MicroW8: A WebAssembly based fantasy console | Hacker News Reader

MicroW8: A WebAssembly based fantasy console

exoticorn.github.io

86 pointslifthrasiir15 comments

Another fantasy console: https://wasm4.org/

Oh, I forgot that WASM-4 is a thing. It indeed makes a good comparison:

- MicroW8 was originally conceived from the size-coding community (I think it was mainly inspired from TIC-80), and partly because of that its compressed cart is much smaller than WASM-4 carts and can be shared with just a single URL. The built-in assembly language (CurlyWas) also certainly helps.

- MicroW8 has a relatively rich support for palettes and fonts. That might be a matter of taste though (some want a very constrained environment, others want a slightly more powerful but still retro-looking environment).

- As a result WASM-4 doesn't have any sort of text handling while MicroW8 has one, arguably similar to PICO-8 as well due to its control characters.

- MicroW8 doesn't yet have audio support, though it is in the high priority to my understanding.

For anyone wondering:

> On a keyboard use the arrow keys and the keys Z, X, A and S to emulate the A, B, X and Y buttons.

I would really like to explore something like a whole section of the internet that runs on something like an 80 column fantasy console and restricts all web pages to like 50 or 100kb or something.

How does it compare to other fantasy consoles? This reminds me of the Chip16 virtual machine.

Most other fantasy consoles are based on their own virtual machines or stripped-down scripting languages (like Lua in PICO-8), but this is based on WebAssembly so there is a variety of languages you can pick. You can of course write an WebAssembly module from scratch or a built-in assembly language called CurlyWas [1].

[1] https://github.com/exoticorn/curlywas/

It doesn't look like this has any editing UI (i.e. code, sound, graphics, etc. editors) like PICO-8 or TIC-80. So it's more of a bare runtime for a console and you're on your own to make all the assets.

Are there any fantasy consoles with CPU limits?

I'm wondering the same thing. Both MicroW8 and WASM-4 seem to be unlimited, whereas it'd be nice if there was some standard for CPU speed in case I wanted to, say, port it to a retro console.

IIRC Pico-8 does.

no, pico-8 does not have any cpu limits, but it has a code size ("cartridge" size limit) of 32k of lua.

edit: incorrect, see reply

PICO-8 does have artificial CPU limits: https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/CPU

thanks for the info! never knew about this, i wonder why it's not on the pico-8 landing page.

Pico-8 has an artificial CPU limit; once you surpass 100% utilization the system cuts the framerate in half until CPU usage dips back down under the imposed cap.

There are a lot that emulate 8-bit CPUs, although which have fixed clock speeds, I'm not sure.

I have my own 8Mhz 8-bit AVR that I work on from time to time. It's more designed for the Assembly coder experience.

https://k8.fingswotidun.com/static/ide/?gist=78d170a65bc6c9d...

I have wondered about doing a version the the same virtual IO 'hardware' and a WASM core.

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