Episode: 3100
Title: HPR3100: For your consideration - Makers Corner
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3100/hpr3100.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:49:01

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3100 for Friday 19 June 2020.
Today's show is entitled For Your Consideration, Makers Corner
and is part of the series podcast recommendations. It is hosted by Ken Farlin
and is about 76 minutes long and carries a clean flag. The summary is,
Makers Corner is a tech-oriented DIY podcast
from the other side podcast network.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Music
Hi everybody, this is Ken bringing you a recommendation for a new podcast.
If you're into making or hardware hacking and integration with Raspberry Pi's,
Adrenal, soldering, that sort of thing, then Makers Corner with Nate and Yannick
is a podcast for you. It's a tech-oriented DIY podcast
from the other side podcast network. They've released a few shows already.
I must say that I was very slow to subscribe to this one
but I rapidly called up and it is an excellent podcast
and I'm glad to bring it to you today especially
as they are having an interview with John and Phil
about the 32-built project also features some headphones stuff.
So this is not a typical episode that they do
but I thought that it would be an ideal opportunity to expose this interview
because it's very interesting to the HPR audience.
So their website is Makers Corner.tech
and sit back and relax and enjoy the rest of the show.
This podcast is part of the other side podcast network.
Music
Hello and welcome to Makers Corner episode 4.
My name is Yannick. I'm the French guy from Switzerland
and joining me for this episode, as always,
my front anchor host, Nate. Hello Nate, how are you?
Great, how are you doing?
Well, snow is back but the delight is back too.
So all in all, I'm a little better than I was a few weeks back
when I was driving to work in the dark.
So the mood is better and we have a fantastic show tonight.
So it's harder to fall asleep when you're driving if it's light out.
Yes, yes.
Which is something that almost happened during every morning of the winter.
The winter drives are something else.
On tonight's show, we have that interview with John and Phil
that we talked about on our last episode that couldn't happen
before, what was it, last Thursday, I think we recorded that.
So we are on March the 3rd today.
So we recorded that, I think the 29th February, I guess.
So we're going to feature this interview in this episode.
Also, we're going to talk with you Nate about what you've been up to this fortnight
and then we will close the episode with the Thingiverse thing of the episode.
So Nate, what have you been up to this past two weeks?
I've been learning electronics with my oldest boy.
He's almost nine and he's taking this electronics engineering class
and it's been a lot of fun kind of relearning some things that I've forgotten
and then working with him and teaching him how to properly do circuits.
We've got some breadboards and it's a plan.
Amy.co is the website that is kind of through, but it's part of his schooling.
So this last time, we're from just having very simple circuits with switches
and LEDs to now we're doing stuff with transistors now.
And I got to explain to him this little PNP and NPN transistors.
Sometimes they're hard for me to grasp at times like when they pull down
or how to pull them down or anyway, but it's funny to think about how many millions
or maybe billions of those transistors are in a phone or a computer.
It's amazing to think about how far things have gone.
When you look and you just pause and you think about the vacuum tube
was the precursor to the transistor and how big that is.
And then the transistor got a lot smaller.
They started packing these things tighter and tighter and tighter.
And now we have, I mean, now they're so extremely tiny.
And I know it's, it makes me really appreciate all the technology we have today
and how awesome, you know, pick your poison raspberry pie
or do we know or blip 32.
What amazing technology we have today that we can play with.
And I don't know, I'm going to mumble, I'm going to ramble here on.
But it's just, it's amazing to see all that we can, that we have now,
compared to what it was just, you know, 20 years, 20, 30 years ago.
And there's just a lot more appreciation that I can, I can re-garner
just from doing this electronics class with, you know, with my eight-year-old.
Did you, did you yourself learn something with this electronic, electronic course?
A little bit, yes.
I mean, these are things I already kind of know.
But it's nice to have kind of the reformalization of the education
because I'm pretty much self-taught on most of it.
And I did take electronics class in high school.
You know, that was, let's see, the 1990s was five years ago, right?
Yeah.
Yes.
Five years ago.
And those, those classes there, and I built circuits and I fixed things and whatnot.
So I understand the concepts and I have the multimeters and whatnot.
I don't have an oscilloscope yet.
But that is, that's something that every mad scientist really needs to have.
Exactly.
That's something I've put in my wish list for last Christmas.
But...
Santa didn't bring it.
Yeah, no.
Well, maybe you weren't good enough.
Maybe, maybe I just didn't buy myself one.
It must be fun to be able to follow along with your kid.
So I guess he's learning from school, so you're learning things.
But probably you're teaching him also stuff and that must be very...
It is.
Very nice for you.
You know, teaching things like, you know, circuits and parallel and circuits and series and whatnot.
There's a lot of little basics.
Yeah.
And he enjoys it.
It's fun for him.
He's excited to do it.
You know, once we get through this next round of projects, then we're going to take a part
his broken tablet and see if we can actually get that thing working again.
Cool.
Yeah.
But at the end of the day, you know, those parallel and series, circuit, circuits and homeslow,
it's basically all you need to do some electronics stuff.
Pretty much.
Yeah, because I mean, I'm not going to be tearing into any chips.
You know, but if you can understand the things around the chips, you know, the all the
disasters and capacitors and everything else, then that's kind of the...
And that's all the foundational stuff to be able to, you know, fix stuff yourself.
Yeah.
Once you know how to do a RC circuit or when you don't know how to do a voltage divider,
you're pretty much...
You have all the basics you need.
The world is opening.
Yes.
On my side of the Atlantic, I was busy this week playing with the 42 Blit.
I reflashed the firmware because I think it was last month since I did that.
And a lot have changed, as you will hear in the interview in this last month.
So I did that.
I had a look at the code.
I joined the Discord server.
I met a wonderful community there.
I also submitted a couple of full requests.
Nothing fancy, just fixing a problem with the sample and fixing some displays
that were not exactly as they should be.
Just, you know, to kind of dig my toes into the water just to see how this thing is working.
And now I'm exploring the APIs.
And this thing is really amazing.
It's an awesome device.
But I will let Phil and John from Pymore tell you all about that in the interview.
So I guess we're going to go to the interview now.
And then we will come back to close this episode with the thingyverse thing of the episode.
So I'm joined tonight with by John and Phil.
Good evening, guys.
How are you, Nick?
So you guys work for Pymore and we are going to talk about the project that I like.
Well, I like all of your project.
But the one that I'm really into right now and I have I have it there going to show it on the camera.
Yay.
That's the beta version.
Or is it?
Yeah, beta or the access.
I don't know how you call that.
It's beta.
It's beta.
A beta unit of the 32-bit platform.
We talked about that on the podcast two weeks ago, two episodes ago.
So why don't we start by a small introduction?
So guys, if you want to introduce yourself, maybe join if you want to start.
Yeah, sure thing.
I'm John Williamson and I'm one of the co-founders of Pymore any.
So I started the business with Paul Beach in 2012.
