Lab Notes

Binary search in BASIC DATA statements

January 26, 2022

Behold! Binary search of five-letter words in BASIC DATA statements without pre-processing the memory! gist.github.com/dansanderson/8…

Electronic Bulletin Boards by Carolyn E. Cooper, a book report

January 10, 2022

Electronic Bulletin Boards by Carolyn E. Cooper, a book report by Dan Sanderson, age 12. Six handwritten pages, in cursive, with a cover page and five printed pages of figures from a Boise BBS. I got an A+.

What if the Bee had an S?

December 12, 2021

What would it be like if the #nytspellingbee had an S in it?

@thegridkid is on record as saying an S-Bee would be “too easy,” a nice way of saying it’s difficult to balance difficulty, size, and funness. I wanted a sense of this design space, so I did some computer’ing.

PICO-8 on the RG 351M handheld game console

November 18, 2021

Wow, #pico8 on the RG 351M handheld game console is fantastic! This one from Anbernic is metal, heavy, with solid controls. $139 USD is pricey but worth it.

Angle math demo in PICO-8

November 1, 2021

We were discussing angles and coordinates in the #pico8 Discord and I whipped up this quick demo while we were chatting. It’s a neat demo, and super-neat how easy it was to put it together! The value of a tight feedback loop cannot be understated. gist.github.com/dansanderson/2…

PICO-8 fillp shortcuts

October 21, 2021

DID YOU KNOW: 20 of the #pico8 typeable symbols are predefined fillp() patterns! Pass each one as the argument—without quotes—to get a fill pattern that looks a bit like the symbol.

Clockwork DevTerm and PICO-8

September 6, 2021

I wrote up my Clockwork #DevTerm adventures as a review and #pico8 tutorial on the PICO-8 BBS. Enjoy! lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=44522

hey everyone I figured out what #pico8’s “export .lua.png” does!

September 4, 2021

hey everyone I figured out what #pico8’s “export .lua.png” does! 🤓 #devterm

/cc @Hal_clockwork @lexaloffle

New P8SCII documentation

August 31, 2021

I spent today making a #pico8 wiki present for you all: a fully spec’d P8SCII character table, and enhanced P8SCII control code documentation! lmk what you think! (/cc @lexaloffle @Liquidream)

pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8SCII

Tandy 1400 FD; NTS DreamWriter 200

August 22, 2021

Two quick ones today. First, a Tandy 1400 FD portable DOS machine with two 3-1/2” floppies and an LCD 80x25 screen. I don’t have a boot disk yet, freaks out after a few minutes, has a fishy odor. Looks cute though.

The HP 50g graphing calculator

June 9, 2021

In HP graphing calculators, between my beloved high school model (48GX) and the latest hotness (Prime) was the 50g. I thought I’d try to live without one but it actually has advantages over both of those models in programmability and data access (USB, SD card).