Uxn on the GPi Case 2W is finally usable! I have Fourtette (https://github.com/nf/fourtette) working now, fully playable! Though only at 1:1 pixel ratio and with no audio.
This is running directly on the bare metal of the Pi Zero 2W, using Circle for graphics and USB gamepad drivers.
I’m going to try running
some FPGA simulations in GHDL for some basic test ROMs, and compare output logs to the Uxn software emulator. The simulator runs many thousands of times slower than the real thing, and is a pain to set up, but I think I can no longer guess my way through it. Too often I’m trying random ideas, waiting 10 mins for a build to finish, and then seeing if it worked on the Pocket 😅
A little more progress on the Uxn core for Analogue Pocket! Some of the test ROMs are looking a little closer to how they are supposed to 😀 I started to fix some issues with how I was implementing the multiple sprite drawing, but I think I still have some more work to do with blending.
Sorry for the lack of updates lately - progress has been slow because I was really sick for a while. Feeling much better now!
My favourite thing about #uxn is that every time I look at it, despite how remarkable it is, all I can think about is building my own mini compute space. It’s good at what it does, but for me its power is in inspiring the notion that little compute spaces informed by a small perspective are possible, and should be more common.
It’s just like Morrowind in that I could never get very far in the story without starting to build mods and my own games.
Hacking a driver to load Linux after a Blue Screen of Death in Windows. I wonder whether it would be possible to load a tiny #uxn env from @neauoire instead... 😎
A few more ROMs are working on the Analogue Pocket Uxn core, and input is hooked up now! I have so much more to do, so a lot of things still don’t work, but a little more progress is always exciting to see! 😀
Next, I’ll try to implement the auto-advancing sprite drawing (where a single instruction could draw as many as 16 sprites).
It's uxn38, running the timer ROM from its example programs! I made a custom rootfs with buildroot and an old kernel on an SD card. I wanna make something out of this cute little puter and #uxn seems to be a good fit!
When I was a teenager, "The Talking Moose" kept me company on the corner of the screen of my Macintosh SE while I did my homework. He'd look at me and occasionally crack a joke like "Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair, Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't very Fuzzy. Was he?" (Man, I loved #Macintalk)
Now, thanks to swayimg, I can have a little #uxn Potato keeping me company while I read the "Introduction to uxn programming" text (not animated or talking of course, but it's still cool+feels ;)
P.S. (Yes, I'm still write-only until next year. Toodles! ;)
P.P.S. (Yes, it still counts as a dopamine detox.)
Reading @neauoire's posts about character input, got me wondering if it is possible to do character recognition with neural networks inside UXN.
After a few hours of work, the answer is: Yeah, kind of (?)
As a proof of concept I implemented a 3 layer neural network trained on MNIST.
Since UXN has limited memory and no floating point operations, I decided to use a binary neural network: Each weight & activation is quantized to a single bit.
seemingly out of nowhere I've somehow found myself delving deeper into technologies that could be classified as "permacomputing"-friendly or adjacent. I've recently been doing a lot of reading and exploration on things like around redbean, lua, tcl/tk, c, portability, longevity, and "old" tech and can't help but get excited or overly curious about them.
Librito web para aprender #Forth. Lo bueno es que utiliza un interprete de forth en javascript, así que puedes ir probando mientras lees.
Tenía curiosidad de probar Forth desde que supe de su existencia en la primera mitad de los ‘80. ¿Podía haber mirado antes? Sí, pero no lo he hecho hasta hoy. La culpa la tiene #uxn.
Loading Uxn ROMs from the SD card! There are still bugs to work out with a couple ROMs that were working before, but it’s getting there! #Uxn#Varvara#AnaloguePocket
Just fixed a CPU bug where I was just slightly off by one. That was a tough one to find, but more test ROMs are working now.
I started out with an 18MHz clock speed on the Pocket, which ought to be more than enough for everyone right? 😅 I’m gonna try to see if I can increase that speed. Maybe I can also get some more instructions to complete in fewer cycles. Then finally, I’ll go back to working on sprites!
A little more progress on the Uxn core for Analogue Pocket! Screen vectors are working, at least partially. This means that “game logic” code, which needs to execute once per frame, is handled correctly. This is assuming we are starting on a new frame where the CPU isn’t already busy. Otherwise, it will wait another frame to try again.