I noticed that on Twitter. Impressive hardware.
The promise of tooling is nice. Interesting that they are using C++ or Lua for programming.
The tools offer is really rich: sprite, map, sound and music editor. Combined with a pack of game tutorial.
Only lack seems the absence of any IO for electronic hack.
And itâs quite expensive.
Hrm, I have mixed feelings.
Iâm tempted to back it purely because I like Pimoroni and I like supporting local businesses.
(Not that Sheffield is âlocalâ exactly, itâs quite far up north.)
And I like the C++ and Lua combination.
Personally I donât care about the asset editors or tutorials,
Iâm used to working with bare mimimum tools and writing my own tools.
Iâm more concerned with how good the API is and what tools+IDEs are available for programming it.
But itâs got a very hefty price tag, which is what really puts me off.
Iâd be tempted to get involved in beta testing if it werenât for the fact Iâd need tools to assemble it.
Also the fact itâs Discord rather than a Discourse forum isnât as good.
Lack of easy extensions or IO is a deal breaker for me.
Is there no SD card? The best feature for a portable game console is the ability to carry around lots of gamesâŚ
Itâs got a â32MB flash via QSPI interface which supports XiPâ.
Usually flash is easier to program for because instead of messing around with file paths you can often just treat it as more addressable memory (depending on how itâs implemented).
Either way, you could probably build something to allow game flashing on the go.
I hadnât noticed it was missing, not having an SD card slot really ruins it. 
That and the price.
The 32 MB QSPI flash is good for holding games. But if you want to stream music, 32Mb runs out pretty fast
Weâll have to see how big their games are. I have the feeling that the looser constraints will lead to much larger games and less data compression. When emulators get ported to it, 32mb of ROMs is pretty small.
Also, the games would have to be compiled with position-independent code for the user to be able to choose which ones he wants to run. I think thatâs not an option on GCC+Thumb2.
By golly, you are right. How do they plan to use the 32mb flash? By running from RAM?
This is an odd detail indeed.
But, otoh, I am not familiar with the MMU of the Cortex M7, and donât know what it is capable of.
EDIT: Iâm going to answer my own question. Clearly the idea is to run mainly / only LUA compiled bytecode. That explains the arrangement.
Free assets!
A repository of free (libre) assets sounds very nice, I was once thinking about this in Pokitto context as well. Wouldnât be bad to get inspired 
All of 32blit 's software, libraries, and firmware will be released under the MIT license
- DRM-free and region-lock free
- Open media & game formats
- Respect for your privacy (no telemetry/phoning home)
- You have complete control over the hardware
Sounds good, but the details will matter. Adding this to my watch list.
It doesnât actually say what the licence is (if any),
so be careful with throwing âlibreâ around.
(Personally it makes no difference to me anyway,
I wouldnât be likely to use them unless theyâre exceptionally good.)
They changed their minds, it does have an SD card. They also created a forum, for those who donât like discord.
In other news, beta units have been shipped and theyâve openly released their lib on github. Itâs interesting to see what design decisions they make differently, due to the different hardware.
And the ones that arenât due to the hardware.
Thereâs a lot of really bizarre design decisions in there.
Theyâll happily use classes like std::vector and std::string, and theyâll put their code in a namespace,
but theyâve decided to use the deprecated C libraries, avoid C++11 features (even to the point of using #pragma pack instead of the align keyword) and design most of their library like a C library.
(And it seems they donât know what const-correctness is, but sadly thatâs a disturbingly common problem among these sorts of libraries.)
Worryingly theyâre passing std::strings to functions by value instead of by (const) reference,
which suggests to me that they either donât know what a reference is or donât understand the implications of passing a string by value.
And Iâm really not sure what to make of the âtweeningâ part of the library.
I had noticed some of these issues (tbh I didnât look too far) but didnât think too much of them as theyâve stated things are still in flux. If you look in the âProjectsâ tab on github (a nice feature I should try), youâll see theyâre planning an âAPI Overhaulâ. Maybe right now theyâre just busy getting things to work and itâs just a prototype.
I definitely recommend it.
I used a project in automated kanban style for developing Minesweeper V2:
Milestones are also handy, for tracking which features and bugfixes were part of which versions of the code,
and for tracking longer term goals (like removing accidental -fpermissive-permitted code).
(I keep meaning to look into Actions but Iâve never got round to it.)
Perhaps so, but personally I think it pays to aim for correctness as early as possible, even if the API is subject to change.
If you set a precedent of correctness at the start then it should encourage that correctness to be carried forward as the API changes.
Besides which, usings consts and references correctly isnât that difficult in the grand scheme of things:
- Anything that doesnât need to be modified is
const - Anything thatâs expensive to copy should be passed by reference
- 9 times out of 10 a reference is better than a pointer
- Any function that doesnât need to modify
thisshould be markedconst
(Thereâs probably a handful of exceptions to those rules,
but pretty much every rule of thumb in programming has exceptions.)
Talking about that, you should at least port it over to pokitto in full colour and bigger playfield. Would be about time 