I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and here are my conclusions

Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by abraxas on Friday November 20, 2020 @11:44AM (#25162134)

I wish there was a bare metal option that boots RPI 400 into a BASIC or Python interpreter the way the 8 bit machines used to

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by UncleSlacky on Friday November 20, 2020 @12:53PM (#25162949)

RISC OS Pico boots straight into BBC Basic:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181109020203/https://www.risco...

(IA link as it's been removed from the site, but the installer is still available via IA).

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by bencollier49 on Friday November 20, 2020 @01:57PM (#25163630)

This is the correct answer. I've copied BBC BASIC games directly to a Pi running RISC OS Pico:

https://www.bencollier.info/projects/electronics/emulation/f...

To reiterate, the Pi can be made directly backwards-compatible with 8-bit games from 40 years ago. It's wonderful.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by notpygame on Friday November 20, 2020 @12:06PM (#25162413)

There's a python/pygame/pygame_gui OS that does exactly this called snakeware. https://github.com/joshiemoore/snakeware Grab the rpi4 image and go.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by simonh on Friday November 20, 2020 @12:58PM (#25163002)

The Pi OS comes with Python installed, the pygame libraries, a bunch of games written in Python and of course the source code so you can modify them and create your own.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/python/READM...

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/usage/python-games...

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by 0-_-0 on Friday November 20, 2020 @12:35PM (#25162758)

Check out this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228740

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by drcode on Friday November 20, 2020 @12:25PM (#25162635)

Pick up a pocket chip for $40 on eBay- you have to click a single button after boot and then can start coding a game with pico-8 in lua.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by mlyle on Friday November 20, 2020 @06:49PM (#25166560)

It's not bare metal, but Python on Pi400 is great for kids.

Especially with side-by-side with a Minecraft window and the Minecraft Pi Edition python integration.

Also, there's a whole lot of little boards that support Micropython, and boot straight to it, including ESP32 etc. I use them in the classes I teach.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by boogies on Friday November 20, 2020 @07:09PM (#25166685)

Wasn’t Minecraft Pi Edition discontinued years ago? Minetest on the other hand might be a great intro to programming with its Lua script mods, and also has always been designed for modest hardware.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by cyberbanjo on Friday November 20, 2020 @07:12PM (#25166705)

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/edition/pi

Appears to still be available

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by boogies on Friday November 20, 2020 @07:31PM (#25166801)

But not updated in ~7 years since v0.1.1

https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Pi_Edition

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by mlyle on Friday November 20, 2020 @07:34PM (#25166825)

Yah, it's discontinued, but it works fine and is still distributed. It's a fine path to write some code and interact with a working game world.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by boogies on Friday November 20, 2020 @09:06PM (#25167332)

Yah, it’s technically functional, but there’s an actively maintained alternative that can support such advanced features as spawning mobs (like, say, the mascot in Minecraft’s logo).

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by lixtra on Friday November 20, 2020 @11:53AM (#25162250)

What do you mean by bare metal? Booting into python (or basic) would probably take less than 1h for someone who knows what they are doing.

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Re:I've now played with a Raspberry Pi 400 for a week and he... by zozbot234 on Friday November 20, 2020 @12:36PM (#25162769)

RISC OS for RPi can do this. Not sure if RPi400 is supported just yet.

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