minimicro-sysdisk VS Starfarer

Mini Micro comes with a bunch of built-in playing card images which come from Kenney's Boardgame Pack. I love these card images, and when I started the project my goal was to demonstrate a game made using only these built-in assets.

Among the built-in images in Mini Micro is /sys/pics/digits.png. It looks like this:

Here we're using shellArgs[1:] to get the list of files passed to the script, and then file.info to get some details about each one. This script skips directories (of course it could be expanded to handle those too), and then collects all the other files more than 30 days old, with the help of the dateTime module.

You can use this to make your code do different things depending on where it's running. For example, the Acey-Deucey game included with Mini Micro at /sys/lib/acey-deucey.ms is designed to work on command-line MiniScript, too. But the latter doesn't have the Sound class, so we "mock" that class at the start of the program, so the rest of the code doesn't need to worry about it.

He's currently divided his work into two projects on GitHub: MiniScript.TS is the language core, while MiniScript-NodeJS adds Node.js support and a script-runner. The latter includes support for print and input, the import command, and a subset of the Mini Micro /sys disk.

This might be of interest if you already know BASIC, and want to quickly bang out a game or utility. MiniBASIC provides a good set of high-resolution drawing commands, suitable for making plots, graphs, and diagrams. It also has access to all the data on the built-in /sys disk, including stock images, sounds, and a complete English word list! And, being completely cross-platform, Mini Micro (and so MiniBASIC) runs identically on any desktop computer (and soon mobile devices, too). So if BASIC is already in your wheelhouse, MiniBASIC offers a great way to take advantage of these Mini Micro features.

This uses a couple of tricks which you could glean from the startup.ms file on the system disk (/sys/startup.ms):

So as usual, I come away with a realization for something that really ought to exist in MiniScript: an efficient sort algorithm that takes a comparison function as an argument. I'll code this up soon, and who knows, it might even find its way into a future version of /sys/lib/listUtil.

One lesson learned is that I should always validate my function inputs. Had my findPath function simply checked that it was being passed two 2-element lists, I would have caught my error right away and fared much better. Grabbing code from somewhere else is no excuse; the first thing I should have done is examined the parameters, and added a quick qa.assert to me sure I call it correctly.

Once again, my starter program did me no good; nor did I need any of the stuff I've been gathering in my custom aoc module, or even the standard /sys/lib modules. The solution was plain, unadorned MiniScript. ❤️

So this is a classic path-finding problem, for which A* (also known as best-first search) is the standard solution. I know I've written that a few times in the past, but I didn't have a standard library for it just sitting around. I searched my hard drive for file names containing "path" and ".ms", expecting to find a path-finding module I seem to recall writing for Farmtronics. But instead I found this script from a half-written space trader game called Starfarer.