Release 24: Flotilla, Esplora and Gameboy!

We try and keep Sniff releases lightweight and frequent, pushing out small updates once every month or so, but Release 24 got a little bogged down in its own awesomeness. It started out with some improvements to SniffPad to make the formatting a little clearer, but then we started work on something really exciting...

We ported Sniff so that it runs on GameBoy Advance! Not only did we port the basic code, and add graphics drivers but we ported the complete sprite library to run directly using the GBA's hardware sprites, so you can take games you've written using the "Hosted" version of the Sprite device, and they run with only minor modifications on a real commercial games console! If you've got a "Flash Cart" you can your run game on the real device, or you can just test in an emulator. We'll have a post in the next few days to document how to set everything up and get going.

The Gameboy work was going well, when the Flotilla arrived in the post... Super excited, we immediately got down to reverse engineering it, and got it running in Sniff. We've already done a few posts, and released a preview version of the Flotilla code, but its now integrated into this release. We've also added support for "Slider" and "Dial" - these are untested, as we don't have them yet, but they're simple enough that they should work.

As if that wasn't enough, we got our hands on an Arduino Esplora. This is technically the same as a Leonardo, so there wasn't any low level work to be done, but we've added an "Esplora" device which lets you read all of the sensors on the board in Sniff. Again we'll post details of this over the next week, but the code and examples are all included.

There are also a few more subtle tweaks and features we've added: We noticed in quite a few of the examples we were declaring variables which were essentially constants, but that we had to make them as numbers, then assign to them. Instead now you can assign a constant value to a number when you create it:

make gravity number 9.81

make maxWidth number 640

If you do this the value can never be changed. While this is slightly different to the way it works (for example) in C, but we think it makes more sense.

The other neat language feature is that you can now access command line args, so for example Sniffpad can take the name of a file to load:

make argv list of strings

when start

.if length of argv = 1

..set filename to item 1 of argv

.else

..set filename to "new"

As if that wasn't enough, as we were working on the GBA port, we refactored, and simplified the way the runtime handles ports, which should make the system more robust, and more portable in the future. You shouldn't notice this, though in the short term it might mean some of the more obscure ports are misbehaving. Let us know if you find any issues.

Wit that all behind us we can finally announce SNIFF RELEASE 24!

You can grab Release 24 from the Downloads page.