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 OUT NOW EVERYWHERE!! USD $25/30 €20ish~ idk* https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/smilebasic-4-switch/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTsfdJYd5Uo After a long long delay, the fourth iteration of SmileBASIC/Petitcomputer is finally available worldwide. What's SmileBASIC? Good question, its the series of weirdly fully featured BASIC programming environments available for Nintendo systems. Originally these things emulated the crudity and limitations of early microcomputer programming, think like C64/MSX, but 3 and 4? Surprisingly fairly loving powerful. Now why would someone want to pay $30 to code in BASIC of all things on a Nintendo Switch, when you can do big boy programming in a real language on a real computer? No idea, but I do. Of course, if you don't want to make stuff, it has online sharing and you can download all kinds of poo poo other people have made also. Previous versions used keys to download programs, which you had to go scrounge for on Japanese wikis and on twitter, but PTC4 features an online gallery that people can upload to, complete with searchable tags, box art, and descriptions. That's where the multiple prices for this thing come in though, the $25 package has extremely limited access to the server, iirc you can only download one user submitted thing every 8 hours, and you can't upload at all. The $30 package includes a server ticket which gets you unlimited downloading and 10 upload slots, and they sell additional tickets that give you another 10 slots for $5 each Please use this thread to share things you find + post your own works + share information thank you  What's new? The dialect of BASIC in PTC4 is pretty similar to 3, which is good because by BASIC standards its pretty good and modern. If you used 3 at all you should be extremely comfortable here. PTC4 is not completely backwards compatible though because architecture changed a lot in some places. Particularly in the way graphic pages work, its a much more regular system now and doesn't require you to juggle paging if you're doing weird stuff with your graphics. Full screen graphics pages and tilemaps don't even exist anymore, everything is a sprite now and full screen graphics are just arbitrarily large sprites. Some other big things that have changed:
Links Official language reference and tech specs Manual PDF Pretty thorough walk through the basic syntax homeless snail fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Apr 24, 2020 |
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Apr 24, 2020 01:53
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SmileBASIC Thread All-Stars!!
Check These Out:
Tools + Resources:
Misc:
homeless snail fucked around with this message at 01:48 on May 23, 2020 |
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Apr 24, 2020 01:53
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I never heard of this in the era of my 3DS, but I had a lot of fun tinkering with PICO-8 stuff on my computer. This looks similar. I enjoyed both making and playing games, but one thing that I disliked about the P8 was that its limitations were too severe to make a fully fledged "game." It was mostly tech demos and art. Is this more of the same? Or does it allow (as far as we can tell so far) someone to start-to-finish make something for real? How did the last version do with this?
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Apr 24, 2020 02:01
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I am very excited  it's a lot to get into with no prior SmileBASIC knowledge though, and the software itself isn't that good at giving basic examples so I think it would be really helpful to have some super basic stuff explained (assuming it roughly follows the same logic as the previous version.) Particularly I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around how I'm supposed to create, save and utilize custom sprites and music since the tutorial only tells you how to play or display the built-in stuffat the moment I'm just messing around with writing stuff directly to the graphic pages (which I think are essentially frame buffers?) and making pretty colors 
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Apr 24, 2020 02:14
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BONESAWWWWWW posted:I never heard of this in the era of my 3DS, but I had a lot of fun tinkering with PICO-8 stuff on my computer. This looks similar. IDK if it really makes sense to spend a lot of time making full games in SmileBASIC though, and a lot of stuff you see does probably have similar scope to P8 projects ultimately. Its totally possible though, and big things do come out occasionally. Here's the Switch port of one of my favorite PTC3 games, Arcanum Stone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HunOUyRhShQ
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Apr 24, 2020 02:19
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Your Computer posted:I am very excited The dead basics of the graphics on this thing though, are that you have 6 GRP pages, indexed 0-5, which are yeah pretty much just 2048x2048 framebuffers. The default spritesheet gets loaded in on GRP4, and also most of 5 is used to store the system fonts. You can load your own graphics files into memory with LOADG, then you use SPDEF to make sprite definitions that reference at what coordinates your sprites are, and finally use SPSET to instantiate sprites based on the definition numbers you picked. By default there's also a full screen sprite mapped to GRP0, which is why the graphics commands work without having to set anything up, but you can turn that off, all the graphics pages are completely general purpose. Out of the box, if you press F10 or hold ZL/ZR on the softkeyboard and hit smile tool #2, you'll load up Gahaku, the default image editor. You can edit all the graphics pages and spdefs in there and save them out to files which takes a lot of the pain out of the process imo Music, I don't think this comes with a tool for that, there are a few in the catalog but they're all in Japanese of course. If you're using the BGM channels though its not too tough to do it without a tool, all the songs are written in MML homeless snail fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Apr 24, 2020 |
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Apr 24, 2020 08:29
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Pretty good twitter thread full of pubkeys https://twitter.com/gosokkyu/status/1253349847085862913
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Apr 24, 2020 09:32
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I'm a sucker for stuff like this - never used any of the earlier versions. Will probably mess around with it for a few hours and then never touch it again. On the other hand, maybe I'll try and port some 80s BASIC programs I played a long time ago, I mean how advanced can this thing - homeless snail posted:Pretty good twitter thread full of pubkeys 
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Apr 24, 2020 11:15
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homeless snail posted:Pretty good twitter thread full of pubkeys  If I can make flashing lines and crunchy noises, then I'll at least have nostalgically relived some of my ZX Spectrum owning youth. Outside of what is already in the OP, are there any newbie-tier resources that people might recommend? Also, *man* am I glad I managed to dig out a spare keyboard and mouse!
