Show HN: R-cade, a simple arcade game engine for Racket

This looks awesome! I have a brother-in-law who is 15 (gosh he's getting so old) and who is frighteningly intelligent. He spends most of his free time hooking up relays to a raspberry pi to control an array of Christmas lights. I'll forward this repo to him; I've been trying to get him to start experimenting with Racket. This might just be the ticket.

I think Racket is a wonderful language for education, and this library will certainly help a lot more kids find interest in learning Racket. When I first started programming, I wrote a lot of games with ASCII art in Perl. They were not fast, but I learned a bunch! If I had had this, I would have picked up a LISP much sooner.

Take a look at music.rkt (the very end), there's an example of doing just that with the Tetris theme song. It's what I would use to test different sound waves, envelopes, note parsing, etc.

Edit: I was thinking of pulling the RIFF/WAV code out into its own package. Let me know if this is something you'd find useful.

Looks awesome! I’m currently teaching Racket in my undergraduate PL course and I was just looking for something graphical to show them. I’ll try this in a week or two!

Is anyone familiar with the stand-alone executable export[1] for Racket?

I did a Ludum Dare and browsed a submission where a child had spent a lot of time and effort making a project in PyGame, but found it hard to distribute because he didn’t have the technical know how of converting it to something like a windows `.exe` file at the time. If this helps youngsters learn and explore programming the way the Commodore 64 had a nice BASIC->6502 ramp alongside distribution via floppy/cassette, I’d be super excited about this.

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/raco/exe.html

I think it is a lot easier now, particularly with the license change to MIT.