endbasic VS fruit-economy

I can confirm that writing a terminal is fun, for the reasons mentioned in the article: it’s easy to get “self-hosting”, but then the possibilities are endless :)

In my case, this was about creating the terminal for EndBASIC (https://www.endbasic.dev/). I wanted to mix text and graphics in the same console, so I had to ditch Xterm.js and create my own thing. It was really exciting to see graphics rendering mix with text “just fine” when I was able to render the first line.

I tried to set up a Raspberry Pi and configured it to boot into a simple window manager with DosBox full screen by default. I taught my kids to launch games within that and they learned the very basics… but it didn’t stick: they haven’t really gained any interest in how to do other stuff in the shell.

Anyway: check (my own) https://www.endbasic.dev/ which I’ve written precisely for the situation you describe :) You would actually have to /write/ the games first though!

Slightly buried: Apache 2.0, written in Rust, https://github.com/endbasic/endbasic/

Definitely an interesting attempt to cut through layers of abstraction and make something that lets people make the computer do useful/interesting things. No idea how well they realize that vision, of course, but good idea.

Or you could use https://www.endbasic.dev/

Somebody else brought it up in a separate comment, but because you specifically ask about the Raspberry, I'll mention EndBASIC (https://www.endbasic.dev/) here again :)

Supporting this platform has been a primary goal of mine, and in fact, one of the features (GPIO) only works on the Raspberry Pi today :) But there is a long road ahead. My vision is to create a minimal Linux image that boots straight into EndBASIC, and extend EndBASIC to give you more control of the Pi's hardware. The idea is to truly mimic the old C64 experience, but leveraging the power of modern hardware / infrastructure.

Agree with the author’s thesis of how the folks that “grew with computers” have an advantage over those approaching them now, in terms of understanding the inner workings. I’m not sure that this matters much in terms of solving actual problems though, which is probably a good thing.

But I somehow find it a little bit sad that this is the case, so I’ll plug my own https://www.endbasic.dev/ because it’s very fitting in this context :) I’ve been building it precisely as a way to understand everything that’s going on (although it’s still far from fulfilling that promise).

Also, buried in the article is a reference to the https://10print.org/ book. I recently came across it at HPB and it has been a pretty entertaining read. Couldn’t believe there was so much to write about such a simple little program!

Fruit Economy - itch.io | latest devlog | ghHey Everyone, For the second week in a row things have been rather crazy at work, so I've not been too upset about my disrupted plans... Most of the performance-related code changes I wanted to get done were complete on Wed [0], but there were still some annoying rendering artefacts mostly around resizing the screen and mouse movement. I could hide the mouse movement issue, but I'd rather fix it properly. It's mostly a case of not passing enough context or too much context to the memoisation. Basically, at the moment I'm re-rendering everything if anything changes on the game-state side when I really should be splitting up the re-renders to be more specific to rendering only the subset of tiles that have changed or grouping tiles into small regions and rendering stuff at a region at a time. Also, because of this, I didn't tie re-rendering to non-game-state stuff, things like resizing and mouse movement are waiting on a game tick to actually be updated. Bad on me for being lazy I guess, so that's a thing to get sorted out, but I'd like to also add in a gameplay thing, two weeks is getting dangerously close to going a month without making any gameplay improvements, which is bad. So that's definitely something I need to prioritise for next week.As always, questions welcome!- Folcon `-[0]: You can peak at stuff on github if you're interested ;)...

Apologies for how much junk is in here[0], I finally figured out notarization and then lost the will to touch it. I'm planning on circling back to clean it up in a few weeks when that entire pile of stress is a bit more of a distant memory, but hopefully it's helpful? =)...

- [0]: https://github.com/Folcon/fruit-economy/blob/185d49f120bac18...

Fruit Economy - itch.io | latest devlog | gh

Last June I decided to try and figure out how to make a game or bust, I didn't really care what, just that I made something, so I took part in the GMTK 2021, that went ok so I decided to try and take what I learned about focus, scoping and getting a small playable thing up and running asap and made a new project[2].

It's super rough, the gameplay is still sort of non-existent, performance is pretty bad and code quality is kind of all over the place as I'm still really trying to work out how to build stuff like this and I know if I let my dev side have too much leeway it's going to take over and I'll probably no longer be able to figure out what my creative side wants to do.

It's a fiddly balance that I'm still trying to figure out.

I've intentionally not said anything about the game itself, you're welcome to ask me for details, but there are also bits of info littered about here and there[3].

- [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130124211012/http://www.dev.gd..., original HN discussion [1]

- [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5096009

- [2]: Itch: https://folcon.itch.io/fruit-economy, GH: https://github.com/Folcon/fruit-economy

- [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22791490