3 ms·
White Lighting was really a sprite editor packaged with an interrupt driven DSL for games, but back before DSL was a term. Forth was a good choice for a compile
by daviding 3y ago
White Lighting was really a sprite editor packaged with an interrupt driven DSL for games, but back before DSL was a term. Forth was a good choice for a compiled target on the platforms back then, given the constraints. Ironically I do ruby now.
- crq-yml 3y agoI've picked up Forth to code for Agon Light, which is a new spin on those old platforms - it's BBC Micro-patterned, but uses some modern chips to make things faster and roomier. Easy to develop for on emulator too. One of the complaints I've read about Forth on micros was that even 8Kb interpreter overhead would be too much for a commercial game - what I've gathered is that many people used it primarily as a macroassembler in that context. But I have 512Kb and 20MHz to play with, plus external display processing, so I can probably ignore that overhead and do just fine. I find Forth quite a bit easier to work with when I treat it as an interactive stack machine and do the bulk of development through offline code generation. That gives me a best-of-both where I can do useful things interactively, but I can add compiler tech to help rein in and structure whatever I'm doing.
- bitwize 3y agoI frickin' LOVE the Agon Light. To me it's the most exciting and promising of the "retro-inspired new computer" designs. I've messed about with Forth on the Commodore 64 (via THEC64). It's fun but I haven't dug too deeply into it, like building a game with it or anything.