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

(benbridle.com)
221 points benbridle | 1 comments | 10 Jul 25 22:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.213s | 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.

Show context
kosmavision ◴[14 Jul 25 23:30 UTC] No.44566466[source]▶
For people curious about the differences between this and Uxn (as I was): https://benbridle.com/articles/bedrock-differences-from-uxn....
replies(1): >>44568935 #
tromp ◴[15 Jul 25 07:50 UTC] No.44568935[source]▶
> each pixel having both a foreground and a background colour

how does that work?

replies(2): >>44569074 #>>44576757 #
1. benbridle ◴[15 Jul 25 22:53 UTC] No.44576757[source]▶
Each screen pixel has two colours because there are two screen layers, a foreground layer and a background layer. Anything you draw to the foreground layer will be draw over anything on the background layer, so you can use the foreground layer for fast-moving elements like mouse cursors and game characters without having to redraw the entire background every frame.

So each pixel has a colour on the foreground layer and a colour on the background layer, and will be drawn as one or the other. Normally the foreground colour of the pixel will be the colour used, but if the foreground colour is palette colour 0 (treated as transparent), the background colour will be used instead.