And since then is kind of grown into an uncontrollable beast that makes lots of PCBs.
And 32-bit is kind of our latest most ambitious project.
And I'm Phil Howard and I sort of joined, what was it, seven years ago now?
Quite a while, as employee number 11 or something like that.
And I am software lead writing Python drivers for basically all of the products we release
and kind of keeping on top of that game and keeping stuff released.
And taking a break to work on 32-bit has been really quite interesting.
All right.
Yeah.
So 32-bit.
That's the subject of this, of this, I was going to say interview.
But let's call it chat because I'm curious about that.
So how would you describe the 32-bit?
Is that a device, that a platform, how would you describe that?
So I think the way that I would describe it, it was kind of my concept originally,
is that it's the piece of hardware I wish I had back in the kind of early 90s
that I could have developed games for.
Because obviously everything was very different.
The technology was a lot harder to get into.
The cost of things like devboards was massively higher.
As a hobbyist, you have no hope of even touching this kind of stuff.
And we're really fortunate that today you can grab a powerful MCU off the shelf.
You can stick it on a PCB that can be made for a reasonable price.
There's such a wealth of features, sensors, devices out there that we can play with.
We can integrate and kind of produce a product like this.
So for me personally, it was, I wanted a standard platform, hardware platform,
for developing kind of retro inspired games.
Cool, yeah.
So it's the hardware, but you also work, you're also working on the firmware.
The firmware, sorry.
So that's been released.
It's open source, right?
The firmware.
Everything.
Yes.
Hardware, firmware.
Tools, content, everything.
Open source.
Was the open source thing?
Was that like from the beginning you were going to open source everything?
Was that like, okay, we need, we need help.
We can do that alone.
So let's open source of that and have people help us.
It was all open source from the very start.
It was actually part of the pitch.
We launched the product on Kickstarter because it's quite a nice marketing platform
for presenting something that's new.
Like we've done Kickstarter before.
We obviously run our own shop.
We produce a lot of products.
Most of them we don't go near Kickstarter because it's just not necessary.
But for this we kind of wanted a focal point for launching the product.
And the Kickstarter campaign seemed like a good choice.
And you'll see in the Kickstarter campaigns kind of a description about what 32-blit isn't.
And that is, it's not your classic handheld console.
It has no DRM.
It's all open source.
It's not region locked.
It's designed to be hacked.
It's the anti handheld console if you like.
Because everything about it is not how traditionally this stuff is done.
And we appreciate that the other products out there that also hit those goals.
Like we're not the only ones.
There's things like the Arduboy, Game Doeno.
I think Adafruit have got a couple of things around that kind of space as well.
But I think from my point of view what I felt they were missing
is they just didn't have the power to do the things I wanted to do.
Yeah, I wanted to play with like 3D engines.
I want to mess around with fixed point math to do crazy effects.
I want to do alpha blending.
I want to render everything in 24-bit color.
It's not, I don't want to move black and white pixels around the tiny OLED.
I want something more than that.
And that's what 32-blit is.
I think the power 32-blit exceeded our expectations somewhat as well.
Which it's been interesting.
Yeah, when I read the description on the website or on Kickstarter.
There's a lot of awesome hardware on the 32-blit.
So, you know, one of you go over what kind of device where cheap is there,
what kind of sensor.
So, well, I'll talk about the chip and the display maybe
and then Phil could take on from there.
Indeed.
I think the thing that made 32-blit possible
as in made it into something that could achieve all those things
that I mentioned before that I really wanted out of it
was this particular chip coming out from STM.
So, it wasn't like we had a plethora of choice.
It was this particular chip coming out that suddenly
sparked the idea that this kind of product could be possible.
You know, it's fast.
It runs at 480 megahertz.
That's fast for an MCU, right?
You can shift a lot of instructions at that kind of speed.
It has a megabyte of RAM on board,
which again is pretty rare in this kind of space.
The flash is tiny, you know, 128K compared to the rest of the specs,
but that tends to be the case within an MCU package anyway.
Flash is very expensive to manufacture in that technology.
So, we put an external flash on to kind of support it.
But, you know, it's also got hardware floating-point units.
It has incredible instruction and data caches.
So, like, even when you write bad code, it kind of runs fast.
It's a very nice piece of hardware.
I've written plenty of bad code to prove this, of course.
And because of the choices they made in the other thing
is it's part of their value range.
So, the actual chip isn't incredibly expensive.
Like, you know, I can't remember exactly,
but you're talking around $5, which for all that power is pretty incredible.
And then on top of that, because it's an ST part, you know,
it's got a huge number of great peripherals.
So, things like the DPI interface for the video,
which is what we use to drive the LCD.
That means that we can have that kind of rock-solid V-sync 60...
Well, I think we were in a 50 FPS display in 24-bit color,
which you're just not going to get out of an SPI-connected display, right?
And things like that DPI interface,
it's entirely hardware accelerated.
You know, we write to a frame buffer in memory.
We tell the, what's called the LTDC peripheral,
where that frame buffer is, and it handles the rest, right?
It tells us a V-sync is going to happen so that we can get out of the way
and let it do its thing.
But all of this kind of happens in the background.
This part is amazing.
It's just a really great chip.
It's got a huge number of features.
It's cost-effective.
And, literally, everything that third-stube that does is done in that chip.
And, you know, we've got audio running in the background.
We've got kind of the image flipping happening.
You've got the engine itself running, timers, tweens.
You've got all these different processes going around in the background.
But still, the user's code has like 90% of the chip's performance available to it.
It's a really nice part.
I could carry on talking about it almost indefinitely,
so I'm going to stop there.
There are so many features we're not even using as well.
For people following along at home, it's the STM32H750.
And, because we're using a not-ball grid array part,
we have to pick and choose what features we can actually wire into it.
They become kind of mutually exclusive in a way.
You get kind of out of pin errors quite regularly.
As you try to, you know, the DPI interface alone uses something like 18 pins.
It's a pin monster, yeah.
There'll be a few more than that, about 20 pins.
And, Phil mentioned a good point.
The other thing is that this chip's available as a TQFP package.
So, you could literally hand solder one of these at home.
We use a machine for it, obviously.
But, it's not a completely inaccessible format for people to experiment with.
Which is cool.
You can get a oscilloscope probe on it as well,
which is a proof to be very handy in the debugging process.
And then the only other bit of hardware that I was going to talk about was the screen.
We are super nerdy about screen.
It's like, I will not buy a device that has a poor screen on it.
So, you know, we've gone for a really nice three and a half inches.
It's a good size screen for the handheld console, you know.
I think it's a nice balance for the size of the device,
versus the amount of it that's screen area.
Because you want a lot of screen as much as you can fit, really.
And also, it's an IPS display, so the viewing angles are excellent.
And, yeah, those two in combination, I guess, are the heart of 32-blit.
Then you get onto things like the controls and the rest of it that Phil can talk about.
