Although mentioned in passing in this message about desert island computing, I only stumbled across Uxn today:
The Uxn ecosystem is a little personal computing stack, created to host tools and games, programmable in its own unique assembly language.
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I wonder what else like it is out there that I haven’t stumble across.
This talks goes in detail on the Uxn design
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Ha ha - I was just quickly browsing through that talk, searching for a way to intersect uxn with retrocomputing. Some nice computer history notes in there, of course. It’s a great talk.
By intersection, I suppose I hoped to find an implemention of the uxn VM and ecosystem on an 8 bit or 16 bit machine: it’s surely small enough to do that. Although I suspect that idea doesn’t quite fit with the vision.
Anyhow, I also meant to note that the #uxn hashtag on Mastodon is quite active.
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For the record, I found Uxn via a comment on a Hackaday article:
Thanks for sharing the video. Some preservation aspects of the discussion remind me of this old blog post:
uxn has a 16bit virtual space. Exactly what you don’t want on an 8bit processor.
It reminds me somewhat of CHIP8 which is most definitely nice and suitable for little 8bit boxes.
UXN is delightful, but its architecture is slightly larger than most 8-bit machines we’re used to.
In addition to the 64k of RAM (including a zero page), there’s also two 256-byte stacks with separate storage. They behave more like a register file than an area of memory, but either way you probably won’t find a small retro PC that it will fit inside.
There are FPGA implementations, however, that do raw VGA out!