The idea of a small OS that focuses on a particular niche rather than being general purpose is very appealing to me. I find it encouraging that a constrained OS can realistically be developed by few people while still being useful to many. See also: Uxn by Hundred Rabbits.
I love PICO-8 so much. It was the first thing that got me off my bum and actually making little games in years by putting all the editing tools I’d want in a cute and fun package with a simple friendly API.
Picotron is very exciting to me (bigger text editor! more space!). As a heads-up, as the website warns it is very unstable right now – I spent a few hours playing around with it this morning and it randomly crashes during basic workflows all the time (editing code, switching to the sprite editor, browsing the README, writing a for-each loop incorrectly). I get about 10-20 minutes of playtime before a crash.
Also Gen Z (born ‘03). I don’t really look at this stuff as “nostalgic” because it would be feigned, but the appeal of a tightly packaged and ‘minimal’ (this means different things to different people) computing interface isn’t lost on me.
My kids both really enjoy making games and art in TIC-80; they started out with it as pre-teens 3 or 4 years ago. The accessibility of the tooling makes a huge difference. Nowadays one of them has moved on to preferring love2d, but I don’t think they would have gotten there without starting out with an integrated tool.
Games are a pretty common gateway drug to programming. I’m early gen-x (born 1964) and my early programming was almost all about creating games in BASIC on the Commodore PET and Apple II. My eldest kid (born 1995) got into programming through Minecraft mods and GameBoy ROM hacking.
As a kid the Pico-8 would have utterly blown my mind. I would have sold my parents to Eskimos to get my hands on it. Those sorts of graphics and speed were unattainable back then without writing in assembly. There were some great arcade-quality games for the Apple II (like Nasir’s Space Eggs!) but that kind of stuff was out of my league — 6502 machine code is hard and the Apple’s weird graphics hardware made it even harder. I would have taken to Lua like a duck to water.
The idea of a small OS that focuses on a particular niche rather than being general purpose is very appealing to me. I find it encouraging that a constrained OS can realistically be developed by few people while still being useful to many. See also: Uxn by Hundred Rabbits.
I tried making a thing in uxn and it made me realise that I don’t know the first thing about computers, it was really eye-opening and educational.
Link: Uxn by Hundred Rabbits
I love PICO-8 so much. It was the first thing that got me off my bum and actually making little games in years by putting all the editing tools I’d want in a cute and fun package with a simple friendly API.
Picotron is very exciting to me (bigger text editor! more space!). As a heads-up, as the website warns it is very unstable right now – I spent a few hours playing around with it this morning and it randomly crashes during basic workflows all the time (editing code, switching to the sprite editor, browsing the README, writing a for-each loop incorrectly). I get about 10-20 minutes of playtime before a crash.
What platform are you on, if I may ask?
Macbook Pro (M1 Pro, Sonoma 14.4, 32 GB RAM)
Now that’s what I call a daily driver. This is a lot of fun and I feel I could understand the whole thing.
Does the younger generations like this sort of things? Any gen z / alpha or parent care to comment?
I’m Gen Z, though I’m in my 20s, so maybe not what you’re looking for? Either way, I adore stuff like this, PICO-8, uxn/varvara, etc
Also Gen Z (born ‘03). I don’t really look at this stuff as “nostalgic” because it would be feigned, but the appeal of a tightly packaged and ‘minimal’ (this means different things to different people) computing interface isn’t lost on me.
Interesting :)
My kids both really enjoy making games and art in TIC-80; they started out with it as pre-teens 3 or 4 years ago. The accessibility of the tooling makes a huge difference. Nowadays one of them has moved on to preferring love2d, but I don’t think they would have gotten there without starting out with an integrated tool.
This is nice, good luck to them.
Games are a pretty common gateway drug to programming. I’m early gen-x (born 1964) and my early programming was almost all about creating games in BASIC on the Commodore PET and Apple II. My eldest kid (born 1995) got into programming through Minecraft mods and GameBoy ROM hacking.
As a kid the Pico-8 would have utterly blown my mind. I would have sold my parents to Eskimos to get my hands on it. Those sorts of graphics and speed were unattainable back then without writing in assembly. There were some great arcade-quality games for the Apple II (like Nasir’s Space Eggs!) but that kind of stuff was out of my league — 6502 machine code is hard and the Apple’s weird graphics hardware made it even harder. I would have taken to Lua like a duck to water.
It is interesting to see that the gateway into programming for all these generations are kind of similar,