Tag: lua
8 posts tagged with "lua".
Cattle Crisis from 9 fps to 58
One day of hardware A/B tests on the H753. The biggest single win was a compiler flag I should have set weeks ago.
The fixed-point Lua core becomes the default
Stage 9 of the runtime migration, ending the night at 59 fps on jumper wires after a one-byte regression that cost 19 carts.
An evening of unrelated fixes
Three unrelated fixes from one evening. The biggest was a cartridge that finally keeps its saves; the strangest was an iterator that duplicated the player.
z8lua lands behind a flag
The new Lua core measured against the old one on identical silicon, with a licensed PICO-8 as the oracle and a per-cart compatibility matrix.
A runtime baseline before the Lua swap
A permanent benchmark and input tapes recorded from real play, so the new Lua VM has numbers to beat before it lands.
Why I didn't replace the PICO-8 runtime
Whether the homegrown PICO-8 runtime should be replaced with an existing emulator. After twenty-one test cartridges the answer was to keep everything and swap the Lua core.
A divide per pixel
Profiling the PICO-8 runtime found a stretched-sprite blit doing an integer divide on every pixel, on a chip with no fast divide.
Running real PICO-8 Lua on a Cortex-M7
Vendoring Lua 5.4 into bare-metal firmware, and why a hardware watchdog beat an instruction-count hook for stopping runaway carts.