And so, when worrying up the controls,
we went for the standard four-face buttons,
D-pad, plus an analog stick, start and select,
which is kind of your basic classic console control layout.
We actually had enough spare eye opins that had no other real use,
that we could root a couple of them to the left and the right,
and call them hack headers,
so that people who want to add either left and right buttons,
some sort of analog triggers or whatever they could,
whatever they might want, can add them to the side of the console
or use those for hacks and mods.
We've got more eye-op rooted to the top of the device
for the programming header, for resetting it externally,
for connecting stuff to the internal iSquatsy bus.
So, if you want to throw away all of the code we've written for it
and build something completely different in faces with peripherals,
then you're quite within your remit to do that.
It gives you the flexibility.
And then to back that up, we've got a little vibration motor
connected to a PWM, so you can get force feedback in games,
which is quite nice, quite cool on a little handheld as well.
It's the amp, rather, which is connected to the audio output
also on a PWM, then we've got the...
It's actually on a DAC output.
Oh, a proper DAC output, yeah.
It is effectively a PWM.
Same difference.
And then we've got the tilt sensor, I can't remember the part number,
but that gives us kind of tilt steering control.
And John put together a really nice kind of sand demo
where you can turn the blit around and sand particles
or slide from one side to another and skitter over each other
and just really satisfying.
So, we've kind of gone all out with...
I suppose you call it a relatively modern remit of input
and output features, but in a classic console kind of style.
So you can imagine you're taking stuff from the mega drive
and the SNES era and you're updating that to have force feedback
and tilt controls and all sorts of other new modern conveniences.
It gives you a little bit more ability, I guess.
And then you can go around...
That's a really important point.
And back in the early 90s, we didn't have men's sensors.
Or, I'm pretty sure we didn't,
but if we did, they probably cost thousands of pounds
and the size of a trunk, you know, a fridge or something.
It's only the fact that technologies moved on so much
that these kind of features can be added so cheaply to a product,
which means we can kind of go for that retro feel
and kind of pitch towards retro gaming,
but augment it with those kind of modern extras like the accelerometers,
the vibration sensors, things like that.
Yeah, yeah.
Nate, my co-host on the show, said a few few shows ago
that right now it's a very good time to be a geek
because we have access to lots of stuff for...
Yeah, what, as you said, about, I don't know,
the 10th of the price that it was a few years ago.
So, yeah, when you talk about the 32 bleeds,
it sounds like a really great device
and I can attest to that because I have one here
and I have tested many of the examples.
I'm starting to try and understand how to write my own programs
for that, but we'll slow down on changing it.
Yeah, this beta phase is volatile.
So, we say that the API, the build tool chain,
everything changes pretty much week by week,
but we're trying to kind of hone in on the right experience for everybody
so that when it comes out of beta,
we can say, we're more stable now.
We're not super stable, but it's not going to change tomorrow, right?
You can have a bit of fun for a while.
You see, I guess.
I didn't know that this was hackable, as you said,
as with the I-square scene.
And the beta and so.
It seems to me that it's a game console,
but it could actually be anything.
Could be maybe scientific tools,
but to control stuff in a home automation system
or enhance the games that would run
on the device using, I don't know, controlling LEDs,
external LEDs or things like that.
It definitely could be.
I think we've learned in the past to not try and be
everything to everybody, especially when we're kind of
scoping out new products.
And you'll get a bunch of people around in the company,
maybe four or five throwing ideas off each other.
It's almost as important what you choose
and not to include as what you choose to include,
because you can end up with, I don't know if you know the reference,
but Homer's car or whatever it is.
There's the Simpsons where he designs a car right
and ends up with like 12 different horns.
And it's just ridiculous.
It just adds everything he fancies at the time.
And with product design of the type we do,
it really is a balancing act between, you know,
it's not just about price or difficulty to assemble it,
or whether the parts are available,
or you know, what quality of part you pick,
do you pick this one because it's 16-bit,
or this one because it's 12-bit, or whatever.
A lot of it's about not making the experience confusing
for the user, because anyone can throw every feature
onto a board to charge 200 pounds as they're done.
But actually, I think the more important thing is saying,
these are the valuable features that can work together
to actually produce experience.
So while you can do a lot more with 32-bit,
we're very, you know, we have been very opinionated
about what we've actually presented
as the final package.
It's not an API feature effectively.
No, we're not trying to make it easy for people
to use it for home automation control,
or for this or for that.
We're definitely all about the game development.
That said, if you can set up a tool chain
and get code running on the device,
or ignore all our stuff and do what you like,
it opens us the end of the day.
Yeah, so what's the target audience
for 32-bit is that developers
and nostalgic developers of a certain age,
like between 30 and 50, something like that.
Right, which is basically exactly me.
Me too.
Yeah, this is definitely,
this is a passion project
as in something we wanted to have,
not necessarily, you know, obviously,
we wanted to share it with other people
and get people involved in it,
and sell units because we're a business at the end of the day,
but we definitely built this one for us.
And I think,
I don't think it's the wrong choice
because I'm pretty sure there are enough software developers
out there of a certain age
who belong for the kind of retro gaming
from the early 90s, you know.
We've had such great kind of return
from the beta backers already that it just kind of shows
someone on the right track.
Oh, that's been incredible, isn't it?
Yeah.
You said you had feedback from the backers.
The campaign on Kickstarter was funded in eight hours,
so you already had an indication
that it was something that
would please your audience.
That kind of thing's interesting
because, you know,
we're not a huge company,
but we do have quite a large audience already.
You know, we've shipped
something like 400,000 parcels worldwide since we started.
So our customer base is quite big.
Our mailing list is quite generous.
So when we do something like Kickstarter,
as long as we're not silly about it,
we can hit those kind of targets relatively easily
because we've got quite a wide audience
to kind of transmit the message to you on day one
and say, hey, check out this thing.
And, you know, we're really fortunate that we have customers
who are genuine fans of what we do.
You know, let's come back time and time again.
They'll try new things that we do.
Not everything we do is perfect.
And sometimes, you know, that's what it is.
And we try to deal with those situations,
as best we can.
Yeah, not to our own horn too much,
but we've worked hard to earn that reputation
with customers whereby when we do a new thing,
they'll trust us, they'll be on board straight away.
And they'll be enthusiastic about it,
which is really exciting and really nice place to be in, really.
Yeah, yeah.
Really encouraging.
Let's come back to the platform.
What are, or will be the ways to develop games for the 30-bit?
We will have a lure,
which will be the kind of entry point for people
who don't want to get too involved with C,
who want to be able to get up and running fast
and want to basically just write code
through the device and see results quickly,
without having to have the entire tool chain
and all the libraries and editors and stuff
necessarily installed on the computer.
And then we have C++,
which is the one step on from there,
or if you've already got some development experience,
that's where you go into make games
that are really fast, perform,
or to port doom,
or to just do crazy things.
And they're both fun, right?
