Fantasy Consoles and the Joy of Limits

I came across PICO-8 sometime in 2018. The programmer and short-time gamer in me couldn’t control myself and had to buy it. I have not made any games with it, but I have enjoyed dabbling with it once in a while. The game, thankfully, is still owned by the same folks and continues to get updates. I do keep updating it and try things out.

I have also looked at other fantasy consoles over time. TIC-80 is one of these; it’s excellent and open source too. It works in a browser, and they also have an Android build other than the standard native LWM¹ builds.

You can play the TIC-80 games on their website without installing anything. Do try, you might like it. If you like programming in constrained environments, it’s a joy. You could get a paid pro version as binary (or compile it for free, it’s FOSS) for about $10, but a free binary build is good too. Go try and share your games with me. May be I will build a fun snake-like game with it.

Why?

For some reason, the constraints of the system or platform bring out the hacker (creativity) in us. During my engineering studies, I loved programming using the 8085. We had a hardware kit here, and we had to enter the program manually. The steps to programming would include thinking through the logic, writing it down on paper, double-checking the logic, and confirming the location of code and data blocks. Then convert the mnemonics into Opcodes. Then check again. Go to the board, enter the opcodes manually, and then finally execute. There were so many steps and so many limitations. It would be a great joy if you got a binary sort correct the first time. Fantasy consoles please the same area of the brain and need the same attention. And hence the joy.

BTW, there are some good 8085 simulators, both online and offline, if you still enjoy coding them.