https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16
It seems so un-FORTRAN that DEC had a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-11. that was based on a stack machine and then later built an FP accelerator specialized to accelerate the stack machine. It was a straggler but I'm still trying to track down a circa 1992 article from Dr. Dobb's Journal where someone used virtual machine techniques to unbreak the broken i860 and make a good FORTRAN compiler.
https://itch.io/jam/langjamgamejam/entries
There were some really impressive submissions in spite of the short time frame!
We plan on running it again: https://langjamgamejam.com/
Cheff kiss!
- Designed a language.
- Implemented a compiler to compile it to bytecode, using F#.
- Wrote a bytecode interpreter, using C++.
- Created a shoot’em up game, using the custom language.
- Renderd the graphics, using a single GLSL shader.
What you're describing is 7 days of productivity supported by probably 7+ years (or 27+ years) of experience and learning and getting things wrong and restarting over again.
It is definitely wonderful to see though.
Claude called the language Blitz.
The repo it created: https://github.com/fragmede/blitz
Is the code shit? I haven't looked at it. Didn't have to. Probably is. I fed it the blog post at the end, and difference.md has a comparison on what Laurent Le Brun built vs Claude, and Claude is fully aware that it went a different way on a number of different things.
It chose python, I had to tell it to use uv.
I'm on a mac with high DPI and it got confused about that.
I had to tell it to make a binary format (it made a BLTZ header)
But you can clone that repo, do uv run main.py --compile game/shooter.blitz and it'll make a .blitzc. Then you can do uv run main.py game/shooter.blitzc Tear the code apart. Call out every tiny mistake in that repo. It's probably cheating somewhere! But all I did was give it challenge.png that's in the repo, and tiny bits of English, and Claude went to work.
It's been 21 years since my college computer graphics class and I went into distributed systems and not game dev, so someone else will have to tell me if it used a single (or even any!) GLSL shaders, or not.
Call it slop all you want, but that took me 70 minutes of babysitting.
None of this is individually difficult, but an actual human being had the motivation and talent to bring it all together in 7 days, which is impressive.
So what if an LLM can create the same components if you tell it to. It's a bit like someone sharing a handknit sweater they just made, and you counter with "Well, here's a machine made one I bought in Walmart, made in 5 min in China".
The difference is the baseline. Once the default outcome is cheap, fast, and good enough, the human effort stops standing out in a way that matters. At that point, pointing at the Walmart sweater is not missing the point, it is the point.
Should people stop playing chess just because a free chess engine can trounce everyone on the planet?
Humans can be awesome. Machines are just machines.
nsxwolf•1mo ago
Edit: Thanks for the downvote, guess I shouldn't have paid any attention to this post at all?
macintux•1mo ago
somat•1mo ago
Anyhow, I think if this was my forum I would put the downvote selector at the end of the comment title and have the upvote selector at the beginning.
laurentlb•1mo ago
The source code is here: https://github.com/laurentlb/shmup8/blob/main/src/shaders/sc...
Blending is on lines 241, 242.
I didn't try to get a specific 80s look, I just played with formulas.