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About

MicroW8 is a WebAssembly based fantasy console inspired by the likes of TIC-80, WASM-4 and PICO-8.

The initial motivation behind MicroW8 was to explore whether there was a way to make WebAssembly viable for size-coding. (Size coding being the art of creating tiny (often <= 256 bytes) graphical effects and games.) The available examples so far are all in this space, however, I very carefully made sure that all design decisions make sense from the point of view of bigger projects as well.

Specs

  • Screen: 320x240, 256 colors, 60Hz
  • Modules: Up to 256KB (WASM)
  • Memory: 256KB
  • Gamepad input (D-Pad + 4 Buttons)

Examples

Examplers for older versions:

  • Technotunnel B/W (199 bytes uncompressed): A port of my entry in the Outline'21 bytebattle quater final (older MicroW8 version with monochrome palette)
  • XorScroll (50 bytes uncompressed): A simple scrolling XOR pattern. Fun fact: This is the pre-loaded effect when entering a bytebattle.
  • CircleWorm (126 bytes uncompressed): Just a test for the circle fill function.

Versions

v0.2.0-rc2

Changes:

  • fix timing issues of sound playback, especially on systems with large sound buffers

v0.2.0-rc1

Changes:

  • add sound support
  • "integer constant cast to float" literal syntax in CurlyWas (ex. 1_f is equivalent to 1 as f32)

Known issues:

  • timing accuracy/update frequency of sound support currently depends on sound buffer size

v0.1.2

Changes:

  • add option to uw8 run to run the cart in the browser using the web runtime
  • CurlyWas: implement include support
  • CurlyWas: implement support for constants
  • fix crash when trying to draw zero sized line

Older versions

Find older versions here.