
Show HN: Rewtro plays tiny videogames encoded in origami GameBoy cartridges - kesiev
https://github.com/kesiev/rewtro
======
danShumway
I love this.

It's incredibly creative and fun. I had an E-Reader growing up, which was a
similar concept but suffered from problems in that it was trying to fit a
disposable experience onto an expensive piece of dedicated hardware. The
scanning experience was sub-par and the ecosystem just didn't lend itself well
to trading or hiding cards. The E-reader was trying to match a disposable,
tiny experience to an expensive, closed ecosystem, and that discordance meant
that it just didn't work very well.

But this -- everyone has a phone that can read these, you don't have to
install anything, anyone can print them out and share them. I see this and
immediately start thinking of fun things to do with the platform. I love the
physicality that's kind of missing from fantasy consoles like Pico-8.

This is wonderful, I hope you continue working on it.

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slantyyz
Ok, are any of the old fogeys here other than me reminded of the Cauzin
Softstrip when they see the printable/scannable code?

Back in the day, way back, actually, you would manually type in source code
from print magazines for applications (and sometimes bug fixes wouldn't show
up until a month or two later in a subsequent issue of the magazine).

The Softstrip was an alternative (that required buying a special scanner) so
you wouldn't have to type in all the source code manually.

Another novel way of distributing code (without typing) via print magazine was
thin a strip of vinyl that you would play on a record player (and weigh it
down with a coin) that you would wire into the audio in port (or cassette
port) of your computer.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauzin_Softstrip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauzin_Softstrip)

[https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/15/science/personal-
computer...](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/15/science/personal-computers-
supermarket-bar-codes-are-applied-to-software.html)

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
From the article, shortsighted, or prophetic?

> The vast majority of personal computer owners have two or three programs
> that they use regularly, and that is all they really need.

~~~
prox
The answer, as always, is : it depends.

Some folks use their laptop as a fancy and expensive browser window and
nothing else, while others use 20 apps concurrently.

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tyingq
That's pretty neat. I'd switch to this pattern to make the cube:
[http://www.mathematische-
basteleien.de/origam16.gif](http://www.mathematische-
basteleien.de/origam16.gif)

Sturdier, less cutting, and would be more "true oragami". Though maybe the
folds would make it harder to scan along the face edges.

~~~
kesiev
I'm starting collecting nice ideas I'm hearing around to the README.md on
GitHub. I've copy/pasted your post inside. Maybe, one day... some good soul...
Thanks!

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RodgerTheGreat
Neat project. The folks over on r/FantasyConsoles might be interested.

As far as I can tell, neither the readme nor the interface for the "engine"
contain a link to this:
[https://www.kesiev.com/rewtro/carts/](https://www.kesiev.com/rewtro/carts/)

It would be pretty hard to make new games for this platform without some real
documentation for the JSON format it uses to describe games and their assets.

~~~
kesiev
Ahem. I've _just_ uploaded that folder on kesiev.com and updated the README.md
accordingly, following a just opened issue. You're right about documentation.
I'll try to add some kind of that when I've some spare time. :)

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
Fair enough.

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PostOnce
Absolutely kudos for building this, it's something I've daydreamed about for a
while.

If you ever do a successor format, color triangle barcodes can store 3x as
much information per square inch -- so you could either have just one
scannable code on the back of the cart, or have 3x as much game with the
current method.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/hccb-hccbcompare.jpg)

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/hccb-lightexamples.jpg)

Other random thoughts, if the engine had any "built in assets", the few kb of
pure-code could go further.

Anyway, lovely stuff. Good work.

~~~
kesiev
Thank you! When I was looking for a printable format for encoding games I
stumbled upon HCCB but I was in a hurry and I didn't managed to find anything
stand-alone, opensource, JavaScript, and easy to integrate that could
encode/decode HCCB. I've noted your suggestion on README.md, just to not
forget your good idea. If you've found some technology that may help, feel
free to suggest.

Right now the only built-in assets are default fonts, that can be overridden
by on-cartridge graphics. I decided to keep out game-specific assets (even
generic ones, like arrows, circles, squares etc.) from the console code,
keeping only what's usually considered "on the machine ROM". Some 8-bit
machines used to have symbols built-in in fonts (like the C64) but I reduced
the number of valid string symbols from the usual 256 to 64 in order to spare
few bits in long texts :)

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godelzilla
Somewhat misleading. The videogames are encoded in QR codes which can be
printed onto "origami". I was expecting the games to actually be encoded in
origami via folding patterns, etc.

Still fun though!

~~~
kesiev
Sorry for the mislead. I admit that my unhappy choice of the term "origami" to
quickly describe the carts is giving me headaches on internet. I thought that
the "generally discourage the use of cuts, glue, or markings on the paper" of
Wikipedia could make me a little safe... but it's clearly not working :)

Anyway encoding data with foldings is a whacky idea I like. Something that a
villain could use to hide hints about his next move :)

~~~
jldugger
"papercraft" is the normal term for that kind of thing, no?

~~~
kesiev
Thanks! I've de-origamized the GitHub repo and replaced with "papercraft".
Sadly I can't change social posts. Well... okay. :)

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0wis
So great ! A combination of constrained simplicity with a physical support
that you can hold in your hands ! I like both concepts, moreover in software
where its now rarer than ever. Mostly because there is no more truly useful
application. But you found one ! Thanks for sharing, I don’t know yet to do
with it but it made my day.

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kesiev
Well... made this for my 2019 Christmas greetings cards.

~~~
cableshaft
Very cool idea!

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ihuman
This reminds me of the Nintendo e-Reader. It was a Gameboy Advance accessory
that plugged into the game card slot and had a dot code barcode reader. Some
cards unlocked bonus items, but there were also NES game cards. If you swiped
all the cards for a game to load the rom, you could then play the game.

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crooked-v
This is neat.

Would you be open to a PR that adds a basic build system setup, so the output
files can do PWA offline stuff without depending on PHP on the server?

This also allows other conveniences (like not needing to hardcode absolute
paths for asset files), but adds a step before being able to put the built
version of the source online.

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turtlebits
Novel idea but these are not origami, but print, cut and fold. My expectations
for the “carts” was much higher from the description.

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beefhash
What good is a console that makes piracy trivial and even advertises this as a
feature?

~~~
cableshaft
Maybe one where you don't have to sell games, you do it for fun? People do
that, you know.

The Pico-8 fantasy console also makes piracy trivial (you have the full source
code available for each game) and yet it has a lot of good games made for it.

Way back in the days of Compuserve I used to download Q-Basic games, which was
just the source code file you ran in the compiler, and could change whatever
you wanted, and that helped get me into programming in the first place by
examining how actual programs worked, so there's a real world use case for
making "piracy trivial".

That was also how most people learned how to do HTML/CSS and basic Javascript
back in the day, was right clicking and checking the source code. It's
technically still possible now but most websites have become a mess of
monolithic scripts or obfuscated code so it's less useful now.

