18 ms·
Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation
- tazu 3y agoThis 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 https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
- WD-42 3y agoThe fact that they seemingly write all this stuff from a sailboat makes it even cooler.
- tazu 3y agoLast I checked it was mostly solar-powered too. That's pipe-dream stuff.
- ajcp 3y agoI want to thank you. Your comment sent me down an hours long rabbit hole (pun intended) last night into their collective and I've frittered away many more this morning pricing out sailboats I can't afford! Thank you so much <3
- lpribis 3y agoFunny, the first time I read about uxn I went down almost the same rabbit-hole and was investigating local used sailboat prices within an hour.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- snvzz 3y agouxn is awesome, and the implementations I have looked at seem to be MIT licensed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- James-Livesey 3y agoPotato (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 https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/potato.html
- CobaltFire 3y agoSomehow having a Ranma 1/2 picture open in a window fits absolutely perfectly with my actual young life.
- PostOnce 3y agoPico-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 tools were so refined, and pico-8 was so cheap, that I can't imagine not giving the dude 10 bucks. (i.e. the open source implementations might just run the program but not come with all the cute tools like the IDE, the pixel sprite/map/etc editor, or the music tracker), that was well and truly worth the money. Pico-8 is one of the only pieces of paid-for software I haven't hated. Tl;dr: I think pico-8 is wonderful, I think the community and free programs are wonderful, and I think given that, this will also be wonderful. I'm a fan and have been for a while.
- Toorkit 3y agoThe Pico-8 is great, but https://tic80.com/ https://tic80.com/ is really cool too.
- PostOnce 3y agoTIC-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.
- blindluke 3y agoI 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 RG351P that's optimized for GBA games (2x integer scaling, same screen ratio). It's a specific use case, but one where TIC-80 shines.
- 3y ago
- dohello1 3y ago[flagged]
- snvzz 3y agoI'd rather one of the many open source alternatives to that ecosystem.
- tomtheelder 3y agoDo you have any examples? I’m pretty curious about Picotron, but would love to try an OSS alternative.
- mostlysimilar 3y agoTIC-80 https://tic80.com/ https://tic80.com/
- noman-land 3y agoPicotron looks to be a different product from pico-8.
- chawyehsu 3y agoThere are plenty of alternatives you could find on [1] in the context of fantasy console, almost all of them, oss or proprietary, active or dormant. And honestly many of them were inspired by PICO-8. Disclaimer: I'm one of the contributors of the list of [2]. [1]: https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy [2]: https://github.com/pico-8/awesome-PICO-8 https://github.com/pico-8/awesome-PICO-8
- PostOnce 3y agoHowever, TIC-80 only exists because PICO-8 does, and without money, presumably PICO-8 couldn't've been made, the dude would have had to be doing other work to live. Previously this guy made Voxatron, which I imagine paid for PICO-8, and that presumably paid for Picotron, so if I don't buy Picotron, then perhaps I'll prevent his next work of art from coming to fruition? Yes it bothers me a little bit that PICO-8 itself isn't open source, but I can't see the alternative, otherwise how can the dev afford to be spending time thinking about and working on these new things? It's not as though this is a huge company, or that there are alternative means of generating income from it (no Enterprise wants PICO-8 support, for example). I don't see an alternative to giving the dev a few bucks to keep making art projects that I love.
- jimmydoe 3y agolooks delicious. just bought one. Mac binary is not signed, is it intentional? (I'm fine w it not signed but just ask
- devjab 3y agoDon’t you need an Apple developer account to get certificates to sign your stuff? If so that might explain it since that would be… what $300 a year? On top of likely having to go through the whole Apple Store acceptance process.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoyou don't have to submit apps for them to be signed by you, but you do need to pay 99$/yr, tbh i think it's fair considering xcode is free
- pjmlp 3y agoI consider XCode's price to be included in Apple's margins.
- devjab 3y agoI’m too unfamiliar with Xcode to know much about it. Do you need it to release software for macs? I’m not sure how Apple gets away with forcing people to pay $99/yr to be able to let people install software without getting a warning. I guess it’s a minor issue. I have added a few installs to my “yes I really want to use this software” list on my m1 air, but I still think it’s a little bit silly. It’s obviously some sort of security feature, but Apple isn’t my mother.
- hirako2000 3y agoIt's an effective "barrier to entry" to level up software quality, or rather, to keep poor publishing out. Apple gets away with it because Mac users tend to be much higher software payers than those on other OS. Not saying it isn't some sort of business extortion
- cubefox 3y agoDoes anyone also think these "is a" headlines violate commonly accepted headline rules? Arguably it should read: "Picotron, a Fantasy Workstation"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pvg 3y agoIt's 'representative text from the article' in this case plus it probably doesn't matter in most other cases.