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Apr 24, 2020 12:46
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I picked this up last night and it's really cool! While I've no interest in programming, there are lots of neat creations to download.
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Apr 24, 2020 13:14
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Ugh I would've flipped my lid as a kid if I'd had this. Even as it is I'm kind of tempted even though I've already got a commercial gamedev project kinda stalling and plenty of game engine satisfaction.
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Apr 24, 2020 17:32
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magimix posted:Outside of what is already in the OP, are there any newbie-tier resources that people might recommend? Found this, it's a helpful text guide to understand the language and syntax, with examples.
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Apr 24, 2020 17:44
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ErrEff posted:Found this, it's a helpful text guide to understand the language and syntax, with examples. Good find! That should totally be added to the OP. I don't know exactly why, but thinking about what ideas to play around with for this had me nosing through decades old code, from when I used to have a website that hosted a number of games implemented as Java applets. Magimix Sokoban will return... (Because I'm assuming I can't just stick the assets for Magimix Mahjongg on my switch, and gently caress drawing all those tileset myself)
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Apr 24, 2020 19:01
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magimix posted:Magimix Sokoban will return... (Because I'm assuming I can't just stick the assets for Magimix Mahjongg on my switch, and gently caress drawing all those tileset myself)
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Apr 24, 2020 19:11
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How easy it is to port from PICO-8 to SmileBASIC? I originally thought that the two were related somehow, because I played the original Celeste on SmileBASIC, and I thought that they were the same thing, but I only recently found out that the SmileBASIC version was ported over from PICO-8; it wasn't just a paste job.
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Apr 24, 2020 19:16
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Argue posted:How easy it is to port from PICO-8 to SmileBASIC? I originally thought that the two were related somehow, because I played the original Celeste on SmileBASIC, and I thought that they were the same thing, but I only recently found out that the SmileBASIC version was ported over from PICO-8; it wasn't just a paste job. I think most of it would be pretty straightforward though, pretty much all your sprite code and game logic would be fairly 1:1
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Apr 24, 2020 19:35
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ErrEff posted:Found this, it's a helpful text guide to understand the language and syntax, with examples. The examples are very good and one thing I've been missing with the official documentation. The reference manual only lists all the functions without any examples of how to use them, and while the in-game help function is very useful it doesn't always show how to use something and sometimes the examples are even cut off weirdly. It's a bit extra confusing because I'm not sure why some functions are called like "FUNC(A,B)" while others are called like "FUNC A,B" (no parenthesis)
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Apr 24, 2020 22:37
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Does this support bluetooth keyboards? I guess a bigger question is if the switch supports BT keyboards?
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Apr 24, 2020 22:38
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Does this support bluetooth keyboards? I guess a bigger question is if the switch supports BT keyboards?
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Apr 24, 2020 22:44
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Your Computer posted:this is wonderful! e: when you def your own functions you have to follow that convention also homeless snail fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Apr 25, 2020 |
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Apr 24, 2020 23:27
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Seems like I was wrong, there's still something like BG layers, by printing your character graphics to the text layers with the text functions?? Unicode characters 0xE800-0xF7FF are mapped by default to the top right corner of page 4, but you can change the mapping with TPAGE. And you can look at the tile mappings in the F9 SmileTool under the USERCHR tab It seems kinda archaic compared to how it worked in version 3, but there's your tilemaps https://twitter.com/notohoho/status/1253833936242765828
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Apr 25, 2020 03:16
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homeless snail posted:IDK if its a weird BASIC convention or what (last time i used BASIC before PTC2 was like, the C64), but they make a distinction between functions that have return values and ones that don't. The ones with parenthesis always return a value and can only be used in an expression, and the ones without parenthesis never have return values and can't be used in the middle of an expression. There are also functions with OUT parameters that fall more in line with the latter. ee: also on the topic of out parameters, there's a couple of functions that you pass arrays to for results but aren't OUT, since arrays are always passed by reference Well! That explains it  Thanks!I've got a question only tangentially related to SmileBASIC 4 - other than (obviously) buying a copy of SmileBASIC 3, is there a way to get a look at the source code of programs from SB3 with public keys (like downloading the files on a computer)? There are so many and it would be a treasure trove of ideas on how to implement certain stuff but I tried googling and couldn't really find anything.
