In preparation for teaching a 3-day "Computing within limits" workshop @ University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg, almost exactly a year ago (next week) I created a little fantasy console (heavily inspirered by TIC80) to introduce students to:
the idea of virtual machines / computing environments
the freedom to design & control any aspect of that environment (and how this relates to the overall idea of personal computing these days)
designing & building a small (virtual) env from the bottom up (incl. defining opcodes, memory limits, maps/regions, device control registers, interrupts (hsync/vsync), device I/O, comms & multi-tasking possibilities, various retro-computing inspired graphics techniques)
defining a small low-level API/language for creative coding
learning about binary/hex and how that knowledge translates visually
The short video gives an overview of five small examples & tools (incl. a bitmap font editor) I had prepared for the workshop — the entire system was built within a couple of days with http://thi.ng/umbrella and incl. examples is only 12KB (gzipped). In the workshop we later ended up mostly using the TIC80 instead, since we covered quite a few other wider perma- & retro-computing related topics too... The 3 days were barely enough to provide an overview and have some exploration time...
If anyone is interested in a similar workshop, please do let me know, I'm keen to repeat it/extend it...
(Ps. I will post a link to the interactive version later too)
Add comment