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Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

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Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#151

Post by gjadi »

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…

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...

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#152

Post by AlanYx »

krumpet wrote: post #146
rahimnathwani wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 ( Then, le…

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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#154

Post by qooiii2 »

deaddodo wrote: post #122
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…

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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#155

Post by auto »

mrspeaker wrote: post #47

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 f…

> "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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#156

Post by CobaltFire »

James-Livesey wrote: post #94
tazu wrote: post #2

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

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

Somehow having a Ranma 1/2 picture open in a window fits absolutely perfectly with my actual young life.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#157

Post by mncharity »

mike_hearn wrote: post #74
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 leng…

> 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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#159

Post by binarycrusader »

acomjean wrote: post #148
lynndotpy wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's fun and easy to share :)

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.

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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#160

Post by thesnide »

boffinAudio wrote: post #71
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.

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 evol…

I dream of a pico8 clone, but with forth instead of lua....
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