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Show HN: Bedrock – An 8-bit computing system for running programs anywhere

(benbridle.com)
221 points benbridle | 4 comments | 10 Jul 25 22:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.618s | source

Hey everyone, this is my latest project.

Bedrock is a lightweight program runtime: programs assemble down to a few kilobytes of bytecode that can run on any computer, console, or handheld. The runtime is tiny, it can be implemented from scratch in a few hours, and the I/O devices for accessing the keyboard, screen, networking, etc. can be added on as needed.

I designed Bedrock to make it easier to maintain programs as a solo developer. It's deeply inspired by Uxn and PICO-8, but it makes significant departures from Uxn to provide more capabilities to programs and to be easier to implement.

Let me know if you try it out or have any questions.

1. behrlich ◴[14 Jul 25 22:33 UTC] No.44566072[source]▶
> I designed Bedrock to make it easier to maintain programs as a solo developer.

Can you say more? I really love this idea but can’t think of any practical use case with 65k of memory. What programs are you now more easily maintaining with Bedrock? To what end?

replies(3): >>44566328 #>>44572041 #>>44578460 #
2. durakot ◴[14 Jul 25 23:04 UTC] No.44566328[source]▶
Check out Uxn for some "practical" use cases: https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn
3. apgwoz ◴[15 Jul 25 15:16 UTC] No.44572041[source]▶
It’s true you can’t build giant video editors or even photo editors. But, if you reestablish your expectations and think 8-bit retro, you’ll be reminded that very few things didn’t exist in some form in the 80s… just at a smaller scale. Spreadsheet? Check. Paint programs? Check. Music composition? Check.
4. benbridle ◴[16 Jul 25 03:38 UTC] No.44578460[source]▶
I'm currently selling a pixel-art drawing program called Cobalt, which is built on Bedrock (you can see a demo of it running at the bottom of the project page). It was initially only available for Windows and Linux, but I wanted to make it available for the Nintendo DS as well, so I wrote a new emulator and now it and all of my other programs work on the DS. It was far easier to write the emulator than it would have been to figure out how to port Cobalt to the DS directly, and now I don't have the issue of having to maintain two versions of the same software.

It's true that 64KB is pretty small in modern terms, but it feels massive when you're writing programs for Bedrock, and the interfaces exposed by Bedrock for accessing files and drawing to the screen and the likes make for very compact programs.