Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

lexaloffle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 208 posts

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#121

Post by seanc »

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…

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...

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#122

Post by deaddodo »

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…

> 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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#123

Post by beagle3 »

GTP wrote: post #99
beagle3 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

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?

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#125

Post by Narishma »

p_l wrote: post #93
rob74 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 with…

"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 inc…

> 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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#126

Post by lioeters »

deivid wrote: post #84
vintermann wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 guaran…

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!

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#127

Post by corytheboyd »

lynndotpy wrote: post #116
r3trohack3r wrote: post #114

> 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?

it's fun and easy to share :)

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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#128

Post by GTP »

beagle3 wrote: post #123
GTP wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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 / shutd…

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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#129

Post by btreecat »

lenerdenator wrote: post #110

luv me 80s/90s computing aesthetics, 'ate 'aving to deal with the 'ardware to run software that 'as them, simple as.

> 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

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#130

Post by drcode »

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?

Post reply on HN