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Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

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Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#171

Post by mncharity »

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?

Others have mentioned a limitation-creativity link. But I wonder if there's also an implicit... "impedance match", to the current state of interface devices? "We'll make it more creative and popular by requiring physical punched cards! Think of the lovely chunkchunk-chunkity-chunk sounds!", or "You have to hand punch holes in paper tape!", would seem unlikely. On the other hand, decades-old ux is well matched to decades-old current keyboards.

When I wanted my own laptop more "cozy", without the silliness of "you can only press two keys at a time, so no chords", and "most of it isn't a touch surface, and can't even tell which finger pressed were on the cap", and "it's oblivious to hand pose and gestures above the surface", and "the screen is only 2D and can't even tell where you're looking", I had to kludge the entire stack from hardware to apps. If you could sculpt, dance, and sing code, perhaps 8-bit might have less appeal? Like the appeal of entering programs with faceplate bit toggles instead of a keyboard?

Maybe. Counter argument: pico-8 mobile/tablet. Counter counter, historical state of pico-8 mobile/tablet??

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#172

Post by xmonkee »

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…

idk, i love Tic-80 way more. For me, the better aspect ratio, ability to use a different language, and not having to use a custom lua stdlib wins out

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#173

Post by crq-yml »

Avshalom wrote: post #165
deaddodo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

it looks like the agon light actually runs an ez80 which runs pretty fast and can address the whole 512k of ram without paging which does give you that sort of late-80s/early-90s headroom

The eZ80 is indeed quite fast, and the 24-bit space is a comfortable size for values as well as addressing - I've been working with it in Forth and haven't felt deeply constrained by that size(occasionally needing the double number operations, but nothing more than that). The graphics spec is a little bit below most 16-bits in terms of color depth, since it's VGA 2-bit per channel, but the screen resolutions also go quite high, so I expect a lot of 640x480x16 or 800x600x4 games.

Meanwhile, the ESP32 acts as an ultimate co-processor through the VDU protocol inherited from the BBC Micro. That's a part of the architecture that I really appreciate, because it positions software design around the serial I/O and how effectively you delegate your tasks to the VDU. Early reactions from people who are used to 8-bit coding were a bit perplexed because they couldn't push a lot of stuff down that pipe, but as the firmware has developed, the ability to define complex, shader-like programs has also built up. Nothing stops you from describing, e.g., a tilemap engine in terms of a program that stores map data, tiles, and sprite assets in VDU buffers, and then launches a program to do all the array processing needed to blit the tiles and display the sprites when given a camera position.

That's cool because it means that your graphics engine is decoupled from the CPU language. The same VDU sequences will work in Basic, assembly, Forth, C, etc.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#174

Post by TeaDude »

It's a fun little thing but BEWARE! It's still a bit buggy and crashy* and rough around the edges. You can kinda see what Zep is going for but a lot of it is quite mysterious and there's little in the way of API docs (as-in, people are having to print all the global lua tables to figure out how to do stuff)

*Not as much as 0.1a but there's still kinks to be worked out for 0.1c.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#175

Post by jamesgeck0 »

thesnide wrote: post #160
boffinAudio wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

There are some forth WASM compilers, right?

The Pico8-inspired TIC-80 project can use WASM, although it’s a pretty heavy fantasy console too. The WASM-4 project might be another option to look into.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#176

Post by jamesgeck0 »

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, mostly. Also, PNG has a handy alpha channel you can use to store data. I believe the previous console from this developer, PICO-8, started the trend.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#177

Post by jamesgeck0 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #29

> CPU: 8M Lua VM insts / second Is that ballpark, or throttled for consistency? The FAQ has a "How Fast is the CPU?" item, but that just discusses being fast and faster than PICO-8.

It is throttled, although we’re still working out the exact details.

Practically, it’s not significantly more headroom than PICO-8 had because the screen is so much larger. You’ll have to use a low resolution screen mode if you want to do CPU-heavy things that wouldn’t fly in PICO-8.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#178

Post by flykespice »

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…

Enough already with retro hardware that reproduces the early 2d games aesthetic. We need to step up the game and make retro hardware that reproduces the early 3d aesthetic.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#179

Post by the_af »

flykespice wrote: post #178
deaddodo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Enough already with retro hardware that reproduces the early 2d games aesthetic. We need to step up the game and make retro hardware that reproduces the early 3d aesthetic.

This is completely my subjective opinion, but I find "early 3D" ugly. In my opinion, pixel art has aged better. In fact, some of it still looks beautiful to me. But early 3D I find almost completely unappealing.

About the only exceptions I can think of are some flightsims like SSI's Flanker (which had very complex graphics for being simply flat-shaded 3D) and the games that emulate this nowadays, like Tiny Combat Arena.

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