Looking at the specs, it seems that 32k of ram seems a little low (even 80s computers had more ram available). What options would be available to expand the ram?
In a perfect world, I would like to see a hat that connects through GPIO that adds more ram (or in an even more amazing world, I would love to see pokitto having few mb of ram straight out).
If that would not be possible, how one would go about adding more ram?
I am asking because, I am investigating if it would be possible to run pico-8 games on pokitto and ram could be a bottleneck here (as pico-8’s lua has access to 1mb of ram).
Well i guess Pico-8 on the Pokitto will never really be possible hardware wise. The lua code needs to be interpreted which takes quite some CPU cycles. Also the RAM indeed is limited (however it can be extended, mileage may vary ). You can always re-write the games i guess, which take some time and is probably not what you are looking for.
as far as i know there is always spi ram you can use via the gpio, it will be fair bit slower from what i have tried in the past.
pico-8 games would be allot more then just 1mb ram, you need to run the lua vm aswell.
idk how well elua works on the cpu.
i would like to see more ram aswell, but i would probably use it for tinybasic implementation instead
Guess elua on a Cortex m0+ is a bit to much. However with 32kb you should be able to come a long way with tinybasic right? Even on a Uno with 2kb you will be able to make pong.
yea also if you manage it a little you can break down your game into smaller segments and load in chunks from sd example would be rpg overworld and battle system being loaded and unloaded wen needed
That’s a bit disappointing to hear that running pico-8 carts would be basically impossible. Honestly, I was hoping that pokitto could be my handheld pico-8 console.
Yeah, I can technically port my games (and possibly some of the CC ones)…I guess that’s that…
well not really, there might still be ways.
but pico-8 fantasy console doesn’t have physical limitations and swipes the lua behind the scenes
oh theres still a way with elua where it you store the program on flash though variables memory would still be tight
i dont think pico8 includes the screen buffer in that 1MB calculation
From what I have heard, official android version will come out closer to version 1.0.
I know that games are playable because they can be exported to html5 after all. Someone made a experimental player few months ago, and it worked pretty well.
What I was hoping for is a dedicated device. Pokitto has the exact button layout as Pico-8 and a form factor that I really like.
well the chip9 (pocketchip) has official pico8 support, its a fair bit larger.
and love2D translates decently well also you can build love2D games for android and ios right now and even publish them if you so desire as standalone.
back to topic there might be a way to use a secondary processor over the gpio pins, but as far as i have found got only 520 KB
). You can always re-write the games i guess, which take some time and is probably not what you are looking for.