social.noyu.me

these last few weeks, @lynn and me have been working on a c compiler for uxn, based on rui ueyama's “chibicc”. it's been a lot of fun! it's such a cute little vm… assembly for this tiny stack machine involved so many little puzzles.

i made a demo https://github.com/lynn/chibicc/blob/uxn/examples/star.c :3

there are a number of important limitations, but it's already usable enough to write small games and demos. with some effort, it's even possible to port some existing software! i've managed to get a certain classic app working in it. i'm hoping to announce it soon :3

the fact it's a stack machine makes it really fun to write (or generate!) assembly for. you never have to remember register numbers, all the inputs and outputs are implicit. the magic of concatenative programming~

one of the challenges was that uxn doesn't have signed integer operations, but they're essential for c code, so i had to write some little helper routines that emulate signed operations. for example, this does sign extension (char->int conversion):

#80 ANDk EQU #ff MUL SWP

the single most complicated thing to emulate was, believe it or not, argc and argv: https://github.com/lynn/chibicc/blob/uxn/routines/argc_argv.tal

don't let that scare you though, most of the compiler isn't anywhere near that complex, hehe

writing c code with this compiler also involves a lot of problem solving. there's no floats, no 32-bit integers, almost no C runtime, and only 64KiB of ROM space. the compiler can't do much optimisation of your code. you'll have to be creative!

related: https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01H2G44V6QJ7BB9Y3J25QCEPB8

btw, uxn/varvara is a really impressive vm. what amazes me is how small it manages to keep its api surface while still providing everything you could want: graphics, sound, mouse input, keyboard input, gamepad input, file i/o, a real-time clock, stdin, stdout and stderr!

it does all of that while having far fewer api entrypoints than posix or wasi or the browser or any api you can think of, and they're all defined in such simple and constrained ways that there's very little room for incorrect implementations (though still some: i have found bugs)

so i think uxn apps will have fantastic portability. better even than famicom roms, and yet they can do more!

it'll never replace wasm: apps can only use 16-bit integers, a 64KiB address space and 2-bit color. but that's still a whole universe of creative potential. i love it.

the limits aren't without advantages: it's a universe where you can store your whole app collection on a floppy disk, or run it on a gba…

i painstakingly preserved the structure, comments, and feature set to the greatest extent possible… parts of this codebase are several years older than i am, and i wanted to respect the history. it's the most faithful port of this program that is possible, i think!

i found a bug in oneko-uxn: the 16-bit Euclidean distance calculation can overflow even for 8-bit inputs :(

but @lynn found a great alternative: the average of the L1 norm and L∞ norms is within ~6% of the Euclidean distance, and way easier to compute!

https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/oneko-uxn/commit/060bc664e647e3ea6d1362fa5d882c1d1b95a87c

this has to be a known algorithm, right? it's so much easier to compute on a system with only integer arithmetic, and gets amazingly close to the right answer…

smol neko window (upcoming feature teaser)

new version of oneko-uxn. two fixes + two new features.

now the window size can be customized.

https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/oneko-uxn/releases/tag/1.2.sakura.5.uxn.2

日本語版も有ります。

#uxn

@lynn @neauoire (cc)

this will probably be the final version, fwiw. i wasn't intending to have more than one version, but i wanted to fix that movement vector bug, and that made it clear the premise i had for not allowing window size customisation was wrong, so i added that too

oops, i forgot to recompile when i bumped the version number. i fixed that now, but this means someone out there might have a copy of the rom that reports a lower version number, but has the new features and fixes 👻

@hikari

In another time this would've been the basis for a creepypasta.

@hikari 👀

@hikari @lynn What's the red curve represent?

@cr1901 @hikari @lynn it's the direction of the cat :)

@neauoire @hikari @lynn The cat has flower on the brain, apparently :o...

@cr1901 @lynn

0 ≤ x ≤ 2π

cx = cos(x)
sx = sin(x)

i plot a point at (cx, sx)

interpreting (cx, sx) as a vector from (0, 0), the euclidean distance is always going to be 1, right

i then calculate the same distance with our approximation, and plot a point at (cx * distance, sx * distance)

so the red line shows how far it strays from euclidean distance at various angles

@cr1901 @lynn you can see that at 0°, 90°, 180° and 270°, there's no difference, which should be intuitive considering that these are exactly the directions for which euclidean distance, L1/manhattan distance and L∞/chebyshev distance are identical, so an average of these last two should be the same as the first of these

@hikari

That is so lovely! Incant wait to download it when I get home.

I remember playing with a version of Neko on my Mac SE circa 1990. Neko stayed on the desktop and followed the mouse everywhere.
Actually, I believe it came on Bob Levitus' book (and floppy), "Stupid Mac Tricks." It flickered a lot, bit was cute. 😁

@RL_Dane I had many old PDAs growing up. my first experience of Neko was a PalmOS port <3

@hikari

Ah, I missed that one. That would've been neat.

A lot more wholesome than that bizarre app where you give a monkey crack cocaine and he does unspeakable things to a bunny.

Some of those PalmOS apps were deranged, lol

@hikari @lynn ah! I knew it. When you said you were working on an unannounced port this porting, I crossed my fingers it'd be neko <3 amazing.

@neauoire @lynn wow, that's some coincidence! but to be honest i was slightly surprised when i couldn't find an existing port to uxn. it felt obvious, hehe. I'm glad you like it!

my first exposure to Neko was playing a PalmOS port of it as a kid, around two decades ago, so i've had a lifelong fondness for it at this point.