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Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

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81–90 of 208 posts

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#81
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wish firefox had more granularity with its tab unloading feature. one method is restarting browser. but by default it’ll unload tabs if you’re low on memory. you can force em in about:unloads (hint- about:about if you ever forget) i wrote a simple firefox extension that unloads em all with a button click, but it’s no different than restarting ff or spamming clicks in :unloads

We already know the solution. We run the browser in Wasm inside the browser. That way it only has one tab open and that tab is doing 99% of its work inside of a wasm env. I thought firefox would ship new versions of firefox inside of firefox at some point. I guess that point is still in the future. This of course is how electron should work as well. A canvas only frame that loads whatever rendering system you want, w…

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, but assuming it's not...

How many levels of abstraction do we need to run software reliably? The fact that browsers have effectively become operating systems should be worrying enough.

No wonder we have all these fantasy projects that take us back to when our computing environments were actually pleasant to use. I would partly blame the invasive tracking and needless complexity of modern OSs for that, but the ever growing software layers around hardware makes no sense at all. We should question any such design decision, and strive to simplify this ball of complexity instead.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#82
post #65
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…

> A computer is not a box made to be cozy and support creative, limited programming work.

That's a pretty hard line you have drawn there. There is no reason why it cannot be that. There are several open source window managers which tried to have a vibe. KDE had a cozy vibe. We have a Hanna Montana Linux, which was definitely awesome as a kid. I find it obnoxious that society has decided these infinitely flexible machines will have the personality of an iron smelter.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#84
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 guarantees 2MiB of usable RAM

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I run Firefox on 8 GB without any trouble whatsoever. But I also rarely open more than a dozen tabs.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIC-80 is cool, but it's a clone of PICO-8, and like Doom clones, some of them are great, but they're still not Doom.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that TIC-80 is not as great as PICO-8 is, and I would never recommend it over PICO-8 to someone who wants to start their adventure with game development. But it is not a clone of PICO-8. It offers a resolution that's very similar to that of the Game Boy Advance, so it serves as a nice transition stage towards GBA development. You can then enjoy your games on a console like Anbernic RG3…

Just for information. The Powkitty rgb30 is the current defacto pico8 handheld because of it's 1x1 ratio screen running at 720x720 pixels.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#87
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I run Firefox on 8 GB without any trouble whatsoever. But I also rarely open more than a dozen tabs.

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.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used 8GB RAM till recently and I've found it more and more untenable. The primary issue is the browser. Even now on 16GB I restart Firefox every couple of days. But other things also eat RAM like crazy Running Emacs/Cider I'd have to kill other apps and reboot my REPL a couple times a day. Emacs would also leak memory and need a restart every couple of days

i wish firefox had more granularity with its tab unloading feature. one method is restarting browser. but by default it’ll unload tabs if you’re low on memory. you can force em in about:unloads (hint- about:about if you ever forget) i wrote a simple firefox extension that unloads em all with a button click, but it’s no different than restarting ff or spamming clicks in :unloads

There’s AutoTabDiscard which lets you set a timeout and other rules for when to discard.

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#89
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…

I used 8GB RAM till recently and I've found it more and more untenable. The primary issue is the browser. Even now on 16GB I restart Firefox every couple of days. But other things also eat RAM like crazy Running Emacs/Cider I'd have to kill other apps and reboot my REPL a couple times a day. Emacs would also leak memory and need a restart every couple of days

[flagged]

Re: Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation

#90
post #39
post #4

Pico-8 was and is one of the most pleasant pieces of software I have used. I can only imagine the wonders the community will produce for this thing. Of course, despite the machine itself (pico 8 that is, and this thing too) being proprietary, all the user-programs are source-available if not open source. It's really educational and I love it. There will be compatible implementations of this thing, but the pico-8 tool…

Can you – or someone else – write about why Pico-8 is so much better than other fantasy consoles? In particular, I've been intrigued by WASM-4 recently, and someone else mentioned TIC-80 which also looks good. I remember reading about Pyxel and getting inspired. All three of those have the benefit of being free, so why would I pay for Pico-8?

PICO-8 has a free online edition: https://www.pico-8-edu.com/
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