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Comment by chapium | Hacker News Reader

I'm frequently amazed by what can be built within the limits of PICO-8 and Lua.

I'm not sure how drastic these limits really are. The display is tiny, the graphical memory small (32K), and code is limited to 8192 Lua tokens.

On the other hand, I haven't seen any computational model. It seems the "machine language" actually is Lua, and processing power is not limited by the specs, but by the host computer. Thus, there are quite a few ways we could trade speed for size.

My dream of a fantasy console is one that we could actually instantiate in actual hardware, should we want to. Ideally a cheap FPGA for which we have a Free toolchain, like the iCE40.

Have you seen this? https://basicengine.org/

I have only plugged around in pico a bit but i think there are some limits on how many instructions can be executed per update(30fps)

This isn't true at all. There are (undocumented) artificial costs to all instructions, making something like writing a performant software 3D engine non-trivial. For example there is a benchmark cart that compares runtime performance of multiple triangle rasterizers (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=31478). If the limit was the host computers ability to execute Lua you'd be able to trivially draw 10s of thousands of triangles in software without issue.

Ah, that would explain why I haven't seen it. Good, then.

Along these lines there is the ZX Spectrum Next which just started shipping their pre-orders: https://www.specnext.com/

Also the Playdate which is ARM based and will have an SDK supporting C and Lua: https://play.date/

Then of course there’s tonnes of older hardware that’s well emulated and well understood. I’d recommend the GBA as giving all the flavour but having a reasonable amount of headroom.

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