. palette, maximum ROM size.) There are tons of these little "retro console" devices lately—the Bittboy, LDK-game, etc.—that people just treat as emulation devices, when they actually have hidden potential for running native game software as well, with more power tha…

The open-source TIC-80 is a less-constrained fantasy console if you're not aware: https://tic.computer/

It's not really "less constrained" in any way that matters, though. Sure, you can write more than 8K of Lua and the display resolution is a bit wider, but you don't get a dedicated DSP+sequencer for audio, multiple graphics layers with affine transforms/color math, SRAM(!), a real-time clock, etc. I can't even build a Tamagotchi with this ;)

In other words, for my needs, TIC-80 is still entirely dominated by just using https://github.com/rust-console/gba to write GBA homebrew in Rust. (And everything has a GBA emulator. Everything!)

A viable PICO-16 platform, to me, would have to offer a clear improvement over the "GBA homebrew in Rust" solution.

(Even if all it is, come to think of it, is the GBA's ARM7TDMI ISA extended with some more hardware registers and instructions, and a PICO-8-like IDE for building those "GBA+" ROMs. Such an approach would come with the benefit that you could build a PICO-16 runtime by just starting with a GBA emulator and adding features. You could even choose encodings for the new ops such that they would look like NOPs to old GBA emulators, making PICO-16 "GBA+" ROMs gracefully degrade into regular GBA ROMs when run on a regular GBA emulator—very much like how Gameboy Color games work, or how SNES ROMhacks and homebrew support the MSU-1 audio chip.)

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