I think lure is definitely more focused
at the...
Yeah, it's more focused at beginners,
but actually, personally, I think
something is what I want to achieve.
I could achieve in it.
It's a damsel I could and getting into it, you know,
developing something in C++.
And, you know, I'm not going to have to worry about hard-faulting
or messing up my memory allocation or anything like that.
You know, it's...
We've had it running on device before.
We have to kind of cut it out of the build
because the APIs were changing so fast
that we couldn't keep the lure bindings up to date
or time scale.
So we pull it all out while we let things stabilize
so we can bring it back in towards the end.
But actually, when we had lure running on the device,
the performance is still astonishing.
You know, it's a fast chip
and the instruction caches
and the data caches are really...
really make a big difference to that.
And coding, you know,
I had an example doing, like,
real-time soft shadows that were written in the lure.
It's not...
You can still achieve great things,
not like it compromise.
It's definitely one of those cases where, as soon as
you've reached that level of competence
that you're writing again, it's too complex for lure.
You're probably ready to move on to see anyway.
And I kind of get that.
It's still a fair hunt, but...
You can definitely do more.
You can definitely do more and do it more quickly
if you write in C++.
Obviously, I mean, that's the nature of the beast.
But what we're trying to do with the API
is give you a really great set of tools
that mean all of those kind of really hot loops
aren't in your code base.
They're in our code base.
So things like, you know, rendering
blitting screen or doing stretch blitz
or processing large amounts of data
like doing the audio.
No, seven, I think, is a good example.
That kind of thing, what we're trying...
what we're trying to do is hide that all behind
kind of a couple of simple API calls.
In C++, you know, it's a few functional overheads.
It doesn't really matter.
Yeah.
Any plans for Python?
I know there are, because we don't have that just today.
Probably not from us, at least initially.
We promised lure in C++, so we're going to completely focus on that.
I would be...
Well, I would be astonished if someone doesn't get
a microphone running on it
in relatively short time,
because there are people who specialize in this.
You know, they just literally just grab it.
They'll have it done in half a day, probably.
But we've never ported my microphone to a new device.
It's not part of our ecosystem.
So it will be...
it will be an undertaking for us to start it now.
We just need to focus on the core experience.
Okay.
Now, I'm a developer.
So I know how to write C++,
and I know how to place a sprite somewhere
and detect a collision with a wall.
But what I am not is a graphics designer or a some designer.
So how would I actually program a game
if I don't have any talent in those fields?
You don't have to have talent to produce something, right?
I mean, I have no artistic talent at all,
but I can at least...
I still have fun with things like the demos and stuff,
like doing the tilt demo and various effects.
That's kind of what tickles me.
But for people who just want to have a go at the coding side,
we're including a bunch of assets.
We got this great guy called Sam,
who came over and actually spent some time with us in the UK.
He's from Germany.
He's a pixel artist who does some great stuff on it.
And we saw his work,
and we were like,
we really want to commission some sprite sheets to go with the device.
So, you know, our users can basically use them as a jumping off point.
So he's put together, I think it's like eight sprite sheets
that are 128 sprites per sheet.
Oh.
So, 128 by 128 in the size 8 pixels,
which makes it...
64 sprites.
64 sprites.
Is it 16 by 16?
Yeah, it is.
Sorry, yes, it is.
No, it's filmed.
Trying to do a very simple mass in my head on...
It's 256 sprites.
Basically, you've got like a catalog of over 2000 sprites,
I think it is, you can use in your own games.
And they're all completely royalty free.
Again, we paid him to produce the work completely for us.
Again, it's open, license free, everything.
You can do what you want with it.
We already have someone using the pirate sprites
to make a very piratical version of Bomberman, I think.
Yes, that's really sweet.
But they're quite...
They're a nice set of sprites because we kind of...
It was great to get them over, actually,
because we could go out and have a couple of beers.
We could kind of talk about what we wanted to achieve.
And we came up with these four themes
for kind of classic game style concepts.
And we've got them to put the sheets together.
So we've got like a shoot them up.
We've got an RPG style one.
We've got a kind of a...
What do you call that kind of Alien vs.
Alien breed style top down?
It is a top down shooter, isn't it?
Top down shooter, yeah.
And there's one of that type of shooter as well.
We've got a platform set.
So the idea is that it's kind of something for everybody.
But you can mix and match them if you want to.
And then there's a few extra sheets that just contain kind of
dig bats and symbols and things like that that you might want to bring in
as assets or icons or whatever.
I think you can get started quite easily.
The other thing that's nice about being retro style games
is that while great pixel art is a true skill
and it takes practice and an eye for the...
An eye for it.
Just the restraint of only having an 8x8 pixel square
I think lets people achieve a lot more than they could with just a
blank canvas is because they wanted it to be.
And I've drawn some icons that I'm not totally ashamed of.
So that's something.
I was going to say my rainbow ascent game all
of the graphics are just rectangles.
There's no sprites in there anything.
Yeah, it looks great.
Yeah, that works.
So I think it's about being created and you did an asteroid's
cleanse as well, right?
Oh yeah, that's just...
Which is entirely vector based, just geometry and nothing else.
So it's not necessarily about drawing, you know,
sitting there and churning your way through
five different sprite sheets to get the perfect look.
It's about trying something new experiment.
So you might not need sprites at all.
Your audio might be entirely algorithmically generated or you might
get a tracker or you might ask a friend or you might transpose some existing music.
Or you might just play an MP3 file because apparently that's possible now.
We've got into one of our big tobaccos.
I think the only limit is really
kind of just what you prepared to try.
It's all about experimentation at the end of the day.
And we'd hope that people in the community want to remix
each other's projects as well.
Because we're making everything open.
We're hoping that people will want to share their code.
So someone might put together like a great engine
for some platformer actions.
Someone else might pick that up, work on the sprite sheet,
improve it, pass it back over.
Someone adds the audio track.
You know, why not?
This is possible to work that way.
No problem.
I've finished my top notch game.
The way to distribute that if I wanted to pass the game
to someone else who has a 32 bleed.
Is that just one file or zip file?
Is there a plan for some kind of centralized platform
for games distribution?
Or is it just put that on GitHub and get it compiled it and run it?
Well, Phil knows the ins and outs of this more than I do.
But I'm kind of architecting the project.
So I'll tell him what I want it to be.
Hopefully I'll be like that.
So the idea is that we'll have like a custom byte.
Obviously we want people to share code.
You know, they don't have to. It's up to them.
You will be able to pass a single binary file to someone.
And that will contain like a packed header with all the details
with icon description, the name of the game itself.
Some of the metadata that kind of travels with it.
And also includes the executable code.
And includes all the assets.
So you can stick on an SD card, plug it into the device,
or where you go.
Or you can use our command line tools that are uploaded via USB
serial. So you can just say, you know,
32-bit Prague file name or whatever.
That's how it would work for C++ projects that are actually compiled.