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Apr 25, 2020 05:07
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You can load SB3 pubkeys into SB4 I'm pretty sure, they just won't run
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Apr 25, 2020 05:13
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homeless snail posted:You can load SB3 pubkeys into SB4 I'm pretty sure, they just won't run  I never even thought to try (it works!)
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Apr 25, 2020 05:18
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Actually I should say, there are a few programs in the catalog that are titled like Puchikon 3-4 converter so maybe you can get then to run idk. I haven't tried those so I don't know if they're patchers or how automated they are or anything e: actually it works really well on most of the stuff I've tried so far, including the SB3 port of Celeste, 4V3X8442S it even has an English translation homeless snail fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Apr 25, 2020 |
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Apr 25, 2020 05:45
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progress   I've always wanted to try implementing a raycasting engine and this seemed like a good time. I was having a lot of problems that I just couldn't figure out until I turned on OPTION STRICT which I honestly recommend everyone use. SmileBASIC is very happy to just read whatever you write as a (new) variable so the tiniest typo or misunderstanding leads to some really tricky bugs. e: babby's first raycaster is now working! https://twitter.com/YourComputerSA/status/1254237340207210497?s=20 Your Computer fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Apr 26, 2020 |
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Apr 25, 2020 23:45
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Yeah option strict is absolutely essential, I should probably put that in the op or something. defint was also something I used a fair amount on the last version, where everything was floating point unless you specifically declared variables otherwise, the type system seems a little bit saner in this one though so there's probably no benefit anymore
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Apr 26, 2020 07:13
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Gonna recommend the games by Yoshiharu Takaoka, the designer of PC Engine game Coryoon. They're remakes of arcade games mostly using Smilebasic's pre-made RPG-style sprites, but there's some neat little additions and gimmicks that keep things interesting. https://twitter.com/freeman_hal/status/1141884073897426945 https://twitter.com/freeman_hal/status/1168750387907555328 https://twitter.com/freeman_hal/status/1221827060022202368 The last one requires some Japanese knowledge to read the between-level hints, though... The Kins fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Apr 26, 2020 |
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Apr 26, 2020 08:19
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Yeah, Monpara is an extremely good version of Mappy, definitely a pro-download. I forgot to mention I edited a bunch of pubkeys into the second post, its mostly all stuff you'll see on the top rankings in the published section though.
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Apr 26, 2020 08:41
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It’s page one and I’m very excited! Here are some basic questions I haven’t been able to figure out because I’m a chowderhead: Is there a command for direct mode to clear the screen of all graphics and text loaded previously? Is there a way to put line breaks in a string for the PRINT command or do I need a new PRINT for each line of text?
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Apr 26, 2020 20:30
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Tempura Wizard posted:Is there a way to put line breaks in a string for the PRINT command or do I need a new PRINT for each line of text? This should work (can't test it right now): code:
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Apr 26, 2020 21:22
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Tempura Wizard posted:It’s page one and I’m very excited!
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Apr 26, 2020 21:55
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So uhh, the response of my keyboard is really slow. I can't code anything like this, with it skipping letters unless I type very slowly, like 2 characters a second at most. Is that normal, or should I look into getting a better keyboard (which I can't really do because my city is on lockdown)? I haven't had trouble with that keyboard on my PC.
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Apr 27, 2020 09:16
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This looks kinda interesting but would probably require I get a usb hub for my switch, I assume any generic one would work?
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Apr 27, 2020 09:22
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Your dock has two USB ports.
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Apr 27, 2020 09:27
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Argue posted:So uhh, the response of my keyboard is really slow. I can't code anything like this, with it skipping letters unless I type very slowly, like 2 characters a second at most. Is that normal, or should I look into getting a better keyboard (which I can't really do because my city is on lockdown)? I haven't had trouble with that keyboard on my PC.
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Apr 27, 2020 09:39
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Argue posted:Your dock has two USB ports. uh, pretty sure it has 3 but I got all of them plugged already and I am lazy enough I'd rather just get a hub.
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Apr 27, 2020 09:41
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homeless snail posted:Wireless? Mine gets like that if I get too far from the Switch, I'm assuming there's interference from being right next to the wifi or something. Otherwise its fine Nope, it's wired. Ugh, okay, so it's not normal then.
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Apr 27, 2020 10:03
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homeless snail posted:Wireless? Mine gets like that if I get too far from the Switch, I'm assuming there's interference from being right next to the wifi or something. Otherwise its fine
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Apr 27, 2020 10:03
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The Kins posted:Smileboom are also not officially supporting wireless keyboards or mice.
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Apr 27, 2020 10:24
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