- ClassyJacket 3y agoWhat rule?
- cubefox 3y agoÆsthetics
- fortyseven 3y agoSlow night?
- rideontime 3y agoApparently not.
- bitwize 3y agoIt'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?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rob74 3y agoRemember the days when all home computers came with a BASIC interpreter preinstalled, and that was the first thing you saw when you started the computer? Later generations (Amiga, Atari ST) also had BASIC included with the OS. Not that familiar with the original Apple Macintosh, but from what I read that was the first computer to ship without programming tools. Windows then followed suit, and today all OSes ship without developer tools by default. Of course they're just a download away, but those are mostly tools for professional developers, so not really beginner friendly. Also, the limitations of 8 bit (and 16 bit) computers also made them more approachable. I "designed" some cool-looking sprites (actually they were called "players") on my Atari 800 back in the day, although I'm not good at drawing, so I would be hopeless at producing something more hi-res...
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoLinux comes with Python included. (Python is the new BASIC, and explicitly designed to be so.)
- p_l 3y ago"Classic" Windows usually came with DOS which included BASIC, with the main difference being that in Windows 95/98/Me it no longer had an editor, IIRC. Original IBM PC in absence of other drive would attempt to boot from cassette and then drop you into similar BASIC interpreter - the "GW-BASIC" included in DOS was the same except it was shipped completely as file on disk drive instead of being ROM. NT didn't have included programming language before NT 4.0 SP4, when WSH was added, it was also part of Outlook 97 and IE 3.0.\ The original computer to ship without any programming tools that was targeted at general population was Apple Lisa, I seem to recall mention of at least one loud consumer complaint if not lawsuit based around expectation that general purpose computer should have some tool included.
- esbeeb 3y agoWhen 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 over SSH's SFTP, etc. Pretty much all that's really missing, to fill it out, is Zoom (or some such functional equivalent) with a fast-enough frame rate on video calls. And this is not, strictly speaking, the fault of Raspberry Pi, et al.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- contrarian1234 3y agoI 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
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoReally? I can only hold one firefox session at a time in 8GB of RAM, but I've always assumed that's because I keep an unreasonable number of active+background tabs open.
- grimgrin 3y agoi 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
- sitkack 3y ago
- ggm 3y agoQR codes on cardboard slid under a cheap reader slot? cannot go past the 8 bit feel demanding some phsicality behind the thing. Lo-fi screen and giant buttons to mash..
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> 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.
- kaoD 3y agoI bet throttled since PICO8 does that https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/CPU https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/CPU
- jamesgeck0 3y agoIt 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.
- exitb 3y agoIt’s a bit of a shame that it’s apparently not fully compatible with PICO-8. I’d imagine it to be a perfect environment to create PICO-8 games.
- sitkack 3y agoIn what ways? Maybe there is a chance to change it!
- exitb 3y agoDon't know the details, but apparently "[it's] not designed to run PICO-8 carts out of the box". PICO-8 has a really low resolution, lower than a Game Boy, which makes it a bit difficult to write code in.
- sitkack 3y agoThat would be really cool and a fitting level of meta if the Picotron could be used to develop PICO-8 games. I guess you could bolt a PICO-8 onto the side of the Picotron like one of those 90s console devkits.
- AlanYx 3y agoOne of the big differences is that Picotron supports floating point math whereas Pico-8 is all fixed point.
- sandyarmstrong 3y agoSee https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php?page=faq https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php?page=faq > Picotron supports PICO-8 style shorthand syntax, almost the whole API, and other compatibility features that make it relatively easy to port PICO-8 cartridges. However, it is not designed to run PICO-8 carts out of the box, because the underlying machinery is quite different. For example, Picotron uses floating point numbers, and so can only approximate PICO-8's fixed point math behaviour.
- crq-yml 3y agoI 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 emulate them, talk to the hardware directly, run BASIC or C or Forth or whatever other language. Lua might be too slow to run interpreted on real 8-bits as in the Pico series, but it can be used as the base for a cross-compiler instead, and that presents a different spin on the specific coding challenge: Why not create an ultimate development environment, something that generates the precise code needed for that type of project? That's the direction that the highly optimized PICO-8 games took, and it is likewise seen in new demos for C64, Spectrum, A800 etc. - the "big hardware" is leveraged towards the old stuff in a way that can ignore the assumed paradigms of both.
- vintermann 3y ago> 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.
- benob 3y agoThere 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 https://github.com/DavidVentura/PicoPico
- vintermann 3y agoOk, 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?
