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Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

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Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#71

Post by boffinAudio »

vintermann wrote: post #51
crq-yml wrote: post #42

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 emula…

> 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.

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?

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#72

Post by vintermann »

benob wrote: post #54
vintermann wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

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?

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#74

Post by mike_hearn »

bitwize wrote: post #15

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?

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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#76

Post by nolist_policy »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #68
prmoustache wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#77

Post by rvense »

ale42 wrote: post #61
pjmlp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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...

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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#78

Post by esbeeb »

prmoustache wrote: post #56
esbeeb wrote: post #25

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 ov…

You weren't born in that late 90's era right? :D

Correct. 70's

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#79

Post by esbeeb »

pjmlp wrote: post #43
esbeeb wrote: post #25

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 ov…

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!

Zoom alone takes 2.4GB of RAM, just after being launched and starting a meeting - and no-one's even joined the meeting yet.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#80

Post by pjmlp »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #63
devjab wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I consider XCode's price to be included in Apple's margins.
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