So everything built into that one package.
When it comes to Lua projects,
always, I think at this moment,
we'd always run our SD card.
So you'd have a folder that contains your various Lua scripts,
your various asset files that you want to load off the SD card.
And yeah, they won't be quite so tidy to pass around.
Maybe we'll come up with a way of packaging them
and say is it file or something in the future
that allows it to be handled on, you know,
unpackaged on the flyers needed.
But right now, we're kind of focused on getting it working.
Yeah, it'll probably be a collection of files in the folder.
Do you have anything to add to that?
It's worth noting as a consequence of how we built the system
to allow you to develop on your desktop computer.
You can take your 32-bit game
and you can distribute it on Windows Linux
and even in browser via EM script and as well.
So it gives you that opportunity to share the game
beyond just people using the 32-bit.
So you're not putting a huge amount of time.
Perhaps if you're really looking to take games to development seriously,
you can reach out to a wider market,
maybe put your game up on each I.O.
and then people with the bit can download that version
and everyone else can download the other versions.
It makes them a little bit more free, I suppose.
Yeah, that's interesting.
The fact that I could run the examples
and my little games that doesn't do much right now
are on my computer before sending it to the device
because that takes extra time each time.
So the cycle of development is shortened
by being able to run that on my computer.
I think it's something we could never have stopped people from doing.
If they wanted to redistribute their games to other platforms,
they've got the kind, they've got the source,
they could go for all the effort required to port it,
just making it possible straight out of the gate.
Why not?
Well, the experience is so different.
I've had times when I'm trying to debug like a slightly gnarly problem in a project
and it only happens on the device.
I'm having to transfer it over for every test.
Oh yeah, this is very true.
That's no fun.
It's all right to have to do that now and again,
but I'd much rather load it up in Visual Studio,
smash through a dev debug cycle over and over,
step-by-step debugging.
99% of the time you can get all the way to something that will run on device
just like that, perfect.
Why wouldn't we want that to be something?
Sure.
It's always complicated to debug on the device.
It is, we're adding tools to the API for that.
So you can expect that to improve over time,
things like being able to stream via the USB serial.
You can actually do step-by-step debugging,
but you need to buy a plugin programmer.
So it's like a standard ST programmer.
But we're looking at tools to help you stream
debug information via USB serial to log files on the SD card.
There's overlays on the screen.
But I think the thing,
not quite related to that,
but the thing that surprised me more than anything else
is that when I'm developing on my Windows machine,
which is a fast machine, right?
It's stupidly quick.
When I'm running Visual Studio in debug mode,
the speed of the compiled code is not that far off
the same speed as it runs on the device,
and really smooth.
I like, that's pure chance.
But actually, if I'm running something,
and if I'm going like five milliseconds per frame rendering
on my desktop,
if I put it on the device,
it's going to be roughly the same.
I mean, obviously, there are edge cases
where if I do something that's completely pathological
and happens to run really fast on my 7,
but it's awful on the ARM architecture,
then I'm not going to get that experience.
But it still surprises me to this day
that I can hack away on my Windows machine.
I'm like, come up with something ridiculous.
I was doing some stuff with 3D rendering,
and I wasn't being careful about it.
I was trying floating point numbers all over the place
to just get something on screen.
You're running on the device, and it's actually okay.
You're thinking, wow, there's so much potential
to do more with this.
If you really spend the time on it,
it's nice.
I was amazed that the speed of
the different demos and examples,
even the 3D rendering is just,
it's so fast.
It's viable, right?
And that's what matters.
We're not even that skilled at it.
I'm a part-time bedroom 3D code.
There are people who are way better at this stuff than me.
And if I can get something up,
I've been developing for a long time.
But I don't know anything about optimizing the assembly
or using things like the SIMD instructions.
There's so much scope for someone who knows
what they're doing to come in and just say,
let's smash this.
It's twice as fast now.
What the hell are you playing at?
That was so easy.
We had someone with the frame buffer copy
I think coming on and saying,
you can use DMA2D for that.
You just have to do four passes or whatever.
Which we're going to end up influencing.
It's great.
Jumped into the Discord.
He's like, I noticed you're doing,
we can do it with DMA2D,
emailed me the source code.
Which we haven't integrated it yet,
but we're totally going to do it this way,
why wouldn't we?
And suddenly, he's just fixed that for us.
That's great.
It worked before, but now it takes way less time.
Yeah.
Talking about this person in China,
do you have an idea of how many better units have been sent
and did you send that all over the world?
We did.
Definitely ship them all over the world.
I think it was about 350.
Is that right, Phil?
Somewhere in that region.
Yeah, something like that.
Because we've got the remaining units still to go out with.
We're basically waiting for the plastics now.
The actual case itself.
But yeah, it was something like 350.
And I would say
most of the communication with respect to the beta
has happened on the Discord.
Yeah.
Which is the perfect place to do it really.
And out of those 350,
there's maybe kind of 20 really involved contributors.
Which I think is a pretty good hit rate, actually.
And a few of those are like way above and beyond,
who are just incredible.
Yeah, I'm going to try and pop up more often on Discord.
But probably to get information more than to provide information.
The community there is great.
I mean, when I got on the server,
I was greeted by almost everyone.
Everyone is, you got to help.
So it's really nice, yeah.
It's a really good atmosphere on there.
And it's quite funny as well.
Because as we said earlier on,
there are certain technical challenges
that are completely fresh to us.
We know they're possible.
It's just a case of kind of slogging through it.
And I would say,
there's a couple of people on the Discord
who will just jump in and have a go with you.
Like every step of the way they're there
and we're throwing bits of code backwards and forwards
and copying links out of the documentation
and discussing possible ways to deal with it.
And they're kind of like, you know,
it definitely makes the experience more fun
than Phil and I kind of just staring at each other in a room.
Well, it really is just us too,
who do anything really relate to it.
It's like, you know,
it's like, you know,
it definitely makes the experience more fun
than it is just us too,
who do anything really related to software in Moroni.
So this is almost like,
suddenly having a team of people
bashing away on problems
and it's really quite rewarding and quite fun.
Yeah, the borrower of the open source community
always amazes me.
It is. And, you know,
we said it earlier on,
but it's so important
to us that this is open source.
You know, as a company,
we'd love to sell hardware.
If it's got legs, then we want people to use it.
And use it as very, you know,
in as varied a way as possible.
Which is why things like
running it in the browser is just great
because it means you can just throw an example over to your friend
and you just send them a link.
They can have a go at your game.
Then it just makes the whole thing way more fluid, I think.
It's much more interesting.
And it makes having distributed teams
a lot easier when you can just,
okay, hold on, I'm going to put that on the brother
and then refresh the page.
Okay, I did that. Yeah, that's cool.
Give me the thing.
Yeah, it sounds really interesting.
So,
how far are we from
some sort of release,
maybe a 0.9 version
that would be
viable for
the wide audience?
