Integrated Console - makapuf/bitbox GitHub Wiki

Here are a few discussions about a Pico8-like environment for the bitbox console.

pico-8

Just as a reminder, pico-8 is

  • 128x128 16 color fixed palette
  • lua scripting
  • Integrated Sprite / SFX / music / code / map editor
  • mouse+kb input
  • 32k games
  • sound is 4Channels blips
  • map is 128x32 cels (layers ?)
  • 128 sprites 8x8

see the pico-8 website here.

bitbox-related

Works in progress:

Either we can do a pico8 execution engine or do something like it for the bitbox.

maybe we can aim at using a sprite/tile engine, using 256x200 resolution (black borders)

source of games should be available / editable i think with a possibility to edit everything load/save from one unique file (to SD or flash memory), possibly compressed

execution engines

must be able to recover source (no bytecode interpreter), but maybe we can store the AST only (or sth like that). Most 8-bit computers work with "tokenized" sources, where keywords are replaced with special bytes, numbers are encoded as int32, etc.

platform size nice to use implementation ease gamedev ease implementations
LUA recommended: 256k/64k, Min 128/32 ++, known by many + (already exists) ++ elua, lua, luajit
python 256k/64k tinypy does pyc ?? ?? micropython tinypy
forth ++ -- weird syntax for some see Mako console! - JonesForth
basic ++ (94K/16K for mmbasic) + + + mmbasic, ubasic, TinyBasicPlus
Squirrel ++ + C-like syntax, classes ++ http://squirrel-lang.org/
Javascript 256k/92k or less ++ + + JerryScript, Espruino, duktape
custom ++ ? can -- +

Interesting read: the picobit scheme system however the compiler to bytecode is targeted to be running on PC, not on device. The VM is interesting though.