- 3y ago
- mrspeaker 3y agoI'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 far Picotron seems to have that same level of love and thought. It's delightful, and I don't want to stop making things with it. I've used many of the clones of pico-8 and they all feel like they miss the point. They "improve" on the limitations, but are just... not satisfying. Funnily enough, I've tried three times to make my own JavaScript version of what Picotron is ("what if I made a more feature-rich version of Pico-8 to use for prototyping in game jams?") and each time abandoned it because it felt like the Pico-8 clones: adequate, functional, but not inspirational. I don't know who makes Pico-8 and Picotron, but hats off to you amazing person/people for making such likable software!
- auto 3y ago> "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.
- ilkke 3y agoAround 2016 or so I had concluded that game dev has just stopped being fun, but luckily a friend talked me into trying pico-8. It's hard to describe what this little piece of software did for me, pure white magic! Just around New Year Godot finally 'clicked' for me and once again I am super excited to tinker and prototype. I'm almost too scared to try out Picotron now. Almost.
- xmonkee 3y agoidk, 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
- hansonpeter 3y ago[dead]
- olivier5199 3y agoSeems like this would be awesome on one of these Clockwork devices: https://www.clockworkpi.com/shop?page=2 https://www.clockworkpi.com/shop?page=2
- vinc 3y agoIt's not open source but it's really good looking, nice work!
- Ranmalie 3y ago[flagged]
- BrokerHans 3y ago[dead]
- Quiark 3y agoI'm just wondering if there's a toy project for implementing the operating system for a sci-fi spaceship. Would it run on Kubernetes?
- cbm-vic-20 3y agoAbout ten years ago, Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft, was working on a game called 0x10c which was going to be a sci-fi spaceship game where the various functions of the ship were controlled by 1980s-era computers, leaving the programming parts to the player to build. There was a community that spung up that wrote code, device drivers, etc. An interesting idea that died on the vine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c https://github.com/lucaspiller/dcpu-specifications https://github.com/lucaspiller/dcpu-specifications
- lenerdenator 3y agoluv me 80s/90s computing aesthetics, 'ate 'aving to deal with the 'ardware to run software that 'as them, simple as.
- btreecat 3y ago> luv me 80s/90s computing aesthetics, 'ate 'aving to deal with the 'ardware to run software that 'as them, simple as. Late shaving cardware Roombas
- twoquestions 3y agoMan this feels great to me. The Pico-8 feels a bit too old-school and janky to me despite being a great bit of software, the picotron feels a lot more like my childhood. I'm excited to start playing with it!
- r3trohack3r 3y ago> 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?
- lynndotpy 3y agoit's fun and easy to share :)
- corytheboyd 3y agoIn a world full of SERIOUS BUSINESS ALL THE TIME it’s nice to see something decide to be fun for the sake of it. It’s a cool digital homage to cartridges, which are basically also rectangles with cool graphics on them that run a game.
- acomjean 3y agoI 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.
- binarycrusader 3y agoOther 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.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago> I would be fun to be able to take a picture of the png and have it load up the application. Reminds me of the time they would distribute tape deck based software via the radio.
- 3y ago
- ListeningPie 3y agoAre there any apps made for pico (other than games) that have broken through to the mainstream?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tomku 3y agoDepends on your definition of "mainstream" I guess, but picoCAD[1] got some attention outside of the PICO-8 world. Edit: Including here on HN[2]! [1]: https://johanpeitz.itch.io/picocad https://johanpeitz.itch.io/picocad [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101251
- mrpf1ster 3y agoI believe the game Celeste started as a PICO-8 prototype
- drcode 3y agoI like the idea of using constraints from hardware to drive software design, but the thing that always bothered me about pico-8 is that a lot of the model isn't fully constrained: As far as I could tell, the amount of memory available through the pico-8 lua interpreter is unbounded, controlled by the host OS. Anybody know if the picotron is more tightly bounded in this way when it comes to memory usage in the programming system, and elsewhere, to turn it into a "true" constrained environment?
- Taikonerd 3y agoMinor quibble about this screenshot: https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/wip/picotron_desktop2.png https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/wip/picotron_desktop2.png The wallpaper is named "triplane," but that's a biplane.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dohello1 3y agoPICO-8 I think has it's place still
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoLooking at this page makes me wonder if Mario Paint could be considered a "fantasy workstation".
- TeaDude 3y agoIt'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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- syngrog66 3y agoI stopped reading fast once I realized they don't know what the relevant (and multi-decades-old by now) terms mean, or, simply didn't care if they abused them or confused people. Time too precious to waste on this.
- tombert 3y agoI'm a bit confused. I was about to buy this, but when I logged into my account, it looks like I already own it? At least the alpha. I already owned a legit copy of Pico-8 and Voxatron...do I get it automatically?