Bedrock is a compact and portable 8-bit computer system, designed to last forever. Click here to jump straight to the live demos.
This project was discussed on news.ycombinator.com and lobste.rs.
Overview
Bedrock is a computer system that makes it easy to write useful programs that will last forever. The system is small and quick to learn, with only 32 instructions and 12 devices to remember.
Bedrock isn’t a real computer system that you can pick up and hold in your hands. It’s a specification that describes an interface for any kind of computing device, allowing you to write programs that will run on any device without having to worry about the peculiarities of the underlying hardware.
Programs written for Bedrock can run on any computer system, so long as a Bedrock emulator has been implemented for that system. The emulator acts as a thin translation layer between the program and the system, and is designed to be easy to implement on any computer, console, or handheld, no matter how old or limited. The core system can be implemented in a few hours, and the 12 standard devices can be implemented and connected as needed.
Programs can currently run on Windows, Linux, the web, and the Nintendo DS. See the live demonstrations section at the bottom of this page for examples of the kinds of programs that can run on Bedrock.
Tutorials
- Bedrock: Printing a string
A hands-on tutorial that shows how to print a string to the terminal. It assumes no former knowledge about Bedrock, and almost no former knowledge about programming in general.
Documentation
- User manual
The user manual is aimed at people who are learning about or writing programs for the Bedrock system. It contains many examples in the form of runnable code snippets. - Specification
The specification is aimed at people who are implementing the system from scratch.
- Examples
Implementations of some popular algorithms as runnable programs. - Example: Microwave clock
Full editable source code for the microwave clock program.
Implementations
To write and run a program using Bedrock you’ll need an assembler and an emulator. An assembler is used for converting program source code into a Bedrock program, and an emulator is used for running any Bedrock program on your chosen system:
- bedrock-js
An assembler and emulator that can be embedded in a webpage, written in Javascript. - bedrock-pc
An assembler and emulator for Windows and Linux computers, written in Rust.
Background
Bedrock originated as a fork of the Uxn virtual machine and Varvara computing stack, with the aim of improving performance on extremely resource-constrained systems. It has since diverged in many significant ways, most notably by restricting the interfaces between components and by stripping down the assembler and the instruction set. See Bedrock: Differences from Uxn for more details.
The name Bedrock comes from the concept of a ‘bedrock abstraction’ coined by this blog post, though it takes a different approach to the one advocated for in the post. Bedrock achieves habitability not by producing a higher-level instruction set, but by reducing the complexity of the program environment.
Live demonstrations
The following programs are all running using the bedrock-js emulator, which was thrown together in a few days. There is a lot of room for improvement.
Cobalt
- cobalt-demo.br (47665 bytes)
A full-featured pixel art drawing program, with brushes, textures, and undo history.
Snake
- snake.br (1133 bytes)
A graphics demo showing a coloured stream of letters that follow the mouse cursor.
Microwave clock
- clock.br (393 bytes)
A clock in the style of an old microwave oven display.
System information
- sysinfo.br (4918 bytes)
Shows information about the Bedrock implementation being used.
On-screen keyboard
- keyboard.br (2774 bytes)
An on-screen keyboard, designed to be used as the keyboard for Bedrock on the Nintendo DS.