💾 Archived View for soviet.circumlunar.space › ~hektor › siberdeck-2020.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 03:00:48. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-04-29)
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This is a proposal for a fantasy cyberdeck in in the style of the fantasy 8-bit game consoles that have become popular lately. Like a lot of people messing with Gemini recently, I've grown to like the design decisions behind it:
Somehow I've gotten the craving for something more interactive, but keeping the same minimal flair. I'm thinking something along the lines of a more flexible TIC-80 but with 2000s era graphics and networking support, or maybe a more restrictive processing.org. I call it the SiDeck 2020 and I imagine it as a mashup of fantasy cyberdeck + 90s WinCE palmtop + late 2000s Nokia E90 proto-smartphone, and looks a lot like an HP Jornada 720, AlphaSmart Dana, or Nokia E90:
More about the AlphaSmart Dana
The Lua program can communicate with the server over HTTPS so it's like a a Java applet running in its own window (or even a modern webapp), but if someone came up with the idea in the early 90s. I'm not an 8-bit fan, so I'd avoid the overly restrictive graphics modes of the PICO-8/TIC-80 and go with 640x240/24-bit color pixel-indexed display mode. I'd originally thought about supporting 160x25 character-mode graphics. However, I'm leaning for more of a PalmOS vibe so I'm nixing that and going with a Lua debug console instead. There is the open questions of whether do support a stock widget set or to leave it to the application developer. I'd also originally thought to run programs directly from a URL, but I think downloading to a launcher makes more sense.
My hypothetical virtual machine would support keyboard and stylus input, so it can make use of click and drag events, but programs wouldn't have access to the mouse cursor otherwise. Most keyboard keys would be accessible, but with F9-F12 reserved for the client to use, eg:
