RPi Pico?

Technical Development Interpreters
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While noodling around on one of the UK Adafruit resellers, I came across this tidy little keyboard+display combo:

It has a purpose-built board you can use to connect a Raspberry Pi Pico. Now a Pico isn’t a general-purpose SoC, and is closer to an Arduino in terms of usage. You can compile code to target it the way you would an Arduino, or run MicroPython (which has support for a lot of the stuff sold by Adafruit, as they tend to publish whatever shims and drivers are needed).

It seems like an ideal “no distractions pocket IF device” for those periods when you just want to hand someone a game and say “give this back to me when you’ve finished.” Or perhaps keep a “Lost Treasures” style collection on the flash storage. It’s frivolous, but I find the format compelling.

So have there been any terps targeting the RPi Pico yet?

On the MicroPython front, there’s always the venerable old zvm project, which I notice has seen some updates for cheapGlk integration fixes recently after a decade-long hiatus in development. And there’s the slightly more modern and comfortable xyppy, which supports more advanced terminal features and Python 3 natively.

There appear to be “provide enough terminal features to make ncurses happy” modules for MicroPython on a number of these platforms, but it could also be easier than some platforms to just write a Glk layer that takes advantage of the display to do proportional fonts and so forth.

I know some folks have targeted Arduinos with compiled interpreters. Would much of that work be transferable to the Pico?

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There’s no reason Frotz won’t work on that thing. I’m very interested in experimenting with that thing for a multitude of uses.

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I have several variations of RPi’s Pico. It has quickly developed a very wide spectrum of support including C, Arm, MicroPyton and Arduino.

In terms of capability, it is much like a PIC micro with easy programmability.

Here is a link to RPi’s documentation page: PICO Docs

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Yeah, and the feather 2040 seems like a better deal than adapting a pico, now that I spot it on that page! Of course it also has features that the esp32 model boasts as well, so perhaps someone’s port of frotz may be applicable here if some standard feather libraries are around for that…

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This looks quite cool!

Is there a RPI pico with more RAM?

Pairing with the ESP32 like this one, it appears to have 8MB PSRAM as well as the usual 320K internal RAM. From a quick look, this PSRAM seems to be memory mapped and operate the same as normal RAM.

This would basically mean a modern interpreter would easily run on it.

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