It's,
well,
so from a purely
logistical getting that
the door situation
all we're waiting on is the plastic.
So that's the case itself from the,
you know, you've got a device in your hand now
and it's, it's kind of constructed from layered PCBs.
And it actually works incredibly well.
I think we're quite proud of how well that works.
And I love it. I love it. I love it.
It looks cool, right? Yeah, it looks cool.
But obviously we promised
with the Kickstarter that it would come in a proper
and we've spent a lot of time on the shell
and we tried to make it as nice as we can,
trying to make it look great
and just basically work well.
So, you know, we needed to ship that as part of the pledge.
Having said that,
we still got tons to do on the software.
So, you know, from
film, my point to you, it's no bad thing
that we're not quite shipping out the release units yet.
But, you know, there's going to be a point at which
our factory in Taiwan says,
here you go. Here's a load of plastic.
Go nuts. And I guess we're just,
you know, it's not
it's not the best answer,
but I guess we'll scramble at the time when we fill
to tidy up as much as we can.
We're currently mired
in some really difficult problems, I think,
is there? What?
A couple of really difficult things.
Plus, all of the other stuff.
Luckily, we've done the lure stuff before.
So, there's work to do.
We know how to do it.
We know what we're doing.
The specific thing we're working on at the moment is what
I mentioned to you earlier on before
Phil came into the call.
So, there's this idea of getting the
making proper use of the external flash that we put on the device.
So, you can have a library of games installed simultaneously.
Now, worst case,
it's not actually a
it's not a stopper, right?
If we have to skip that, we can still release
and let people get on with the device,
fix it later.
But, we'd like to get that kind of thing sorted before
putting the release units out there.
Let's just do one really awesome thing,
which is to preload all the
release devices with a whole bunch of software
and just send them to people and say,
let's have a bunch of games playing.
Again, we've got nothing that's kind of
we've got loads of stuff on the list.
Like, it's terrifyingly long.
But there's nothing on there that's an absolute stopper.
It's just,
that is that personal pride thing of
I don't really quite want to let it go
out of the door without that game sorted out first,
you know, but there will come a point
at which we know that those
release units are going to go out.
And at that point, we can have to put
down tools on certain aspects of the system,
just tidy up that day one experience for people
and get the, you know,
what we have, get that ready
rather than worrying about anything we don't have
at that stage basically.
So, it's getting there.
So, to help you with that, the long list,
how can people contribute
to the platform?
I mean, not, I'm not talking about
writing games, although that could help
if you want to provide games
from on the device.
But is there something people can help you with
that's directly linked to, I don't know,
the firmware or some hardware drivers
or do you need help in this area?
I would say that if people have advice
and they have the skill set
to kind of make that hardware
seeing as they already know how to do this stuff,
if they want to jump on the discord
and chat about it or, or even if they don't have the hardware,
actually, if you can read a day cheat,
you'll kind of understand what's going on.
If they want to jump on the discord
and talk to us, then
we're all ears. Like, the code,
the code is there, it's on GitHub, people can dive in,
have a go, bits of it are quite
painfully messy and still need to be
kind of worked over, refactored.
But I think, you know, on the whole,
we're doing okay. And actually, for people
who've got the devices, almost one
of the most useful things they can do is
build projects, have a go, do their own thing,
and let us know whether api fall short
for them, let us know where
they're finding bugs.
Find the pain points, find the holes
in the documentation, etc.
And yeah, things like documentation.
So every little helps,
as they say, at the end of the day,
we're not looking for one person to ride in on the horse
and fix everything.
It's going to take time for us to fix everything.
So even if someone is not a developer
or doesn't have the device,
you talked about the documentation.
So people can help with the documentation too.
Do you have some kind of
special format, some things that, you know,
they need to be fixed in the documentation
and that can be contributed too?
I think probably during this phase of the beta,
we're not quite ready for that yet.
But obviously, as we come to that release,
one of those kind of tasks to get it ready to go out of the door
is to get the documentation a bit more tidied up.
And well, we're going to have to get to a point
where we kind of lock down the functionality
and say that's that bar breaking bugs,
basically, and that's what gets documented.
The problem we've had today is that, obviously,
documenting is kind of not something that developers
like doing when there's a big voice code you're going to be done.
It isn't just that's the case.
Tell me about it.
The API, the way that we've worked with the platform,
change is so fast at the moment,
but you can't really nail anything down.
So it's, you know,
there's going to be a point where we have to.
And actually, the core 32-blit API,
I would say, Phil, has been pretty stable for a few weeks now, actually.
We had a full time,
for a few weeks now, actually.
We had a flurry of changes early doors.
Yeah.
For a few whole weeks.
Yeah, but a few weeks is good, right?
We used to have situations where
someone would come on to Discord and say,
hey, haven't been online for two days, my project won't build.
And then you just have a literally, like,
a list of all the changes that have been made,
like you need to rename this to this.
You need to include this header file in 30.
They're like, there would be a swathe of changes
that they had to deal with,
their projects to fit those changes.
And they've all been good changes.
I'm happy with every single one we've made,
like they're just much more safe.
It's finally the piece of the puzzle coming into place, I think, for us as well.
Exactly. But for the last questions,
the last two weeks, I think it's all been about the firmware.
And we haven't actually touched the core API.
So we may be at a stage where we can start thinking about actually
locking that down, documenting it better.
But I think another thing that's quite nice is,
obviously, you can't get away with no documentation,
as much as I'd love to.
The API is smaller, like the surface of the API is small enough
that people pick it up very quickly.
And I'm really obsessive about APIs being human.
And not like, yeah, I've written Win32 code.
I've written stuff in .net.
And like, we don't...
Just to do something simple,
you don't have to create like a do something simple,
factory-factory controller or whatever.
It's literally like you write screen.rectangle.
And that's how it's meant to be.
That's the point.
I understand.
If you want to make it more complicated,
go ahead and make it more complicated.
But for us, we're going to just tell you to use the variable
that's called pen and then call rectangle.
And like, that will put you a rectangle on screen.
So, you know, for us, the API,
because it's pitched at the beginning as well as more advanced people,
the API is super important.
It has to be human, it has to be understandable.
The more advanced developers at the end of the day,
you can just swap it out.
They can change it. They can re-implement bits.
They want to, if they want to do...
People already have, more or less.
Well, let's see, if you want to manipulate the frame buffer directly,
because it's faster,
whatever, people can do that.
That's the nice thing. There's no real restrictions.
So, our API
has to focus 100% on doing what you expected to do
when you tell it to do something.
And to do the
heavy lifting, because it's also going to become the back end for the Lua API,
it has to do the heavy lifting,
where it doesn't make sense to attempt to do that in an interpreted language.
So, if I want to put a sprite on the screen,
or say I want to put a 5x5 block of sprites,
I'm doing like a boss fight, right?
So, my boss is 5x5 sprites,
and he jumps around the screen,
and he rotates, and the alpha blends in and out.
