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Virtual Computer 1
This page describes the VC1 project.
History
I like NetHack and roguelike games, so one of the first things I do to ease myself into a new computer language is to write a sort of roguelike game. The game I write is called NetWhack. I first wrote NetWhack in C++ in 1997. By 1999-2000 I had rewritten the project in Java. After essentially completing the game to my own satisfaction it was placed on the back burner.
In 2018, 2019 and 2020 I was teaching Python and Javascript to Neo, Roger, and a few other kids. Eventually we came to the need for a sort of JavaScript terminal/basic game-loop that we could use as a foundation for our projects.
There was, however, one serious problem. It was the old problem of blocking IO that I had with game libraries like LWJGL: because it is event driven, you cannot perform blocking input. Or rather I should say, because LWJGL (and JavaScript) are extremely poorly designed, you can't normally do blocking input. However, nature always finds a way; In Java, I just made a new “thread” and handled a custom keyboard buffer there. This was a very technically difficult thing to do, but it worked, and I had what amounted to blocking input under LWJGL.
Blocking Input in Javascript
The story of VC-1 is the story of the JavaScript version of our PyGame base code morphing over time, and me banging my head against a wall for years trying to figure out how to do blocking input in JavaScript. I went through many revisions of many games and programs in Python and Javascript. However, one day, I had an epiphany and figured out how to do it. It was during the development of a small demo program I wrote called “Javascript Terminal technical Demo”.
What remains is the story of JTTD, which eventually became ensconced as VC-1.