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 emulate them, talk to the hardware directly, run BASIC or C or Forth or whatever other language.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>three times</i> 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.<p>I don't know who makes Pico-8 and Picotron, but hats off to you amazing person/people for making such likable software!
> Picotron apps can be made with built-in tools, and shared with other users in a special 256k png cartridge format.<p>I’m noticing a trend of newer indie software distributing assets in png files, what’s with that?
It's a fun little thing but BEWARE! It's still a bit buggy and crashy* and rough around the edges. You can <i>kinda</i> 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)<p>*Not as much as 0.1a but there's still kinks to be worked out for 0.1c.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I'm a fan and have been for a while.
> CPU: 8M Lua VM insts / second<p>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.
Man 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!
Seems like this would be awesome on one of these Clockwork devices: <a href="https://www.clockworkpi.com/shop?page=2" rel="nofollow">https://www.clockworkpi.com/shop?page=2</a>
QR 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..
I 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.<p>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?
I'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.<p>I already owned a legit copy of Pico-8 and Voxatron...do I get it automatically?
I 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.
When I use Raspberry Pi OS in a Raspberry Pi 4, 8GB of RAM - I feel I <i>already</i> have an excellent, <i>refreshingly stable</i>, late-90s-era experience. It scratches that strange nostalgia itch for that more innocent experience - of early-times WIMP computing.<p>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.<p>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.
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?
Minor quibble about this screenshot: <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/wip/picotron_desktop2.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/wip/picotron_desktop2.png</a><p>The wallpaper is named "triplane," but that's a biplane.
This 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!).<p>[1]: <a href="https://100r.co/site/uxn.html" rel="nofollow">https://100r.co/site/uxn.html</a>
Does anyone also think these "is a" headlines violate commonly accepted headline rules? Arguably it should read: "Picotron, a Fantasy Workstation"