You do not want to be doing that in Lua, right?
You want to call screen.sprites,
pass in the transform matrix,
pass in the global alpha setting,
and tell it where the sprite sheet is,
in that single one call,
because behind the scenes,
all of the tight loops,
all of the hard work is being done by our firmware,
our API.
But that's what lets you get away with doing
kind of big, impressive stuff in Lua,
and advice like this.
So, it's critical.
Well, it's a really interesting platform.
I'm really looking forward to
producing something for it,
and hopefully see the production units pretty soon.
So, just to come back on that,
that means that it's not possible anymore
to get better units now that the Kickstarter is finished.
Oh, wait, we're torn on this,
because we kind of love them.
They turned out so much more nicely,
I think almost,
if we don't know they were going to be this good,
even offered the plastic shell.
Because there's something about it,
the aesthetic of it,
it feels quite nice in the hands.
It feels good, the weights good,
the controls are surprisingly good,
considering it's,
you've got limited granularity
when it comes to PCB layering.
So, yeah, everything about it,
I probably prefer it to the vinyl.
I don't know, maybe I prefer it to the vinyl unit.
We'll see when they come through.
I think the difficulty that we have is,
when it comes to pricing,
is that customers look at something
and they look at something else
and they will make a comparison.
And the hard truth is that the BT units
cost us as much to make.
Because, in fact, they may be slightly more expensive
than the retail units.
Because plastics,
while the molds are expensive,
once you've paid for the mold,
the per-piece costs are very, very low.
Whereas those PCBs
and having someone like to screw them all together
is quite expensive, right?
Especially when you do it in Sheffield,
rather than in Shenzhen.
So, I think
there might be scope for it to be available.
But the other problem is,
because it's not fully contained,
we weren't comfortable putting a battery in there by default.
There's all sorts of little compromises.
It's a better unit, so we knew
where we were getting
when we ordered that and we kicked that around.
We made that super clear, right?
That was really important
that we told you exactly what was going on.
I think a few people were disappointed
it wasn't more beta.
Yeah, people complaining saying,
can you just send me a bag of parts?
I'll deal with this.
I know I'm going to keep this one.
I mean, as long as
it will live,
and there's no reason to think
it won't live as long as any other.
But yeah, I'm going to keep that.
Yeah, my goal is to try
and do some stuff
for my daughter, so
yeah, she's five,
yeah, this is five pretty soon.
So, I'm just
discovering this platform too.
I'll be on Discord
and getting information
from the community to help on that.
Are you more excited about
C++ or Lua?
I know both.
So,
I don't know.
I've used Lua
in the context of World of Warcraft
and you can
add-ons for World of Warcraft in Lua.
So, yeah,
I like Lua.
I like C++.
I'm going to try both.
I just think,
I know a lot of people mention MicroPyFilm.
But the
Lua is not perfect.
We all know that.
But the elegance
and how lightweight it is
and nicely it binds into
C++ projects.
It's a cracking
project like
Lua is a
I think it's under-represented.
I think it's under-appreciated.
And I think if they're a race started at zero,
that would be different.
And you're like,
genuinely, it's that stupid, isn't it?
I think people dislike it for some of the war too.
But,
embedding on a device,
you get that performance that you want
almost like it's running on the bare metal.
And, you know, as a language,
it's also so tight and so
synced
that
is not like syntax soup.
There's not 10 different ways to do the same thing.
And I really appreciate it for that.
And I think it's a good choice for a platform like this.
You can do a lot with it.
Interestingly about a year ago,
we had a web-based IDEA
up and running that let you write Lua
and hit F5 and see it run
next year code in real time,
which it's just kind of a
reflect sort of thing we could do with that.
Which is kind of cool.
Yeah, that will be coming back.
And I think it's that it was the debug
build cycle was just great on the lure
because like you literally just edit the code
and hit reset and it's like
it's up and running again with the new version.
I think, yeah, for a lot
for a lot of people
that's going to be the experience
Yeah, and if you can manage
to have a
master-age USB master-age on the
device and that does going to be even
great. So you can plug the device on the
PC, edit the code, reset the device
and don't know nothing else to
do. So it's great.
That's it. I mean, we're looking
obviously the tools around 32-bit
are coming together at the moment.
But we're
kind of keen to try and bring them into
one single suite
where you can edit your sprites,
edit your audio, edit your maps,
write your code all in a single
space,
probably web-based because
that's how the world works now.
You want to be able to use it on a tablet,
you want to use it on your Chromebook,
you want to use it on the Mac.
So the idea being you almost have
like this, you know, as an idea,
it's not as complex as a visual studio
but it's not as simple as say
the Arduino idea somewhere in the middle
it has intimate knowledge of what kind of
assets 32-bit uses
and it could let you manipulate those
and work on a project with everything in one place
or like that. That will be a great
experience if we can get it right.
That sounds like mic code.
Is that the Microsoft thing?
Yes. I haven't even looked
at it. Is it any good?
Yeah. I've looked at it. I don't have any device
that I can use with it but
it seems like you
have you abstracted, you know,
but the device can do and say,
okay, I want to blink an LED
and obviously not on
32-bit but on other platforms.
I want to blink an LED and you grab
the block then and then
add some devices and buttons and
this wouldn't be
block based obviously. I mean,
I think what we're thinking about is
a much more
grown-up idea if you like.
That said, I have talked
to some people
about possibly getting
make code arcade up and running on the device
and it should be theoretically possible
but again, it's not one of those things we
have the skill set to do in-house
so it'll be something
we'll kind of wait around and hope will happen.
I think it's possible
that something like that may come along
but I think
our
interest in what could be produced
requires a level of
that of advancement beyond
kind of block level programming.
So, you know, devices already out there
that are pitched entirely at that experience.
I think we'd see ourselves as like
where you go after that
and when you want to write some
code maybe you've done a bit of
Python or something but
you know, you're
comfortable with the idea of writing
at that point
I think that's what it's
too but can come along
and become a tool.
I think the great thing about that
is a pitch that gives people
the opportunity to learn code
Lua being a prime example
that is applicable to writing actual mainstream games
and using in the game industry.
Yeah, but I'm sure that
Godclubs or things like that
things for
young children that
can be used by such a
platform because
kids love games.
So, if you can teach kids
how to program and then tell them
look, you do that and
you can go home with your
console and play your game
back home.
They will like that.
I think so. I mean, I would
have thought that
I was in programming from an early
age, my dad was a programmer
when I started writing
programmes in basic
and I think Lua
Sash Python probably
take roughly the same kind of
there are a lot more complex
depth to them than basic
on the spectrum but I think around the same age
if you have the aptitude for it
and the interest in you prepared to put the time in
and I think you can get stuff done.
