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Comment by jops | Hacker News Reader

I learnt to program on the ZXSpectrum with "Write Your Own Adventure Programs for Your Microcomputer" [0]

The RPi400 with Pico-8 seems to tick the same boxes, so I got one for my 10yr old. He's loving it. Perfect use case.

[0] https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/Write%...

I wish there was a bare metal option that boots RPI 400 into a BASIC or Python interpreter the way the 8 bit machines used to

What do you mean by bare metal? Booting into python (or basic) would probably take less than 1h for someone who knows what they are doing.

There's a python/pygame/pygame_gui OS that does exactly this called snakeware. https://github.com/joshiemoore/snakeware Grab the rpi4 image and go.

Pick up a pocket chip for $40 on eBay- you have to click a single button after boot and then can start coding a game with pico-8 in lua.

Check out this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228740

RISC OS for RPi can do this. Not sure if RPi400 is supported just yet.

RISC OS Pico boots straight into BBC Basic:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181109020203/https://www.risco...

(IA link as it's been removed from the site, but the installer is still available via IA).

This is the correct answer. I've copied BBC BASIC games directly to a Pi running RISC OS Pico:

https://www.bencollier.info/projects/electronics/emulation/f...

To reiterate, the Pi can be made directly backwards-compatible with 8-bit games from 40 years ago. It's wonderful.

The Pi OS comes with Python installed, the pygame libraries, a bunch of games written in Python and of course the source code so you can modify them and create your own.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/python/READM...

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/python-games...

It's not bare metal, but Python on Pi400 is great for kids.

Especially with side-by-side with a Minecraft window and the Minecraft Pi Edition python integration.

Also, there's a whole lot of little boards that support Micropython, and boot straight to it, including ESP32 etc. I use them in the classes I teach.

Wasn’t Minecraft Pi Edition discontinued years ago? Minetest on the other hand might be a great intro to programming with its Lua script mods, and also has always been designed for modest hardware.

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/edition/pi

Appears to still be available

But not updated in ~7 years since v0.1.1

https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Pi_Edition

Yah, it's discontinued, but it works fine and is still distributed. It's a fine path to write some code and interact with a working game world.

Yah, it’s technically functional, but there’s an actively maintained alternative that can support such advanced features as spawning mobs (like, say, the mascot in Minecraft’s logo).

I got my start with a Spectrum and that book too. Far less luck interesting my kids in computers though.

These Usborne (and other) books were fantastic!

one of my colleagues uses that as an assignment for his students, they have to port one of the listings to c++

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