Currently waiting on my PicoCalc with great anticipation - in the meantime, I’ve been looking into various permacomputing and smalltech things and came across Hundredrabbits uxn. It’s a personal computing stack that has its own little language called uxntal and a VM called Varvara. This just looks really cool and I feel like it fits in perfectly with the whole PicoCalc vibe.
The thing is, it’s allegedly ported to Pi Pico but I can’t find a uf2 or repo anywhere. There are a bunch of resources at awesome-uxn including repos for other devices, but nothing specifically for the Pi Pico. And even if it were there as easy as just flashing an image, it would probably need additional porting to get it running on PicoCalc.
I don’t really have the skill set to port something like this (and wouldn’t even know where to start) but it’s just such an interesting project that seems like it would be right at home on the picocalc.
Reminds me of my old HP50g and RPN. Too messy for the kind of easy to read programming I prefer, hence Basic on the PicoCalc… Yet 2350 Machine code via a built in PicoCalc macro assembler, now that would be interesting !
Looks like the reference to the Pico code was removed in May of 2023.
The site it linked is gone now, but the Wayback Machine has a snapshot from November of 2022.
I’m not sure if the entire contents were archived, and I didn’t go digging to check, but if anyone was interested in messing with it, this would be a good place to start.
The original website, when it listed it, showed the support for Pico to be “partial”. Though I did find a video example online of someone running the bouncing DVD logo on the Pico using this stuff, so it was doing something, even if it wasn’t a complete port.
Fair enough - seems like something was being done but it eventually was abandoned. I also found a uxn emulator in python that might work, depending on how it addresses the screen. Maybe the better approach would be to just build a launcher in python and use it to individually load uxn roms from the SD card.