So, it still works from a
young age but it's not kind of the
I think in the UK
I'm talking about scratch around 8 years old
and probably 32
but isn't quite
for you at that stage, you know, maybe
five years later you've had some exposure at
school to initially block programming
then maybe you've moved into kind of Python and stuff
but ultimately
I think the
biggest interest for this will come from
people who
not necessarily don't know how to code
at all but they already know how to code
but they just want to write some games because that's the fun bit of coding
right? They say it's a set at work all day
or at university doing
whatever it's called in their
computer science, I guess I don't know
or they set at work all day writing banking systems
and in the evening they get home
they just want to
blitz and pixels and then
make some noise and that's what it's all about
Yes
Yes
Well guys, thank you very much for
joining me for this
this interview. I have a feeling that you're going to be back when
the device is shipping to talk more about
the final product
namely the
the
the breakout garden
I think we're going to say breakout
I had no idea
Go ahead
Because that's
that's a really nice
concept
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're going to be
back on the show before
It's been a pleasure
Where can people find more about
you guys on social media
or somewhere else?
Follow us on Twitter
We are by far
the most active on Twitter
So just search for Pimirony
and we're on there
Other than that we're terrible at social media
Because Twitter's like
280 characters or less we can just about deal with that in the day
All right
Well, it was a pleasure to have you
This awesome platform that
32-bit is
Thanks again for joining me
And as I said
You will be back
If you want to
Let's talk about breakout garden
There's a good story behind that one
Oh, now I'm enjoying it
I'm going to go
Yeah, I know
Thanks, have a good evening
Talk to you soon guys
Cheers, bye
So that was our interview
Once again, I would like to thank
John and Phil
from Pimirony for
Accepting to
appear on this show
It was great
I mean, the device is great
And the people
who do this
These devices are great too
Really
It's a shame that
that they are going to sell it
I think around as we said
Earlier
Earlier before we started recording
We talked about that together
And then I talked about that
With them
It's really nice
I put some picture in the show notes
It's
Even though the buttons are not labeled
And you know
It's
Really a row design
It's really nice
Maybe they can
Maybe they have a few extras
And they will
Send that
That's going to be a collector
I think some day
I kind of need the case for me
Because I'm a bit of an animal in pants
And I break everything
So the more case
In plastic layers
The better
I don't know
I just
Maybe a clear case
Back in the 90s
Five years ago
But yeah
Maybe I can
Three brings one
But it's very
Inspirational to see
This device
It just makes me think back to my
Days of when I did
I did some game programming
And my youth
And I did all that for sure
To take
Take a little time and maybe
Figure that out
I've always enjoyed the platformers
And I had my own little take on a platformer
But the
That would be fun to really revisit
And look and do
And submit that up
But yeah that would be really fun to play with for sure
I would get a huge kick out of
Out of that
I just need a little more time
But you can grab the
The
Github repo
And compile that for Linux
All windows
And you know
Make your game
Without even having a device
And then you know
Once you get your hand on the device
Flush that and of course there's going to be problems
Because it's not exactly the same
Platform but
A lot of things can be made
The
The windows are the Linux version of
The game
So hopefully
Yeah, hopefully this is going to be
A great product and
I myself
I'm still trying to
Find an idea
I always find it a lot easier
To have a goal
So I have a project in mind
And then
With that in mind explore
Then just you know running examples
And thinking that could be
That could be great
So I'm going to try and think
About something to build
For the 32-bit
So I'll keep it
It always makes me think
I still have all my
Assets from my Amiga
Programming days
It's really not that hard to convert
Those graphics over
And I could still use the
Disney animation studio
From like 1993
And probably just you know
Because it's
I mean I don't remember what the resolution was on that
But no I did most of my
Drawings from 320 by 200
So I'm sure it can scale fine
It's 320 by 240
Okay, well there we go
I could definitely do that
And you can still have a
Studies bar at the bottom or something
Yeah
That might be kind of a fun excuse
Then to tie in some of my old tech
My retro tech into helping to
You know build some of these things
So yeah
All right, so
I think it's almost time to
Finish this episode
So we're going to do
What we did last time
And hopefully in the next episodes
And in the next episodes to come
That's the thing
Give us a thing of the episode
And for this one
I selected something that I've printed
A few
Month back
And it's called the monster mouth
Headphone holder
Clumpable
So that's basically
That's a huge
Support for your headphone
And then you also
Print a
Screw and then you can
And fix it
Get mine
I also will put some
Features
And I did some
Some magical that
Things you know to
To avoid making
Indense in my
On my desk
Yeah, and that's the screw
You put like a little rubber
Rubber feed on that or something
Okay, rubber feed
I've printed it
A few months back
And it's already
Been a little
Because it's pretty
Too much
But it's really study
So it's going to last for
A long time
And I'll just print another one
When this one
That would be a fun one to redo
And change it for my situation here
Because I'm in my basement
I am my own troll
And put on my ceiling here
Which is you know
Floor joys and just kind of just change
How that's done
At a right angle
And then I can have all that stuff
Rottered above me
That would actually be really neat
And then you can submit that to
Thingiverse and we could feature it
In the future episode
Yeah, why not
I could even do like a little like you
Yes, that would be awesome
Yeah, I have to look into what the
Pictures on that and that screw
But yeah, that's very cool. I like that. That's handy
It's like a little it is
A little problem solving right there
I like practical prints you know
Things that solve problems
Or create new ones
Sometimes
Well then that's new problems to solve
Exactly
Which creates some problems
You have to find a solution for
Yeah
Yes, someone else
Well, I can create a problem and someone else can find a solution
Right, yeah
I'm a master at creating problems
Oh, okay
I can try and find solutions for your problems
I am hoping
Right
So for us it's been a very short recording but the episode is
Going to be quite long because
This interview was an hour or so
It was a lot
A lot that you want this episode
Lots of meat
Lots of meat in this one
Very few bones to spit out, lots of meat
Exactly, great
If you're vegetarian, lots of eggplant, lots of eggplant
Eggplant Parmesan
Extra sauce
Extra sauce, wow
It's always better with the extra sauce
Yeah, it always is, yeah
Thank you for everyone
We don't already did our previous episodes
And for the kind feedback
Once again, thanks to
John and Phil for
Appearing on the show
You can get in contact with us by sending an email
At feedback at makeersconer.tech
Or by following us on Twitter
We are at makeersconer.pod
If you want to chat with us
In a more lively fashion, you can join our telegram group
At t.me slash makeersconer.pod
And that's otherwise stated
This podcast and the interview
Are released under a creative commons
By attribution Sherlock license
Whatever you want with it, as long as you create us
As the original authors
And if you publish anything based upon this episode
You have to release it under the same license
Well, thanks Nate for joining me
Once again, this fortnight
It's always great seeing you
So it's a good time
Yeah, even though this week has been quite short
But yeah, it's always a pleasure
A little high in buy and it's, you know, a little chat
Here and there, we're good to go
Yeah, yeah, absolutely
We will be back in two weeks with another episode of makeersconer
In the meantime, take care of yourselves
Ciao ciao
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