Currently, there's a resurgence of appreciation for the aesthetic of old computer hardware. The popularity of such 'fantasy consoles' like Pico8, TIC 80 and Pixel Vision 8 are following the long-lasting wave of retro-computing which has only gained momentum since the introduction of the first popular 'retro emulator', NESticle in 1995, an emulator that mimicked Nintendo's original flagship games console from 1984. I don't foresee this aesthetic going away any time soon and it is quite inviting for kids and adults who want to try their hand at making something on the computer but don't want to be bogged down with the current generation's level of complexity. Even the basic low-resolution graphics inherent to these old systems invite the most novice of artists because there's no expectation that anything will look 'polished' in the way that modern 3D games and applications look. By their very nature is a concrete limit as well as a 'challenge' to make just a few pixels resemble an idea. Combine this with these graphics and sounds requiring imagination to be 'complete' by anyone else who looks at it, it becomes quite an interesting medium to explore even for people who've gone through thousands of hours of graphics and audio instruction and training; the possibility of someone without this experience producing something that stands up to the work of a professional is much higher than in high-resolution, high-definition settings.
My project involves a complete makeover of Etoys so that it retains functionality of Etoys/Smalltalk at it's core, a system that is itself already inviting, with the inviting nature of low-definition visuals and audio. Using the already-made classes such as OLPCVirtualDisplay and FMSound, the idea is to follow the concept of projects like Pico8 as a 'fantasy console' and make a 'fantasy computer' running a 'fantasy OS', which at this point is dubbed EmoSTEP. It also is highly dependent on having some good demonstrations how to think about this version of Etoys and minor additions/changes to some of the tools so that everything marries together in a cohesive feel.
I myself am not a programmer by trade, I'm actually in the middle of a career change from electronics technician/grunt to graphic design (I am in my last year of school), so a lot of the things I've been doing programatically have been very slow as I'm learning how to implement these ideas as I go. And you know what that means:
The purpose of this project is not to supplant or replace Etoys at all or even be considered part of the 'main Etoys goals', but to provide an alternative entrypoint for those interested who cannot see beyond the initial look of Etoys what it's capable of. In fact, one of the main goals I have is to keep projects made in this hack completely Etoys compatible so that a project made in EmoStep loads like any other Etoys project into the official Etoys release (and of course, later, Squeak).
Aspects/applets that are intended to be included are as follows:
Low Color Depth (I need to hack the 8bit palette maker to not simply produce 248 shades of gray and 7 'regular colors' but be a true approximation of a full 16bit/32bit depth color range but executed with fewer colors to select from...)
Pixel-Art Oriented PaintBox (currently, the GSoC Paintbox edit and built in Paintbox are only capable of really bad high res/low color art work. What is needed are special brushes for 'lighten/darken', pattern/stipple brushes etc. See GRAFX2 application for an idea of tools that need to be implemented)
FM Sound Composer (restructuring the old Squeak code that allows editing and creating of FM instruments/sounds and musical compositions and accessing the creations via Etoys viewer flaps)
Demosdemosdemosdemos (lots of cool little 'applet' projects that demonstrate commonly sought-after effects and basic game-engine operations)
Faux "This Is An Emulated Machine" Aesthetic (rather than making it seem as if it's just a programming language, take the approach interface-wise that mimics *some* aspects of 90's computers, such as startup/shutdown screens, reconfiguring windows themes with a theme editor, icon makers, etc.)
I hope other people are interested in this project. I feel that much of Smalltalk/Etoys lack of traction in these days where terms like 'retro' and 'livecoding' are all the rage fall directly on aesthetic and approach to the system and that's really what, ultimately, is the aim of the project; introduce more people to the world and especially the history of smalltalk.
The name EmoSTEP itself is a bit of satire on the negative effects of Steve Jobs short sightedness to sellsellsell has obscure the real purpose of the work he and his team cannibalized for the Lisa, Macintosh and NextStep computer lines. Namely, it made it easier for 'scribes' to pump out one-size-fits-all style programs which mostly don't fit anyone rather than the real goal of the Smalltalk team which was to make it so that people could build their own software when they need/want it by borrowing from the works of such scribes without restrictions. EmoSTEP is short for "Etoys Morphic OS SmallTalk Experimental Programming" or something of that nature. I came close to just calling it AmigoSTEP, but truth be told, the name isn't solid just yet, so if anything, maybe someone's got some clever puns to throw out at me.
Anyway, here's a pile of screenshots for some work towards this project, both in Etoys and the edited image with the low-fi graphics already operational at a pixel-density level (the color depth issue noted above is still on the to-do list).
I'd love comments, critiques, insights, flames, etc. and welcome any assistance and guidance from people that understand the underlying smalltalk much better than I. I kind of regard it as a minor miracle I've been able to do as much as I have thus far, a true testament to the language and it's immediacy of the environment, something I hope to turn up to 11 with this project.
Thanks for reading this long message!