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Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

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Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#191

Post by qooiii2 »

fgh wrote: post #169
qooiii2 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As there are several available, is there one in particular that you would suggest for this use case?

I liked the 32F746GDISCOVERY which is $56 at Digikey. It has a Cortex-M7 CPU, 1 MB built-in flash, 8 MB of SDRAM, and a 480x272-pixel touchscreen. Games can go on a microSD card. There's a USB OTG port you can use for input.

A low-res screen like this works well because the chip can't rescale its video output.

ST provides libraries for all the peripherals so it's pretty easy to jump in if you know C. I think microPython works on a lot of these boards, too.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#192

Post by qwery »

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.

The development cost -- of the tooling and the games, let alone hardware! -- is too high. Additionally, 3D games aren't products of their host hardware as much as (older) pixel art games are/were.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#193

Post by bitwize »

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…

> Nobody can excel on the Picotron,

Uhhh... have you seen Pico-8 development. People can excel on that thing. The limitations make the achievements even more remarkable. If you want to see the excellence in coding, combine the two and check out the people who wrote BBC BASIC raytracers in a tweet. If anything, we're in a glut of shitty code today partly because our comparatively powerful machines, combined with a race to the bottom in terms of churning product out quickly, make writing and shipping something extremely unoptimized far, far easier than taking time to polish the end product.

I think you're onto something, in that the Pico-8 and Picotron are going for the "vibe" of retro home computer/console programming but are not capturing the true essence of it. With 8-bit home computers, you started off in BASIC and could build simple games and stuff -- but if you wanted to write anything performant then you had to drop down to assembly and there was a significant difficulty spike there. So even back then we were dealing with "unfun" stuff. (In general, the enjoyment you got out of such work was proportional to the effort you put in.)

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#194

Post by bitwize »

kqr wrote: post #65
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?

Because a computer is a general-purpose tool. A computer is not a box made to be cozy and support creative, limited programming work. If you're looking for specific use-cases, that's exactly what userland software is for. Userland software takes the general computer and converts it to something specific. If you are looking for a cozy environment that supports creative, limited programming work, you run userland softw…

"Cozy" and "general purpose" are not mutually exclusive. Emacs is very cozy, and it can do frickin' everything.

(Maybe Emacs is not cozy to you. But the fact that it is to a significant number of people explains why it still has fans in a world where Visual Studio Code is eating everything.)

Picotron is supposed to emulate a particular form of cozy: that of the very general-purpose computers of the 1980s and 1990s: classic Mac, Amiga, Atari ST, even Windows. What I'm lamenting is a sort of fall from grace wherein even Microsoft, of all companies, tried to shape the computing environment to bring support and comfort to the user rather than exploit them and introduce churn and friction for its own sake.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#195

Post by lioeters »

deivid wrote: post #132
lioeters wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

The constraints fuel creativity, but it also pushed me to start writing a Lua compiler for PicoPico, which shows promise but is also a massive scope creep and mostly the reason I've not worked on PicoPico for a while

Ah, I just found your blog posts about PicoPico, wonderful! I'm going to enjoy reading them and perusing the code. Good stuff.

https://blog.davidv.dev/making-a-handheld-pico8-console-part...

https://blog.davidv.dev/pico8-console-part-2-performance.htm...

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#196

Post by AstroJetson »

klelatti wrote: post #188
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…

Maybe check out the Colour Maximite 2 with a Cortex M-7 [1] Very much in the spirit of the early home computers (inc a decent BASIC) but with a lot more oomph. [1] https://geoffg.net/maximite.html

I have one of the originals and spent hours messing around with it. It's a great little computer and MMBasic is pretty nice. Thanks for the memory reminder.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#197

Post by xgkickt »

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…

I’ve often thought the TMS340X0 series would make a good hobby target.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#198

Post by grimgrin »

beagle3 wrote: post #141
user_7832 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is AutoTabDiscard still helpful/necessary with whatever automatic stuff Chrome/Firefox does nowadays? I run a lot of tabs (100s-1000s) and this sounds potentially very helpful if it does something beyond what the browser automatically does.

I think Firefox will delay loading on session resume (that is, if you restart Firefox, tabs will not load until you actually switch to them),but will not unload anything automatically - so if you open 200 tabs between restarts and keep them open (which I sometimes do, for a week or two until I close them) it makes a difference.

If you toggle this it will automatically unload, thought I'm not sure how low memory has to get before it triggers: browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory

In my original comment above I wrongly assumed it _was_ on by default

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#199

Post by OOPMan »

the_af wrote: post #179
flykespice wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Are…

Early 3d generally hasn't aged as well, probably due to extremely low resolution textures and so forth.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#200

Post by rjsw »

xgkickt wrote: post #197
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…

I’ve often thought the TMS340X0 series would make a good hobby target.

They were interesting to program for.

I started using a graphics card with a 34010 before there were tools available for it. I did ports of GNU binutils (gas and ld) to target it then wrote some firmware in assembler for an X11 server to call to do basic tasks like filling rectangles, line drawing, copying with colour expansion for displaying fonts.

Still have the ISA card but haven't powered up the machine it is in for a long time.

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