benbridle

6 ms·

1.
by benbridle 1y ago
Oh cool, that'd be great! I'm wanting to write a disassembler in the future as part of a dedicated debugger for Bedrock programs. If you end up writing down any plans I'd love to take a look or help you out, my email address
2.
by benbridle 1y ago
There are free demos available on the store page for Windows, Linux, and Nintendo DS, so Cobalt can still be used by people who can't afford $5. Charging a higher price would make the program a lot less accessible, and charging nothing
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by benbridle 1y ago
Thank you!
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by benbridle 1y ago
The second revision of the Bedrock specification changed very little of consequence, but I should probably add a change note to the spec. The structure of the document was reworked, becoming a single long document instead of multiple smalle
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by benbridle 1y ago
It's such a good platform for running programs on. It's small, has plenty of grunt, and the dual screens are great for multi-window work.
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by benbridle 1y ago
Thank you! The customizable tools give a surprising amount of power to the user for a relatively small amount of work (just a couple of basic editing screens). The most interesting outcome of all this is that the scatter and spacing paramet
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by benbridle 1y ago
The sketch layer is accessed with the 'eye' button in the bottom-right corner of the canvas screen. Clicking that button toggles visibility of the sketch layer and reveals three more buttons, and clicking the newly-revealed pencil
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by benbridle 1y ago
Thank you! I'm really passionate about exploring this direction of computing, digging around in a bargain bin of discarded futures to find ideas worth pursuing.
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Show HN: Cobalt – a pixel-art painting studio for the Nintendo DS(benbridle.com)
174 points by benbridle 1y ago|31 comments
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by benbridle 1y ago
By data path, I mean the width of the values that are read from the stacks, program memory, and device bus. Pairs of 8-bit values can be treated as 16-bit values in order to perform wider arithmetic, but all data ultimately moves around the
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by benbridle 1y ago
This would be fascinating to see, I have no idea how you'd even start. There was a video I saw a couple of years back that was showcasing a cellular programming model, where each cell in a two dimensional grid performed an operation on
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by benbridle 1y ago
I had a hard time figuring out whether Bedrock counted as an 8-bit or 16-bit computer, because it doesn't line up so cleanly with the usual criteria as does a physical CPU. I decided that the 8-bit label fitted best because it has an 8
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by benbridle 1y ago
Thank you! It's early days yet, we'll see how well it holds up in a few decades.
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by benbridle 1y ago
Thank you! That sounds fascinating, I'd love to hear how you get on with it if you do.
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by benbridle 1y ago
I'm currently selling a pixel-art drawing program called Cobalt, which is built on Bedrock (you can see a demo of it running at the bottom of the project page). It was initially only available for Windows and Linux, but I wanted to mak
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by benbridle 1y ago
Thank you, that means a lot! I've got plans for tooling in the future that will make Bedrock more accessible to people who are learning to program, like a high-level language that runs on Bedrock and a graphical debugger for visually c
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by benbridle 1y ago
The undefined behaviour is limited to only a couple of very edge-case situations that would cause issues for the program anyway, like overflowing the stacks. My thoughts were that a program would have to be broken in order to have triggered
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by benbridle 1y ago
There's PICO-8 in this category if you haven't already heard of it, it uses Lua as the language for writing programs. It was another huge inspiration of mine while working on Bedrock. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pic
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by benbridle 1y ago
The source code for the microwave clock program is available on the 'Example: Microwave clock' subpage [0]. I hadn't put up code for any of the other programs yet, just because they currently use a lot of library code and idi
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by benbridle 1y ago
Each screen pixel has two colours because there are two screen layers, a foreground layer and a background layer. Anything you draw to the foreground layer will be draw over anything on the background layer, so you can use the foreground la
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by benbridle 1y ago
You've got it, yeah. It makes writing programs across different systems so much nicer, because you can just write your programs against a single tidy 'bedrock' abstraction of the file system, screen, networking, etc.
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by benbridle 1y ago
You're right, it's technically true of any program, but it wouldn't necessarily be practical. Implementing CPython on a Gameboy Advance, for example, would be tedious and likely not entirely possible. The purpose of Bedrock w
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by benbridle 1y ago
> Locked and changed? That could do with some better wording. Normally the user can freely drag-resize the window, but after the program sets the width or height then the user will be unable to resize that axis. This is for, say, a list
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by benbridle 1y ago
Amazing work, I love it
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Show HN: Bedrock – An 8-bit computing system for running programs anywhere(benbridle.com)
221 points by benbridle 1y ago|68 comments
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by benbridle 1y ago
I've since been informed that public domain isn't really a proper term, legally speaking, so to clarify things I've released Torque under the MIT license.
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by benbridle 1y ago
Oh I think I see what you mean now, you're talking about the encoding of the Torque source code that gets fed into the assembler. To be honest I'd never really considered anything other than UTF-8, the parsing is all implemented i
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by benbridle 1y ago
Thanks for the interest! Torque is public domain, feel free to use it or change it or share it however you want. I'd love to hear how people use it, but no obligation. If you shared it someplace public I'd love to pop by, if you h
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by benbridle 1y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with using "0o" as the octal prefix, I've never been a fan of "0". I've jut implemented this feature and released it in v2.2.0, you can grab it from the project page. Thanks for the sugge
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by benbridle 1y ago
With character sets, I was initially going to support non-Unicode text by adding a --char-set flag to the assembler, but I decided that the character set should be defined somehow inside each program. My thought was that they could be defin

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